An unputdownable and incredibly evocative military novel full of thrilling battle scenes and flesh and blood characters from Steven Pressfield, author of The Sunday Times Bestseller Gates of Fire. \"A terrific read...this is historical fiction at its very best.\" -- JAMES HOLLAND \"A splendid tour-de-force...it should not be missed\" -- WASHINGTON POST \"Both a captivating history lesson and rousing guts-n-glory saga\" -- ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY \"Compelling...the narrative is a page turner\" -- ***** Reader review \"Mr Pressfield is a true craftsman in the best possible way. You LIVE the story while he is telling it\" -- ***** Reader review \"Simply a brilliant read\" -- ***** Reader review **************************************************** NORTH AFRICA, 1942. AN ELITE BRITISH ARMY UNIT IS ON A DEADLY MISSION. Autumn, 1942 - Hitler's legions have swept across Europe. Soviet Russia reels under the German onslaught while across the channel, Britain struggles on. And in North Africa , Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps have routed the 8th Army, threatening the oil fields of the Middle East. The war hangs in the balance... Out of this, the British hatch a desperate plan - to send a small, highly mobile fighting force behind enemy lines to strike a blow that will stop Rommel's army in its tracks. It is to be called the Long Range Desert Group and its exploits will become the stuff of legend. Based on real events, Steven Pressfield's bold novel brings to pulse-racing life the ingenuity and daring of this maverick commando unit - a disparate, dedicated 'band of brothers' who sacrificed so much for the sake of freedom...

Jacob Rappaport, a Jewish soldier in the Union army during the Civil War is ordered to murder his own uncle in New Orleans, who is plotting to assassinate President Lincoln. After this harrowing mission, Jacob is recruited to pursue another enemy agent, the daughter of a Virginia family friend. But this time, his assignment isn't to murder the spy, but to marry her.--From publisher's description.

The second novel in the epic new young adult series that Michael Grant is calling his best yet! It's WWII but not as you know it from school. This time the girls are on the Front Lines and not on the Home Front. Summer 1943. The enemy has been bloodied, but Nazi Germany is very far from beaten. Now the American army is moving on to their next target: the Italian island of Sicily. With heavy memories of combat, the three young soldier girls - Rio, Frangie and Rainy - now know what they are willing to do to save themselves, and understand the consequences of those actions. On the front lines, they will again come face to face with the brutality of war until they win or die, while simultaneously fighting their own personal battles. No one will emerge unscathed. In the tradition of The Book Thief, Code Name Verity and Between Shades of Gray, Front Lines gives the experience of WWII a new immediacy while playing with the 'what ifs?' of history. Exclusive Front Lines story, Dead of Night to be 2017 World Book Day book. Praise for Front Lines: "What if American women had fought alongside men in World War II? Michael Grant gives us a magnificent alternate history that feels so real and right and true it seems impossible that it wasn't. Every one of these fictional soldiers has wrapped herself around my heart.... (Elizabeth Wein, award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Code Name Verity) "Michael Grant is a master of twists that not only tear at his readers' consciences, they hold a mirror up to our here and now and insist we consider what might otherwise be. Front Lines is a masterpiece of speculative story crafting.... (Andrew Smith, Printz Honor winning author of Grasshopper Jungle) Front Lines was shortlisted for Feminist Book of the Year in the Maximum Pop Bookish Awards. Michael Grant has lived an exciting, fast-paced life. He moved in with his wife Katherine after only 24 hours. He has co-authored over 160 books including the bestselling GONE series but promises that everything he writes is like nothing you've ever read before!

Naomi Novik’s triumphant debut, His Majesty’s Dragon, introduced a dynamic new pair of heroes to the annals of fantasy fiction: the noble fighting dragon Temeraire and his master and commander, Capt. Will Laurence, who serves Britain’s peerless Aerial Corps in the thick of the raging Napoleonic Wars. Now, in the latest novel of this dazzling series, they soar to new heights of breathtaking action and brilliant imagination. It is a grim time for the dragon Temeraire. On the heels of his mission to Africa, seeking the cure for a deadly contagion, he has been removed from military service–and his captain, Will Laurence, has been condemned to death for treason. For Britain, conditions are grimmer still: Napoleon’s resurgent forces have breached the Channel and successfully invaded English soil. Napoleon’s prime objective: the occupation of London. Separated by their own government and threatened at every turn by Napoleon’s forces, Laurence and Temeraire must struggle to find each other amid the turmoil of war and to aid the resistance against the invasion before Napoleon’s foothold on England’s shores can become a stranglehold. If only they can be reunited, master and dragon might rally Britain’s scattered forces and take the fight to the enemy as never before–for king and country, and for their own liberty. But can the French aggressors be well and truly routed, or will a treacherous alliance deliver Britain into the hands of her would-be conquerors?

"From the bestselling master espionage writer, hailed by Vince Flynn as "the best in the business," comes a riveting novel about the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris. Paris, 1941. The City of Light, occupied by the Nazis, is dark and silent at night. Streetlamps are painted blue and apartment windows draped or shuttered in the blackout ordered by the Germans. But when the clouds part, the silvery moonlight defies authority, and so does a leader of the French Resistance, known as Mathieu. In Paris and in the farmhouses, barns, and churches of the French countryside, small groups of ordinary men and women are determined to take down the occupying forces of Adolf Hitler. Mathieu leads one such Resistance cell, helping downed British airmen escape back to England. This suspenseful, fast-paced thriller by the author whom Vince Flynn calls "the most talented espionage novelist of our generation" captures this dangerous time as no one ever has before. Alan Furst brings Paris and occupied France to life, along with courageous citizens who outmaneuver collaborators, informers, blackmailers, and spies, risking everything to fulfill perilous clandestine missions. Aiding Mathieu as part of his covert network are Lisette, a seventeen-year-old student and courier; Max de Lyon, an arms dealer turned nightclub owner; Chantal, a woman of class and confidence; Daniel, a Jewish teacher fueled by revenge; Joëlle, who falls in love with Mathieu; and Annemarie, a willful aristocrat with deep roots in France, and a desire to act. As the German military police heighten surveillance, Mathieu and his team face a new threat, dispatched by the Reich to destroy them all. Shot through with the author's trademark fine writing, breathtaking suspense, and intense scenes of seduction and passion, Alan Furst's A Hero of France is at once one of the finest novels written about the French Resistance and the most gripping novel yet by the living master of the spy thriller. Praise for Alan Furst "Furst never stops astounding me."--Tom Hanks "Suspenseful and sophisticated. No espionage author, it seems, is better at summoning the shifting moods and emotional atmosphere of Europe before the start of World War II than Alan Furst."--The Wall Street Journal "Though set in a specific place and time, Furst's books are like Chopin's nocturnes: timeless, transcendent, universal. One does not so much read them as fall under their spell."--Los Angeles Times "[Furst] remains at the top of his game."--The New York Times "A grandmaster of the historical espionage genre."--The Boston Globe"--

"What if an empire of Jewish warriors that really existed in the Middle Ages had never fallen--and was the only thing standing between Hitler and his conquest of Russia? Eastern Europe, August 1942. The Khazar kaganate, an isolated nation of Turkic warrior Jews, lies between the Pontus Euxinus (the Black Sea) and the Khazar Sea (the Caspian). It also happens to lie between a belligerent nation to the west that the Khazars call Germania--and a city the rest of the world calls Stalingrad. After years of Jewish refugees streaming across the border from Europa, fleeing the war, Germania launches its siege of Khazaria. Only Esther, the daughter of the nation's chief policy adviser, sees the ominous implications of Germania's disregard for Jewish lives. Only she realizes that this isn't just another war but an existential threat. After witnessing the enemy warplanes' first foray into sovereign Khazar territory, Esther knows she must fight for her country. But as the elder daughter in a traditional home, her urgent question is how. Before daybreak one fateful morning, she embarks on a perilous journey across the open steppe. She seeks a fabled village of Kabbalists who may hold the key to her destiny: their rumored ability to change her into a man so that she may convince her entire nation to join in the fight for its very existence against an enemy like none Khazaria has ever faced before. The Book of Esther is a profound saga of war, technology, mysticism, power, and faith. This novel--simultaneously a steampunk Joan of Arc and a genre-bending tale of a counterfactual Jewish state by a writer who invents worlds "out of Calvino or Borges" (The New Yorker)--is a stunning achievement. Reminiscent of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, The Book of Esther reaffirms Barton's place as one of her generation's most gifted storytellers"--

Bulgaria, 1934. A young man is murdered by the local fascists. His brother, Khristo Stoianev, is recruited into the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and sent to Spain to serve in its civil war. Warned that he is about to become a victim of Stalin’s purges, Khristo flees to Paris. Night Soldiers masterfully re-createsthe European world of 1934–45: the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for Eastern Europe, the last desperate gaiety of the beau monde in 1937 Paris, and guerrilla operations with the French underground in 1944. Night Soldiers is a scrupulously researched panoramic novel, a work on a grand scale --

"September, 1939. The opening days of World War II. The invading German Wehrmacht blazes a trail of destruction across Poland. Warsaw is surrounded. France and Britain declare war, but do nothing to help. And a Polish resistance movement takes shape under the shadow of occupation, enlisting those willing to risk death in a David-and-Goliath struggle for a nation's survival. Among them is Captain Alexander de Milja, an officer in the Polish military intelligence service, a cartographer who now must learn a dangerous new role; spymaster in the anti-Nazi underground. Beginning with a daring operation to smuggle the Polish National Gold Reserve to the government in exile, he slips into the shadowy and treacherous front lines of espionage that span occupied Europe; he moves through Poland, France, and the Ukraine, changing identities and staying one step ahead of capture. In Warsaw, he engineers a subversive campaign to strengthen the people's will to resist. In Paris, he poses as a Russian poet, then as a Slovakian coal merchant, drinking champagne in black-market bistros with Nazis while uncovering information about German battle plans. And a love affair with a woman of the French Resistance leads him to make the greatest decision of his life. In the Polish Officer, Alan Furst returns to the shadowy, clandestine arena of World War II spycraft, and the result is a gripping, panoramic espionage novel in the tradition of Graham Greene and John le Carré. The Polish Officer, like Furst's acclaimed Night Soldiers and Dark Star, has a haunting authenticity that brings the era to vital life. His story, brilliantly and colorfully cast, is written with a keen awareness of the nuances of national character, individual psychology, and the weight of history. It evokes the turmoil of a world gone mad, and the courageous heroism of ordinary men and women during the darkest hours of our time. Literate, sophisticated, and utterly convincing, it is by far Furst's best work to date."--

Retooling his second novel considerably, the acclaimed novelist retells his classic tale of the lives of a squadron of Air Force pilots in occupied France during wartime, rewriting entire sections of the original novel.

In his acclaimed novels of alternate history, Harry Turtledove has scrutinized the twisted soul of the twentieth century, from the forces that set World War I in motion to the rise of fascism in the decades that followed. Now, this masterly storyteller turns his eyes to the aftermath of World War II and asks: In an era of nuclear posturing, what if the Cold War had suddenly turned hot? Bombs Away begins with President Harry Truman in desperate consultation with General Douglas MacArthur, whose control of the ground war in Korea has slipped disastrously away. MacArthur recognizes a stark reality: The U.S. military has been cut to the bone after victory over the Nazis--while China and the USSR have built up their forces. The only way to stop the Communist surge into the Korean Peninsula and save thousands of American lives is through a nuclear attack. MacArthur advocates a strike on Chinese targets in Manchuria. In actual history, Truman rejected his general's advice; here, he does not. The miscalculation turns into a disaster when Truman fails to foresee Russia's reaction. Almost instantly, Stalin strikes U.S. allies in Europe and Great Britain. As the shock waves settle, the two superpowers are caught in a horrifying face-off. Will they attack each other directly with nuclear weapons? What countries will be caught in between? The fateful global drama plays out through the experiences of ordinary people--from a British barmaid to a Ukrainian war veteran to a desperate American soldier alone behind enemy lines in Korea. For them, as well as Truman, Mao, and Stalin, the whole world has become a battleground. Strategic strikes lead to massive movements of ground troops. Cities are destroyed, economies ravaged. And on a planet under siege, the sounds and sights of nuclear bombs become a grim harbinger of a new reality: the struggle to survive man's greatest madness. Praise for Bombs Away "A fascinating and compelling story of real people caught in forces beyond their control . . . [Harry Turtledove is] the unrivaled monarch of alternate history." -- Analog "Turtledove is an undisputed centerpiece of the alternate-history genre, and now, to his already grand display, he's adding the ambitious tale of a WWIII that could have happened." -- Booklist "This is Turtledove at his best." --SFRevu "Alternate-world warrior extraordinaire Turtledove delivers the opening barrage of a new speculative conflict." -- Kirkus Reviews

When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for LIterature he was praised for using the 'art of memory' to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. The Night Watch is his second novel and tells the story of a young man of limited means, caught between his work for the French Gestapo informing on the Resistance, and his work for a Resistance cell informing on the police and the black market dealers whose seedy milieu of nightclubs, prostitutes and spivs he shares. Under pressure from both sides to inform and bring things to a crisis, he finds himself driven towards an act of self-sacrifice as the only way to escape an impossible situation and the question that haunts him - how to be a traitor without being a traitor. In this astonishing, cruel and tender book, Modiano attempts to exorcise the past by leading his characters out on a fantasmagoric patrol during one fatal night of the Occupation.

Arabian Nights 1914 begins in 1914...the world is on the precipice of a World War. The great powers, Germany and the Ottoman Empire face each other. Ouda is a small Arab desert kingdom, poor and isolated. Zade, a direct descendant of Scheherazade, is convinced that Ouda is doomed unless it becomes a modern, secular state and adopts science and technology. Her king's model must be the quintessential modern monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. The Oudian Ambassador in Berlin sends books, documents, information praising the virtues of the forward-looking Kaiser. Late June, 1914. Zade learns about the assassination in Sarajevo of the Austrian heir to the throne. The world war must be stopped. She immediately decides to go to Berlin, seduce the Kaiser and preserve the peace. Full of intrigue, seduction, exotic characters, where the 'seductive middle east meets the modern west Arabian Nights 1914 is a totally engrossing novel. Like his previous works, Eric Koch introduces the reader to a by-gone but crucially important historical world. All his characters are well researched and reflect the reality of the period. In the master's hands, they are plausible, human and fully entertaining.

"Separated by 70 years, Michael, an American soldier, and Michel, a French printer, flee German-occupied France towards Gibraltar. As Michael travels, he continues to stumble onto traces of his grandfather's earlier journey, discovering patterns which connect the two men across the expanse of time."--