History & Military

This is the extraordinary life of an ordinary man. It is the story of Albert Facey, a parentless boy who began work at eight, struggled as a rural worker, survived Gallipoli, the loss of his farm in the Depression, the death of his son in WWII and that of his wife after sixty years - yet felt that his life was fortunate.

Stunning reissue of the phenomenal worldwide bestseller: Frank McCourt's sad, funny, bittersweet memoir of growing up in New York in the 30s and in Ireland in the 40s. Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's sad, funny, bittersweet memoir of growing up in New York in the 30s and in Ireland in the 40s. It is a story of extreme hardship and suffering, in Brooklyn tenements and Limerick slums -- too many...

Robert F. Kennedy was the first conspiracy theorist about his brother's murder. In this astonishingly compelling and convincing new account of the Kennedy years, acclaimed journalist David Talbot tells in a riveting, superbly researched narrative why, even on 22 November 1963, RFK had reason to believe that dark forces were at work in Dallas and reveals, for the first time, that he planned to...

Known to millions simply as 'Smithy', Sir Charles Kingsford Smith was one of Australia's true twentieth-century legends. In an era in which aviators were superstars, Smithy was among the greatest and, throughout his amazing career, his fame in Australia was matched only by that of Don Bradman. Among other achievements, Kingsford Smith was the first person to fly across the Pacific, he broke the...

In the last decade, two events have transformed the world: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of militant Islam. This is the first book to explain the link between these two occurrences. George Crile spent nearly a decade researching and writing this original account of the biggest, most expensive secret war in history: the arming of the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation. Moving...

This engaging memoir covers the first 25 years of Brian Edward's life in Northern Ireland during the 1940s and 1950s. His father abandoned his wife and son in dramatic circumstances when Brian was still a baby. He grew up in 'lodgings', often cared for by landladies who were mad, bad or simply sad, while his mother was at work. In his early teens Brian desperately tried to track down his...

Turning away from privileged Victorian Britain, Gertrude Bell explored, mapped and excavated the world of the Arabs, winning the trust of Arab sheiks and chieftains along the way. When the First World War erupted and the British needed the loyalty of Arab leaders, Gertrude Bell provided the intelligence for T.E. Lawrence's military activities. After the war, she played a major role in creating...

Sir Howard Kippenberger is widely acknowledged as the ideal of a New Zealand citizen-soldier and our foremost soldier-scholar; a country lawyer and provincial intellectual who became a national figure as New Zealanders made the transition from colonials to a forthright nationhood. As a military leader, editor and author he was one of the prime movers in that process. His democratic style of...

Helmand Province, October 2006: British soldiers are engaged in the most intense, sustained fighting they've faced since the Korean War. Against a tough, experienced and frighteningly motivated enemy, their lives too often depended on the success of danger-close, pin-point attacks pressed home from the air. When 800 Naval Air Squadron - callsign 'Recoil' - arrived in theatre, their Boss,...

Charles Upham was the great New Zealand war hero. He was one of the few people in history to have won the Victoria Cross twice, setting new standards of personal heroism during World War II. A quietly spoken sheep farmer from Canterbury, at the front in Crete and North Africa, he destroyed enemy machine-gun posts single-handed and led a frontal assault on enemy guns. He then spent the rest of the...

In August 1944, Hans Georg Klamroth was executed for his part in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. Wibke Bruhns, his youngest daughter, was six years old at the time. Decades later, watching a documentary about the events of 20 July, images of her father in the Third Reich People's Court appeared on the screen - and she realises she never knew him. In "My Father's Country", Bruhns tells of...

Nancy Wake lived in France before WWII, and at the outbreak of war, she joined a resistance group in Marseilles and became the No 1 target on the Gestapo's most wanted list, with a five-million franc price on her head. Dubbed the White Mouse, she managed to escape and flee to England.

A true story of love in wartime and in peace by one of New Zealand's finest writers. In Crete during the Second World War a wounded Maori Battalion soldier and a young Cretan woman fall in love when the young infantryman is sheltered by her family. After marrying in Crete, Ned and Katina come back to live in New Zealand, settling in the Far North. They live a long, rich and happy life together,...

On February 13, 2003, a plane carrying three American military contractors - Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes, and Keith Stansell - crashed in the mountainous jungle of Colombia. Dazed and shaken, they awoke battered and covered in blood with automatic rifles pointing at their faces. As of that moment they belonged to the terrorist organization known as the FARC, the military arm of the Colombia...

Using the firsthand expertise she has gained through writing the bestselling Dr Kay Scarpetta novels, Patricia Cornwell utilizes the demanding methods of modern forensic investigation to re-examine the evidence in the Jack the Ripper murders. These include state-of-the-art DNA testing on various materials, computer enhancement of watermarks and expert examinations of hand-writing, paper, inks and...

On Friday 25th May, 1934, a forty-one-year-old woman walked into the lobby of Claridge's Hotel to meet the nineteen-year-old son whose face she did not know. Fifteen years earlier, as the First World War ended, Idina Sackville shocked high society by leaving his multimillionaire father to run off to Africa with a near penniless man. An inspiration for Nancy Mitford's character The Bolter, painted...

Brigadier-General Herbert Hart landed at Gallipoli on 26 April 1915, commanded the Wellington Battalion during the closing stages of that campaign, then served as a battalion and brigade commander on the Western Front between 1916 and 1918. Throughout the war he kept a diary, in which he recorded his experiences in the great battles on Gallipoli, the Somme and Passchendaele. Hart's diary is now...

'June, 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support'. In Amsterdam, in the summer of 1942, the Nazis forced teenager Anne Frank and her family into hiding. For over two years, they, another family and a German dentist lived in a 'secret annexe', fearing discovery. All that...

Wolfe takes a walk on the wild side with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and writes about the 60s hippie culture.

An international bestseller, this is a German soldier's first-hand account of life on Russian front during the second half of World War II. When Guy Sajer joins the infantry full of ideals in the summer of 1942 the German army is enjoying unparalleled success in Russia. However, he quickly finds that for the foot soldier the glory of military success hides a much harsher reality of hunger,...

This is one of the world's greatest stories of adventure, survival and escape. SlavomirRawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer. On 9th November 1939, he was arrested by the Russians and after brutal interrogation in Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison and a farce of a trial, he was sentenced to 25 years' hard labour in the Gulags, for 'spying'. After a three-month journey to Siberia in the depths...

How did a 19 year-old, middle-class, Catholic girl from Munich become Hitler's mistress and what kept him faithful until the end of their lives? Was her appeal sexual, domestic, political - or did he really love her? This biography of Eva Braun is the first in English for 40 years. Angela Lambert has dug deep into Eva's background and brought into sharp focus a fascinating and unexpected...

It is a summer's night in 1860. In an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire, all is quiet. Behind shuttered windows the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight a dog barks. The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery: an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home. The household reverberates with shock, not least because...

According to the Kabbalah, in each generation there are thirty-six righteous people who sustain the world and preserve humanity. These people are often unknown and obscure but they bear all the sorrows and sins of the world. They also appear and help ordinary people in times of extreme need. Their deeds are often unrecognised and unexplained. It has taken more than six decades for Sigi Siegreich...

General Kamel Sachet was one of Saddam Hussein's commanders in his Special Forces, in charge of Kuwait City during Desert Storm, and a Governor in the province of Maysan. Over the course of four years in Baghdad, Wendell Steavenson came to know Sachet, his wife, and their nine children closely, and began to unravel their stories. The Weight of A Mustard Seed tells of a father with a glittering...

Nancy Wake, an Australian who became the most highly decorated woman of the Second World War, now tells her own story.

They were the best of enemies - dedicated, skilled and deadly. In the night skies above wartime Germany an RAF navigator-bomber from New Zealand and a Luftwaffe pilot seek out their targets, testing the gap between success and their own destruction as they cross each other's paths. The odds are heavily against either of them making it through the war, but as this sobering realisation displaces...

WEDLOCK is the remarkable story of the Countess of Strathmore and her marriage to Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary Eleanor Bowes was one of Britain's richest young heiresses. She married the Count of Strathmore who died young, and pregnant with her lover's child, Mary became engaged to George Gray. Then in swooped Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary was bowled over and married him within the week. But...

A new edition of one of the best-selling and best-loved books of recent years, with a new introduction by the author. The publication of Wild Swans in 1991 was a worldwide phenomenon. Not only did it become the best-selling non-fiction book in British publishing history, with sales of well over two million, it was received with unanimous critical acclaim, and was named the winner of the 1992 NCR...

Described by Manning Clark as 'Australia's greatest native son', William Charles Wentworth led a life of firsts. A man of rat cunning, great intelligence and sharp wit, he wrote the first book by an Australian to be published, was joint editor and proprietor of the colony's first independent newspaper, and founder of Australia's first university. But more importantly, with ruthless energy and a...

William Wilberforce's name will forever be associated with the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Stephen Tomkins' book covers: early years as son of a wealthy merchant family in Hull; dissolute life in Cambridge; work as MP under Pitt; evangelical conversion; campaigner for public morality; leads parliamentary movement for the abolition of slavery; forms the "Clapham Sect';...

Corporal Willie Apiata became the first New Zealander since the Second World War to be awarded the Commonwealth's highest military award for his actions with the NZ SAS in Afghanistan. From his early life in small town East Coast New Zealand to his actions in the deserts of Afghanistan, this is his story in his words. Inspiring, and heart warming, this is the story of an ordinary Kiwi facing...

With sixteen other POWs, author Charles McCormac broke out from his POW camp in Japanese-occupied Singapore and began a two-thousand-mile escape from Singapore, through the jungles of Indonesia to Australia. The POWs's escape took a staggering five months and only two out of the original seventeen men survived. This is McCormac'ss compelling true account of one of the most horrifying and amazing...