“At once a scholar’s homage to The Iliad and startlingly original work of art by an incredibly talented new novelist….A book I could not put down.”
—Ann Patchett

“Mary Renault lives again!” declares Emma Donoghue, author of Room, referring to The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller’s thrilling, profoundly moving, and utterly unique retelling of the legend of Achilles and the Trojan War. A tale of gods, kings, immortal fame, and the human heart, The Song of Achilles is a dazzling literary feat that brilliantly reimagines Homer’s enduring masterwork, The Iliad. An action-packed adventure, an epic love story, a marvelously conceived and executed page-turner, Miller’s monumental debut novel has already earned resounding acclaim from some of contemporary fiction’s brightest lights—and fans of Mary Renault, Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, and Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series will delight in this unforgettable journey back to ancient Greece in the Age of Heroes.

“Have you ever heard a story about a woman marrying for love?”

Lady Vivian Ravenswood has the future determined for her; a wealthy husband, a place in high society, a coterie of exclusive friends; and none of it suits her. Could she pick her own destiny, Vivian would choose adventure in the rolling hills, endless afternoons in the dusty garden, and a husband that speaks to her heart; no matter what his income might be.
One magical evening at Almack’s - London’s most exclusive club - Lady Vivian runs into the dashing Lieutenant Sawyer Cook and discovers that her future is not so set in stone. Romance ensues, scandals are wrought, and true identities are revealed. Trapped between duty and longing, Lady Vivian must come to grips with the very notion of fate.

Lady Vivian is a 70.000 word clean and wholesome Regency-era romance novel. It makes the first volume of The Almack's Series. Each book of the series can be enjoyed as a stand-alone, or read as a collective.

Siberia 1919.
In a Jewish settlement a young woman is about to embark upon her destiny. Her father has arranged a marriage for her and she must comply with his wishes. She has never seen her future husband and she knows nothing about him. Michal’s destiny lies in the hands of fate. On the night of her wedding she is terrified but her mother assures her that she will be alright. Her mother explains that it is her duty to be a good wife, to give her husband children and always to obey him. However, although her mother and her mother’s mother before her had lived this way, this was not to be Michal’s destiny. Terrible circumstances would force Michal to leave her home and travel to the city of Berlin during the Weimar period where she would see and experience things she could never have imagined. Having been a sheltered religious girl she found herself lost and afraid trying to survive in a world filled with contrasts. Weimar Berlin was a time in history when art and culture were exploding, but it was also a period of depravity and perversions. Fourteen tumultuous years passed before the tides began to turn for the young girl who had stood under the canopy and said “I do” to a perfect stranger. Michal was finally beginning to establish her life However, the year was 1933, and Michal was still living in Berlin. Little did she know that Adolf Hitler was about to be appointed Chancellor of Germany and that would change everything forever.

Winner of the David J. Langum, Sr., Prize in American Historical Fiction
 
Named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and “Required Reading” by the New York Post

Edward Rutherfurd celebrates America’s greatest city in a rich, engrossing saga, weaving together tales of families rich and poor, native-born and immigrant—a cast of fictional and true characters whose fates rise and fall and rise again with the city’s fortunes. From this intimate perspective we see New York’s humble beginnings as a tiny Indian fishing village, the arrival of Dutch and British merchants, the Revolutionary War, the emergence of the city as a great trading and financial center, the convulsions of the Civil War, the excesses of the Gilded Age, the explosion of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the trials of World War II, the near demise of New York in the 1970s and its roaring rebirth in the 1990s, and the attack on the World Trade Center. A stirring mix of battle, romance, family struggles, and personal triumphs, New York: The Novel gloriously captures the search for freedom and opportunity at the heart of our nation’s history.

For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald.

Driven by the guilt of her heritage, Trudy, now a professor of German history, begins investigating the past and finally unearths the dramatic and heartbreaking truth of her mother's life.

Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and a poignant mother/daughter drama, Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame.
 

The first novel by acclaimed Greek writer Lena Manta to appear in English translation, The House by the River is an intimate, emotionally powerful saga following five young women as they realize that no matter the men they choose, the careers they pursue, or the children they raise, the only constant is home.

Theodora knows she can’t keep her five beautiful daughters at home forever—they’re too curious, too free spirited, too like their late father. And so, before each girl leaves the small house on the riverside at the foot of Mount Olympus, Theodora makes sure they know they are always welcome to return.

A devoted and resilient mother, Theodora has lived through World War II, through the Nazi occupation of Greece, and through her husband’s death, and now she endures the twenty-year-long silence of her daughters’ absence. Her children have their own lives—they’ve married, traveled the world, and courted romance, fame, and even tragedy. But as they become modern, independent women in pursuit of their dreams, Theodora knows they need her—and each other—more than ever. Have they grown so far apart that they’ve forgotten their childhood house in its tiny village, or will their broken hearts finally lead them home?

A moving, exciting, and heartfelt American saga inspired by the author's own family memoirs, these words belong to Sarah Prine, a woman of spirit and fire who forges a full and remarkable existence in a harsh, unfamiliar frontier. Scrupulously recording her steps down the path Providence has set her upon—from child to determined young adult to loving mother—she shares the turbulent events, both joyous and tragic, that molded her, and recalls the enduring love with cavalry officer Captain Jack Elliot that gave her strength and purpose.

Rich in authentic everyday details and alive with truly unforgettable characters, These Is My Words brilliantly brings a vanished world to breathtaking life again.

Alexandra Smith always knew her place in life. 

Hiroshima was one of the great tragedies of WWII.

But out of the devastation of the first atomic bomb, some survivors emerged - twenty-five courageous Japanese women who became part of a remarkable humanitarian epic.

Victims of the atomic blast that ushered in the Nuclear Age, these women were brought to the United States in 1955, where they underwent reconstructive surgery to repair the ravages of the bomb.

Schoolgirls when the bomb destroyed their futures, they began to remake their lives and re-create themselves.

This is the compassionate, often bittersweet chronicle of the Hiroshima Maidens.

It follows their lives from the terrifying moments of the detonation of the bomb, through their years as outcasts in their own country, to their not always idyllic stay in America, and on to their lives since — some tragic, some heroic, some affectingly ordinary.

“An illuminating portrait of heroic people...A sobering inspiration for all of us” — Philadelphia Inquirer

“Controlled, fearsome, wonderful, appalling.” — Los Angeles Times

“Evokes a range of human emotions that has been lost in the dead vocabulary of annihilation and deterrence” — The New York Times

Rodney Barker has been an editor, an investigative reporter, and a feature writer for a wide variety of regional and national magazines. In 1979 he was one of three American journalists awarded travel grants to Japan to write about Hiroshima; his resulting reportage, which was published in the Denver Post, reawakened his involvement with the Hiroshima Maidens, two of whom had stayed with his family when he was a child.
 

From New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Rhys Bowen comes a haunting novel about a woman who braves her father’s hidden past to discover his secrets…

“Pass the bread, the olives, and the wine. Oh, and a copy of The Tuscan Child to savor with them.” —NPR

In 1944, British bomber pilot Hugo Langley parachuted from his stricken plane into the verdant fields of German-occupied Tuscany. Badly wounded, he found refuge in a ruined monastery and in the arms of Sofia Bartoli. But the love that kindled between them was shaken by an irreversible betrayal.

Nearly thirty years later, Hugo’s estranged daughter, Joanna, has returned home to the English countryside to arrange her father’s funeral. Among his personal effects is an unopened letter addressed to Sofia. In it is a startling revelation.

Still dealing with the emotional wounds of her own personal trauma, Joanna embarks on a healing journey to Tuscany to understand her father’s history—and maybe come to understand herself as well. Joanna soon discovers that some would prefer the past be left undisturbed, but she has come too far to let go of her father’s secrets now…

A CITY GIRL

I have to go to Wyoming to help my sick grandfather. On my way, I find a tough guy whose truck broke down--he's dead sexy and I can't resist a hot man in distress. We hit it off and soon a lunch together turns into more. Way more. He brings me flowers, and then he makes love to me. Reese is unlike any man I've ever known--he's strong and determined, but he listens and cares about me, too.

A TOUGH RANCHER

I have to be strong. I wasn't strong enough once, and it cost my friend his life. Now I have the family ranch to run, and my past to try and forget. I don't need any complications--much less the kind of trouble Kelly is. I can't stop thinking about her. I'm drunk dialing her, buying her flowers, falling in love.
She brings out the mountain man in me.
I want to make her mine.
But I know she's going back to LA.

In the shadows of World War II, trust becomes the greatest risk of all for two strangers.

December 1943. In the years before the rise of Hitler, the Gerber family’s summer cottage was filled with laughter. Now, as deep drifts of snow blanket the Black Forest, German dissenter Franka Gerber is alone and hopeless. Fervor and brutality have swept through her homeland, taking away both her father and her brother and leaving her with no reason to live.

That is, until she discovers an unconscious airman lying in the snow wearing a Luftwaffe uniform, his parachute flapping in the wind. Unwilling to let him die, Franka takes him to her family’s isolated cabin despite her hatred for the regime he represents. But when it turns out that he is not who he seems, Franka begins a race against time to unravel the mystery of the airman’s true identity. Their tenuous bond becomes as inseparable as it is dangerous. Hunted by the Gestapo, can they trust each other enough to join forces on a mission that could change the face of the war and their own lives forever?

A spellbinding thriller from the bestselling author of The Einstein Prophecy.

A chilling curse is transported from 1880s London to present-day California, awakening a long-dormant fiend.

While on routine patrol in the tinder-dry Topanga Canyon, environmental scientist Rafael Salazar expects to find animal poachers, not a dilapidated antique steamer trunk. Inside the peculiar case, he discovers a journal, written by the renowned Robert Louis Stevenson, which divulges ominous particulars about his creation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It also promises to reveal a terrible secret—the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Unfortunately, the journal—whose macabre tale unfolds in an alternating narrative with Rafe’s—isn’t the only relic in the trunk, and Rafe isn’t the only one to purloin a souvenir. A mysterious flask containing the last drops of the grisly potion that inspired Jekyll and Hyde and spawned London’s most infamous killer has gone missing. And it has definitely fallen into the wrong hands.

It’s 1945. The Nazis surrender. Hitler is dead. But, the Third Reich has already left a bloody footprint on the soul of the world.

The Margoils family and their friends Lotti and Lev Glassman were torn apart by Hitler’s hatred of the Jewish people. Now that the Reich has fallen, the survivors of the Margolis and Glassman family’s find themselves searching to reconnect with those they love.

Lotti Strombeck- Glassman, is a German woman, living in Berlin. She had been a good friend to the Margolis family. Lotti had been married to Lev, a Jewish man, who was taken away by the Gestapo and never seen again. In 1945 the curtain comes down on Hitler. But, Stalin is pushing his army towards Germany’s capital city. There is an angry mob of Russian soldiers who are on their way to punish what’s left of Hitler’s Aryan race. They will take out all of their hatred for the Third Reich on the terrified women left behind in Berlin.

Alina Margolis escapes to America with her lover at the beginning of the war. Although she has been away from Germany, her life has not been easy. Alina is strugglilng to make her way in a foreign land that doesn’t welcome Jews or Jews of German decent.

At ten years old Gilde Margolis , along with a group of other children board a train out of Germany. They are headed for Britain on the Kindertransport. Alone and frightened, Gilde must leave everyone and everything she loves behind. She is taken in by a family in London. However, London is in the throes of war. Bombs rain down on the city. Food, clothing, even bath water is rationed. As air raid sirens blare and buildings are turned to rubble, Gilde Margolis comes of age. She learns to love, to sacrifice, but most of all to survive.

This is a story of ordinary people whose lives were shattered by the terrifying ambitions of Adolf Hitler… a true madman.





 

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.

Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, a National Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

‘The carnage which would occur in action at unprotected guns has been described vividly by the author of In a Conning Tower.' Lord Brassey, The Times

In this short story, first published in 1891, Hugh Arnold Oakley-Forster describes a disastrous showdown between two of the most powerful sea-faring war machines of his day.

First published in Murray’s Magazine, it is a cleverly conceived, fictional account of a battle between two ironclads.

An early steam propelled war ship used in the latter part of the 19th Century, the ironclad changed naval warfare forever, and the advances in metallurgy and mechanics during Arnold-Forster’s day meant that for the first time in history, these revolutionary warships could be centrally directed from armoured conning towers.

Arnold-Forster waxes lyrical about the ‘hidden powers which the mind can hardly grasp’, all of which are ‘made subservient to his will, and his will alone’. He then goes on to give an impressively technical and involved account of an encounter between two ironclads which wield such power.

In Conning Tower is a prescient forecast of naval battle yet to come, told from the first person it narrates with convincing detail the disastrous outcome of the fictional battle and is a fascinating antique of maritime literature.

‘Some of us have read the very clever sketch of a naval engagement entitled ‘In a Conning Tower.’ The sudden destruction of the enemy’s ship by the ram is not an unfair picture of what may happen even to a 14,000-ton ship.’ Sir Nathaniel Barnaby, Late Chief Constructor of the Navy.

Hugh Arnold Oakley-Forster (1855 - 1909) was a British politician and writer, notably serving as Secretary of State for War in Balfour’s Conservative government until 1905. Since he was a boy Arnold-Forster had devoted himself to the detailed study of naval affairs and of warships. He loved the sea and spent his holidays cruising in a Thames barge. In 1884 he inspired the famous articles on The Truth about the Navy, which subsequently led to a large increase in Navy estimates under Gladstone and the endeavours of later governments to increase their Naval capabilities. He is praised by many for the remarkable technical knowledge demonstrated by In Conning Tower.

Albion Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

She's Blonde. She’s clever. She’s in his office. London based PI David Good doesn’t stand a chance.

South London. The 1980s. David Good, a morally confused and womanising private investigator, is hired by a ridiculously beautiful blonde to help her fend off the attentions of a serial blackmailer. But he's barely got to grips with the woman's keen sense of self-interest when he stumbles on to something far more unsavoury.

Never one to run a mile when a woman needs help, Good finds himself up to his neck in trouble, upsetting some unpleasant people with short fuses and their own self-interest to protect. This time his trade mark sense of humour might not be enough to see him safely out the other side, but the clock's ticking, so for once he ignores the obvious risk to his own carelessly maintained health and starts to unmask an illicit trade that's been causing a great deal of suffering.

Join David Good as he seeks to simultaneously unravel both the crime and the woman.

"Westerham’s writing is tight, smooth to read, carries great descriptions and all with a dry wit and wry humor." Amazon USA review of 'Good Girl Gone Bad'.

This book is part of the David Good, private investigator series, which can be read in any order you like.

"Life’s for real an’ you got to get on with it."

Rosie Goodison is not one to shy away from life’s problems. Whether it’s finding work or challenging injustice, Rosie squares her shoulders, sets her chin high and faces it full on.

Born at the end of the nineteenth century, in the rural south of England and sent into service aged just twelve, Rosie quickly discovers that many good people spend their lives toiling for very little reward, whilst others ‘have it all’.

She decides it won’t be like that for her. Why can’t she ride in a car? Why can’t she work when she’s pregnant? Why can’t she live in a nice flat? Why can’t she be an artist’s model?

Whilst working as a housekeeper for two upper-class boys, Rosie starts to learn more and more about the world, gleaned from overheard conversations and newspapers left lying around. This triggers an ongoing thirst for knowledge, which shapes her views, informs her decisions and influences her future.

Rosie aspires to have a better life than that of her parents: better living conditions, better working conditions and pay, better education for her children, to be able to vote, to be able to control how many children she has…

Without realising it, this young woman is blazing a trail for all those who are to come after.

Whilst working in London, Rosie meets her sweetheart Jim, but the The Great War puts paid to their plans for the future, and matters worsen afterwards, as she, along with the rest of society, tries to deal with the horrors and losses.

This heart-warming story follows the events of the early twentieth century – the impact and horrors of WW1, the financial crisis and the rapid social and political changes that took place.

All that remains of Rosie now is a quartet of paintings in an art gallery. The artist, now famous but the model, unnamed and forgotten; nobody of consequence.

But everybody has a life story. Everybody leaves some kind of mark on this world.

Everybody’s somebody.

USA TODAY BESTSELLER

Reese Witherspoon Book Club Summer Reading Pick!

One of Amazon's Best Books of June!

One of Goodreads' Best Books of June!

A Summer Book Pick from Good Housekeeping, Parade, Library Journal, Goodreads, Liz and Lisa, and BookBub

In an enthralling new historical novel from national bestselling author Kate Quinn, two women—a female spy recruited to the real-life Alice Network in France during World War I and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin in 1947—are brought together in a mesmerizing story of courage and redemption.

1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie's parents banish her to Europe to have her "little problem" taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.

1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she's recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she's trained by the mesmerizing Lili, the "Queen of Spies", who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy's nose.

Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. Until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn't heard in decades, and launches them both on a mission to find the truth...no matter where it leads.

“Both funny and heartbreaking, this epic journey of two courageous women is an unforgettable tale of little-known wartime glory and sacrifice. Quinn knocks it out of the park with this spectacular book!”—Stephanie Dray, New York Times bestselling author of America's First Daughter

'If you read one historical novel this year, make it THE QUEEN'S MARY by Sarah Gristwood. It's a superb fictional rendering of a difficult subject. I could not put it down.' - bestselling author Alison Weir

Mary Seton is lady-in-waiting to the legendary Mary Queen of Scots.

Torn between her own desires and her duty to serve her mistress, she is ultimately drawn into her Queen's web of passion and royal treachery - and must play her part in the game of thrones between Mary and Elizabeth I.

Must she choose between survival, and sharing the same fate as the woman she has served, loyally and lovingly, since a child?

The Queen's Mary is an engaging and insightful novel, which allows the reader to peek behind the curtain of history - and see into the heart and mind of a forgotten woman who helped shape the Tudor era.

Fans of Phillipa Gregory, Alison Weir and The Tudors will love The Queen’s Mary.

Praise for The Queen’s Mary

'Sarah Gristwood breathes new life into the deeply tragic story of Mary Queen of Scots by telling it through the perspective of the invisible woman who sacrificed her life to serve her.' Elizabeth Freemantle, bestselling author of The Girl in the Glass Tower