Banff, Scotland in the 1620s. A young man walks unsteadily through the streets. Is he just drunk or is there something more sinister happening? When he collapses in front of two sisters on that dark, wet night, the women guess that he's been poisoned. His body is discovered in the house of Alexander Seaton - a fallen minister, the discovery of whos...

The Royal Waterloo Hospital, London in the 1960s. Six young women lie asleep on low beds - the women are taken from their beds by the nurses and given electroconvulsive therapy before being put to sleep again. All under the predatory eye of Dr William Sargant. THE SLEEP ROOM is a chilling exposé of Sargant's bizarre psychiatric treatments th...

Ocean is an ambitious history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic Ocean, a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century. Ocean is informed by the author’s extensive travels in and around the Atlantic Ocean, crossing Newfo...

Wild Fictions brings together Amitav Ghosh's extraordinary writing on the subjects that have obsessed him over the last twenty-five years: literature and language; climate change and the environment; human lives, travel, and discoveries. The spaces that we inhabit, and the way in which we occupy them, is a constant thread throughout this striking a...

When the Second World War began, there were 10 million children living in Britain. Many were evacuated to the countryside, but others stayed behind and witnessed the Blitz close-up in cities around the UK. Blitz Kids tells the remarkable true stories of children who spent their nights in cold, cramped air-raid shelters, hearing the rumble of planes...

The house at 38 Londres Street is home to the legacies of two men whose personal stories span continents, nationalities and decades of atrocity: Augusto Pinochet, President of Chile, and Walther Rauff, a Nazi SS officer responsible for the use of gas vans. On the run from justice at the end of the Second World War, Rauff crosses the ocean to southe...

FIVE DARING ESCAPES CARRIED OUT BY THE FAMOUS FIGHTING FORCE DURING WWII From the infamous 1944 desert campaign to the unforgiving terrain of the Vosges Mountains; from a perilous escape across Europe aided by Resistance networks to three Captains fleeing an Italian Prisoner of War camp in 1943, and a death-defying return to Britain via boat, tunn...

How It Feels To Be Colored Me was first published in "The World Tomorrow" in May 1928. In this autobiographical piece that focuses on race and 1920s America, Hurston reflects on her early childhood in an all-black Florida town and her first experiences in life where she felt "different." Hurston focuses on the similarities we all share and on her o...

Forgotten Women reaches around the world and its history to rediscover, retell and reinstate the lives of over 190 important and significant women. From Neolithic times to modernity, Zing Tsjeng has traced the women who have shaped their age and revolutionised society. In this book lies the strength, lives and sacrifices of women who have refused t...

On 14 August 1943, Adam Hart's great-grandfather Frank Griffiths took off from RAF Tempsford, the SOE 'Special Duties' airbase in rural England. Frank and his crew were on a secret midnight mission codenamed Operation Pimento, but they were shot down near Annecy in southeast France. Only Frank survived. Though seriously injured, Frank felt it was h...

The Red Emperor presents an eye-opening portrait of Xi Jinping, the man who presides over 1.4 billion people and the second largest economy on earth. Born a 'princeling' to one of Communist China's ruling families, the young Xi was exiled to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. He fought his way back to the top by stealth, privilege and...

Renowned historian Olivette Otele uncovers the untold history of Europeans of African descent, from Saint Maurice who became the leader of a Roman legion and Renaissance scholar Juan Latino, to abolitionist Mary Prince and the activist, scholars and grime artists of the present day. Tracing African European heritage through the vibrant, complex, an...

Random House presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, written and read by Timothy Snyder.History does not repeat, but it does instruct.In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party...

Simon Russell Beale is one of Britain's most recognisable and well-loved actors. He has played many roles on stage, film, television and radio - ranging from Winston Churchill to Stalin, George Smiley to King Arthur. But ever since his appearance at school as a glamorous Desdemona, complete with false eyelashes that rendered him half-blind, he has...

Have you ever wondered about Edgar Ætheling, the fourteen-year-old who took on William the Conqueror? Or about the woeful collapse of the Angevin Empire under King John? Or what about Eleanor Cobham, a noblewoman found guilty of witchcraft for predicting the death of the King? Join Matthew Lewis and the creators of History Hit on a guided tou...

A vast area of Pompeii is being excavated for the first time, revealing astonishing insights into how people really lived. In this revelatory new history, Director of Pompeii Gabriel Zuchtriegel shares the untold stories that are at last emerging. Pompeii is a world frozen in time. There are unmade beds, dishes left drying, tools abandoned by workm...

'Sir, we are homosexuals . . .' So began the letter penned by Roger Butler and sent to several British newspaper editors - some of whom were so shocked they thought it was a hoax - in June 1960. Writing such a letter seven years before the decriminalisation of homosexuality was a radical and dangerous move. This is the story of the first man to com...

The remarkable true story of America's first women astronauts. When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed too fragile for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA relented and opened the application process to eve...

The best queer history book you'll listen to this year. Shoulder to Shoulder is a love letter to the LGBTQ+ pioneers of solidarity and coalition. Offering a new global look at forgotten moments when those from marginalised backgrounds stood shoulder to shoulder to build a better future for all. Through astounding research and fascinating storytelli...

One of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains, flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. For millennia it has been worshipped as a god; for centuries used as a tool of imperial expansion; today it is the cement of Pakistans fractious union. Five thousand years ago, a string of sophisticated citi...

Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time. What they left behind, in a vast region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity, like the earliest depiction of a wheel and the first approximation of pi. But they also capture...