‘Thrilling … High-definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched’ SUNDAY TIMES‘This book is a triumph’ DAN SNOW9.07 a.m., April 12, 1961. A top-secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile – originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead – and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin and he is ...

Irish Sunday Times BestsellerA true story of war, peace and friendship: a Nazi colonel and an Irish priestThe story begins in Rome at the outbreak of WWII, when ardent Nazi Herbert Kappler, SS Obersturmbanführer, and Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty would become adversaries in a real-life game of 'cat and mouse' of epic proportions. Hide and Seek chronicles the intimate and intensely personal war between them. A fiercely fought rivalry that would culminate in failed attempts by Ka...

Drawing upon war diaries, court martial papers and interviews with veterans and family members, award-winning BBC journalist Stephen Walker explains how, often exhausted by battle, or suffering shell-shock, men who refused to fight were branded as cowards, and shot at dawn by a firing squad. From the cities and townlands of Ireland to the killing fields of the Western Front and Gallipoli, Forgotten Soldiers traces the lives of men who enlisted to fight an enemy but ended up being killed by...

In Ireland's Call BBC journalist Stephen Walker charts the fascinating stories of 40 Irishmen who swapped the sports field for the battlefield - household names who gave up their blossoming careers to volunteer for the Great War.Using rare archive letters, memoirs and newspaper reports, this compelling book features the stories of sportsmen whose lives were tragically cut short in the mud of the Somme, the despair of Ypres and the heat of Gallipoli. It chronicles the remarkable ach...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER‘A stunning book, among the most immediate and thrilling works of history I have ever read’At 8:15am on August 6th 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant, the temperature at its core rose to millions of degrees. Sixty-thousand buildings were obliterated. A third of the city’s population died, by heat, by the blast, and by a terrible new weapon in the history of warfare:...

‘Thrilling … High-definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched’ SUNDAY TIMES‘This book is a triumph’ DAN SNOW9.07 a.m., April 12, 1961. A top-secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile – originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead – and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin and he is ...

Politician, peacemaker, persuader: John Hume was a titan of Irish history – a tireless architect of the Good Friday Agreement who received the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in ending decades of conflict in Northern Ireland. But who was the real John Hume? What motivated the former history teacher to reach beyond political lines? What sustained him during the bloodiest years of violence? How did he impel the IRA to end its long-running campaign? How did he convince presidents and prime min...

A riveting, minute-by-minute account of the World War II bombing of Hiroshima, from early testing to the cataclysmic event and its aftermath.On a quiet Monday morning in August 1945, a five-ton bomb—dubbed Little Boy by its creators—was dropped from an American plane onto the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On that day, a firestorm of previously unimagined power was unleashed on a vibrant metropolis of 300,000 people, leaving one third of its population dead, i...

You have never read anything like this in your life. A truly remarkable comic debut.If you put Mel Brooks, Eddie Izzard, Spike Milligan, and Salvador Dali around a table in an enclosed room with no lights and a few cylinders of Nitrous Oxide fizzing away in the corner and asked them to write a book, they might have come up with Danny Yates Must Die. But why bother when Stephen Walker can do it unaided?It follows the adventures of sad Danny Yates on the run from the Great Os...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER‘A stunning book, among the most immediate and thrilling works of history I have ever read’At 8:15am on August 6th 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant, the temperature at its core rose to millions of degrees. Sixty-thousand buildings were obliterated. A third of the city’s population died, by heat, by the blast, and by a terrible new weapon in the history of warfare:...

A history of the 1961 space race between the US & USSR and Yuri Gagarin's flight into space—"High definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched" ( Sunday Times (London))." Beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller, but it is vividly embedded in the historic tensions of the Cold War, and peopled by men and women brought sympathetically, and sometime...

“This remarkable account of the 1961 race into space is a thrilling piece of storytelling….It is high definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched.” (The Times, London, Front Page Lead Review)**“Beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller, but it is vividly embedded in the historic tensions of the Cold War, and peopled by men and women brought sympathetically, and sometimes tragically, to life.”—**Colin Thubro...