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

“The book is like a salve.  I think the world feels disordered right now.  The count’s refinement and genteel nature are exactly what we’re longing for.” – Ann Patchett

“How delightful that in an era as crude as ours this finely composed novel stretches out with old-World elegance.” —The Washington Post

He can’t leave his hotel. You won’t want to.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility—a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.

“And the intrigue! . . . [A Gentleman in Moscow] is laced with sparkling threads (they will tie up) and tokens (they will matter): special keys, secret compartments, gold coins, vials of coveted liquid, old-fashioned pistols, duels and scars, hidden assignations (discreet and smoky), stolen passports, a ruby necklace, mysterious letters on elegant hotel stationery . . . a luscious stage set, backdrop for a downright Casablanca-like drama.” —The San Francisco Chronicle

Soon to be a major motion picture from Pascal Pictures, starring Tom Holland.

Based on the true story of a forgotten hero, the #1 Amazon Charts bestseller Beneath a Scarlet Sky is the triumphant, epic tale of one young man’s incredible courage and resilience during one of history’s darkest hours.

Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He’s a normal Italian teenager—obsessed with music, food, and girls—but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior.

In an attempt to protect him, Pino’s parents force him to enlist as a German soldier—a move they think will keep him out of combat. But after Pino is injured, he is recruited at the tender age of eighteen to become the personal driver for Adolf Hitler’s left hand in Italy, General Hans Leyers, one of the Third Reich’s most mysterious and powerful commanders.

Now, with the opportunity to spy for the Allies inside the German High Command, Pino endures the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation by fighting in secret, his courage bolstered by his love for Anna and for the life he dreams they will one day share.

Fans of All the Light We Cannot See, The Nightingale, and Unbroken will enjoy this riveting saga of history, suspense, and love.

Socrates sits chained to a wall in a small prison cell. In a month he will die of hemlock poisoning. At night, by the light of a tiny oil lamp, on rolls of paper smuggled in by loyal friends, he tells his three sons the story of his life.

He writes vividly about the people and events that shaped him as a person. The mother who encouraged his questions. Teachers who promoted the Greek ideals of courage and glory. Bloody battles. Lifelong friends lost and enemies made. Being proclaimed the world’s wisest man.

Fearing his sons may follow in his ill-fated path, Socrates honestly reveals his thoughts and feelings, his successes and his failures, and his search for the answer to the ultimate question—how can I be happy?

One of the most prophetic novels ever written.

The Great Pacific War tells the fictional history of a war between the United States and Japan between 1931 and 1933.

First published in 1925, Hector Bywater anticipated many of the details of the conflict in the Pacific during the Second World War.

Written in a manner only possible for the most devoted experts of the subject, Bywater presents an eerily plausible account of a war between these two great naval powers.

His account focuses on the naval actions of the war, describing great battles between a technologically-advanced and well-trained, but under-resourced Japanese fleet and an American navy that continues to grow in strength.

Exciting depictions of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, the defence of Guam, and inventive American counter-attacks involving the use of dummy ships fill Bywater’s intriguing narrative.

Bywater makes use of all the conventions of the historian, including the use of quotations from many invented sources from both the American and Japanese sides.

His account is so convincing that at times it is surprising to remember that it was a work of fiction. From the implications of the Washington Disarmament Conference to the specifications of the Denver-class cruisers, his expert understanding of naval affairs shines.

The admirals, politicians and soldiers that drive the plot are a mix of complex, interesting characters, at once displaying great heroism and exasperating recklessness.

At a time when his contemporaries were often dismissive of the abilities of the Japanese military, his work stands as a startling warning of a conflict that would begin soon after his death.

Hector C. Bywater (1884-1940) was a British journalist, military author and spy, primarily focused on naval affairs. His 1925 work The Great Pacific War correctly predicted many of the actions that the Japanese and Americans took during WWII; indeed, it was later revealed that many military leaders had used it as a resource in their strategic planning.

For details of other books published by Albion Press go to the website at www.albionpress.co.uk.

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.

In the years following World War One, Europe remains in turmoil…

As if the war to end all wars was not enough, now revolution is bringing an end to the remnants of the old ways. Monarchs, princes and grand dukes all tumble.

Only Rheingoldstein, a duchy so small as to be forgotten, remains untouched.

Even when the Grand Duke foresees the inevitable, and removes himself from the situation, his steely widow presses on regardless.

In her eyes, their daughter Margarethe must carry on the ducal tradition. But the choice is not hers to make.

In the years that follow, Margarethe and her mother forge a new type of existence, a peripatetic, hand-to-mouth lifestyle that horrifies the mother but affords her daughter a degree of freedom.

Margarethe, who lacks subtlety and elegance but has an abundance of courage and initiative, decides to make the most of that freedom.

Her subsequent adventures take her across Europe, into the company of struggling artists and dubious companions.

Then, somehow, she finds herself back home. And as she gives birth to what should have been the next Grand Duke, Margarethe senses that a new political movement may be stirring in Rheingoldstein…

An epic tale that traces events in a momentous period in European history, Unicornis bound to appeal to lovers of both historical and character-driven fiction alike.

Marguerite Steen (12 May 1894 – 4 August 1975) was a British writer. Very much at home among creative people, she wrote biographies of the Terrys, of her friend Hugh Walpole, of the 18th century poet and actress (and sometime mistress to the Prince of Wales) Mary 'Perdita' Robinson, and of her own lover, the artist Sir William Nicholson. Her first major success was Matador,for which she drew on her love of Spain, and of bullfighting. Also a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic was her massive saga of the slave-trade and Bristol shipping, The Sun Is My Undoing. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1951.

This is a story of one family in France after the war, but it is also a story of universal significance. The young Englishman, Adam Hartley, goes back to visit the scene of a war-time friendship with the local Resistance leader. On his way a conversation overheard in an inn arouses him to a shocked realisation that peace has not brought, and cannot bring, the peace of forgetfulness to France. Enmities, bitterness, and vengeance are the aftermath of the Occupation.

"Is it better to cover things up, to stifle suspicion, to rebuild life on foundations which may be rotten? Or is it better to establish the truth, whatever the consequences, to inflict just retribution on those who have done evil, and to avenge the dead? This is the profound problem which Miss Storm Jameson explores through the personalities of this group of fully realised characters. The story, exciting in itself, is told with swift economy. It is very carefully wrought; the best constructed, I think, of all the author’s work."

Veronica Wedgwood in the Broadsheet

Margaret Storm Jameson was an English journalist and author, known for her novels and reviews. Jameson was born in Whitby, Yorkshire, she briefly attended school at the Scarborough Municipal, before studying at the University of Leeds, where there is now a halls of residence named after her. Some of her greatest works include Journey from the North, Company Parade and Cloudless May.

Beauty and the Beast and Irish Mythology mix in this sweeping retelling of the beloved fairytale!

Once upon a time…

A plague sweeps across the emerald hills of Uí Néill, leaving a young midwife’s father with months to live. To save her people, Sorcha makes a deal with a dangerous Fae. She must travel across the sea, through merrow and kelpie lands, to find a forgotten king on a crumbling throne.

Born king of the Seelie Fae, Eamonn fought battles unnumbered to uphold honor, duty, and freedom… until his twin brother sank a blade between his shoulders. Crystals grew from the wound, splitting open skin and bone. His people banished him to a cursed isle for his disfigurement, now king of criminals and fools.

With the help of brownies, pixies, and will-o’-the-wisps, Sorcha battles to break through his crystalline shell and persuade him to take back his stolen throne.

This determined beauty could come dangerously close to stealing his beastly heart.

When Grace Hansen finds a box belonging to her beloved grandfather, she has no idea it holds the key to his past—and to long-buried family secrets. In the box are his World War I diaries and a cryptic note addressed to her. Determined to solve her grandfather’s puzzle, Grace follows his diary entries across towns and battle sites in northern France, where she becomes increasingly drawn to a charming French man—and suddenly aware that someone is following her…

Through her grandfather’s vivid writing and Grace’s own travels, a picture emerges of a man very unlike the one who raised her: one who watched countless friends and loved ones die horrifically in battle; one who lived a life of regret. But her grandfather wasn’t the only one harboring secrets, and the more Grace learns about her family, the less she thinks she can trust them.

Kasper Mützenmacher keeps a divine "wishing hat" locked in the wall safe of his Berlin hat shop.