‘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 ...

‘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...

Nobel laureate, party leader, peacemaker, first minister and statesman – David Trimble had many roles. But what is the real story behind the man who made headlines and changed lives?In this definitive biography of Trimble's life and death, award-winning journalist Stephen Walker vividly details how a shy Belfast academic changed the political landscape of Northern Ireland.Written with the cooperation of his widow, Lady Trimble, and their grown-up children, Peacemaker

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...

Stephen Walker hits hard with his surreal hammer. Eye-wateringly funny novel.Wyndam-on-sea. Rainy season. Next Sunday.Sally manages her uncle’s caravan park. He’s ordered her to keep the park dull; the town council – feeling that the resort’s image is being damaged by the liveliness of its caravan parks – has promised a million pounds to the least exciting park in Wyndam-on-sea. If that million pounds isn’t won, the park will close.18 year-old Teena Rama is 148.7% t...

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:...

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:...

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...

Peter Pouley is a very ordinary man who is tricked into becoming the main suspect of a drug related double murder. He escapes arrest, witnesses another murder and avoids being killed by the birth of the monster inside himself. This alternate ego develops its own strengths and behaviours, and grows stronger when there is any form of stress.After the murders of his ex-wife and his son, Peter cannot stop the monster from seeking revenge. He targets the detective who is heading the hunt...

Highly respected by her peers and hugely influential on the subsequent generation of artists, the British artist Helen Chadwick produced a wideranging body of work in a variety of media, which shifted from early institutional and architectural critique to operatic installations, and to photographic projects and sculptures. Stephen Walker looks behind this apparent variety, identifying a consistent range of interests - ranging from classical Greek through to sub-particle physics - that acco...