The author of Little Women wrote personal letters which provide a raw and honest account of the reality of battlefield medicine during the American Civil War, a war which tore the country and families apart. Her compassionate narrative also highlights the under-appreciated role of women in medicine. While serving as a volunteer nurse for the Union Army, Louisa May Alcott recorded her experiences in the letters she sent home, later published as Hospital Sketches from the Civil War. 'A good fit of illness proves the value of health; real danger tries one's metal; and self-sacrifice sweetens character.' 'Although the manliest man among my forty, he said, 'Yes, ma'am', like a little boy; received suggestions for his comfort with the quick smile that brightened his whole face; and now and then, as I stood tidying the table by his bed, I felt him softly touch my gown, as if to assure himself that I was there. Anything more natural and frank I never saw...' Beautiful, wistful. 112pp, paperback.

A moving memoir following the Glass siblings throughout the course of the 20th century exploring assimilation, identity and home, the book is the story and secrets of a 20th century Jewish family. After her grandmother died, Hadley Freeman travelled to her apartment to try and make sense of a woman she'd never really known. Sala Glass was a European expat in America, defiantly clinging to her French influences, famously reserved, fashionable to the end, yet to Hadley much of her life remained a mystery. Sala's experience of surviving one of the most tumultuous periods in modern history was never spoken about. Hadley found a shoebox filled with her grandmother's treasured belongings and started a decade-long quest to find out their haunting significance and dig deep into the extraordinary lives of Sala and her three brothers. The search takes Hadley from Picasso's archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island and to Auschwitz. Hadley brings to life Alex's past as a fashion couturier and friend of Dior and Chagall. Trusting and brave Jacques, a fierce patriot for his adopted country and the brilliant Henri who hid in occupied France - each of them made extraordinary bids for survival during WWII. Alongside her great-uncles' extraordinary acts of courage in Vichy France, Hadley discovers her grandmother's equally heroic but more private form of female self-sacrifice. At the same time the book is an acute examination of the roots, tropes and persistence of anti-Semitism. A brave and thrilling almost detective story. 448pp, illus. Family tree.

Sub-titled 'The True Story of a Young Nurse in Wartime London'. In 1938, 18 year old Phyllis Ellsworth packs her bags, says goodbye to her anxious parents, and sets off from her quiet seaside home for Hackney Hospital in London's bustling East End. There she is to fulfil her dream to train as a nurse. At first it is a whirlwind of hard work, new friends and plenty of mischief, but just ten months later Britain declares war on Germany and life at the hospital is transformed. Phyll's days become an endless cycle of air-raid sirens, injured servicemen, and civilians anxiously waiting for news of loved ones. When she falls for a handsome young soldier, Phyll's work provides the only distraction from worrying about his safety. A true story of coming of age in terrible times, the blossoming of first romance, a life-long love affair and a young woman whose eagerness to do good in the world brought her suddenly face to face with death and drama in all its many guises. Published in Phyll's 95th year she lived to record the events of 75 years earlier recalling names, places and key events vividly, and the experience of fear and the sheer courage of a generation we are now losing. 325pp, paperback.

The epic story of history's most extraordinary evacuation, and one of the most famous episodes of the Second World War, this book is about the miracle on the beaches that saved a nation. In May 1940, British and Allied troops on mainland Europe were in a perilous situation - cut off and surrounded, they faced complete annihilation. It would be a devastating blow, handing Europe to the Nazis. But over a few frantic days the greatest evacuation in history managed to salvage hope, saving the army and hundreds of thousands of soldiers' lives. It was a pivotal and defining moment in the war, one Winston Churchill described as a 'miracle' in his 'We shall fight them on the beaches' speech. Best selling author John Harris describes in vivid detail how the evacuation developed on a day-by-day basis and destroys more than one myth associated with Dunkirk. Packed with authentic atmospheric and first-hand recollections, the desperate lifting of the weary British Expeditionary Force is seen in its tragic but spirited entirety, an epic of courage and confusion without parallel. First published in 1980 and here is facsimile reprint with quite large print. 267pp, paperback.

American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is best known for the Age of Innocence. Opening in August 1914 as the onset of the First World War is announced to sunlit Paris, Wharton's chronicle of her experience on the front lines powerfully evokes a country and a way of life under threat. As nuanced in her observations of human behaviour as in her vivid depictions of French landscape and architecture, she fully exploits her unique position as consort to Walter Barry, President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris, which allows her unparalleled access to life in the trenches. Sensitive without sentimentality, the book is nothing less than an inspirational testament to the strength of the human spirit at a time of the greatest adversity. Colm Toibin in his foreword says 'Wharton's novelist's eye for the perfect detail is matched in these reports with a sense of moral grandeur and warlike fervour.' Names of the towns still resonate today like Ypres which she visited after the second battle but before the slaughter of the third battle: 'Ypres has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses are still standing... Every windowpane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with different stories exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce. In these exposed interiors the poor little household goods shiver and blink like owls surprised in a hollow tree.' The essays are presented in chronological order which shows the modern day reader the slow descent into the chaos of the trench warfare that so dominated this war. 120 page paperback.

A French equivalent to the anonymous 'A Woman In Berlin' (which we stock code 91513), and a non-fiction counterpoint to Suite Française, the author who died in 1975 writes that it is 'the duty of those who have survived to bear witness to ensure the dead are not forgotten.' Her remarkable story of resilience and survival does just that. In 1921, the author, a Jewish woman from Poland, fulfils a dream and opens La Maison du Livre, Berlin's first French bookshop, and a haven for artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets. But Nazi ideology soon begins to poison the culturally rich city, and frequent police visits and book confiscations become the norm. Françoise's dream finally shatters in November 1938 as hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses are destroyed on Kristallnacht. The bookshop is miraculously spared, but fear of persecution forces her on a desperate, lonely flight to Paris, then across Southern France. Although she witnesses countless horrors and sacrifices, she survives at the hands of heroic strangers risking their lives to protect her. When the city is bombed and she flees, she sees children torn from their parents, mothers throwing themselves under buses and she is secreted away from one safe house to the next. There is the heroic tale of Mme. and M. Marius, the comedy of the glamorous refugee who hoodwinked the Germans into saving her son, the tragedy of the young man accused of murdering his wife, and the melodrama of hardened prison guards. Detailed, emotional and careful, it is a compelling account of crushing oppression. Published quietly in 1945, then rediscovered nearly 60 years later in an attic, this is a remarkable story of human cruelty and the human spirit. Hardback, 269pp.

An incredible true story of two idealistic young lovers who led Germany's largest anti-Nazi resistance group, right in the darkening heart of Berlin. Summertime 1935 and on a lake near the city a young man is out sailing when he glimpses a woman reclining in the prow of a passing boat. Harro Schulze-Boysen had already shed blood in the fight against Nazism by the time he and Libertas Hass-Heye began their whirlwind romance. She joined the cause and soon the two lovers were leading a network of anti-fascist fighters that stretched across Berlin's bohemian underworld. Poets, philosophers, workers and artists, they were all freethinkers united by a desire to bring down Hitler at any cost. Harro himself infiltrated German intelligence and began funnelling Nazi battle plans to the Allies, including the details of Hitler's surprise attack on the Soviet Union. Meanwhile Libertas used her position at the Propaganda Ministry to begin collecting evidence of the mass murder of Jews. They knew the stakes all too well, but nothing could prepare them for the betrayals they would suffer in this war of secrets - a struggle in which friend could be indistinguishable from foe. Drawing on unpublished diaries, letters and Gestapo files, Ohler spins an unforgettable tale of love, heroism and sacrifice where daily life was a minefield, and a mis-step could have fatal consequences. We meet not mythic heroes but flawed humans struggling for meaning in a time of terror - writers, artists, a fashion designer, a dentist - you will feel a little stronger and braver after reading about these remarkable men and women. Told with immediacy and encroaching terror. With coloured maps on the endpapers, 293pp, illus.

'A deft blend of historical research, moving interviews and challenging psychological insights, Lowe writes with elegance and perception.' - Jonathan Dimbleby. The fruit of five years labour, Lowe dissects the impact of the Second World War on society, politics, urban planning and more besides. The war created new philosophies, new ways of living, new architecture - this was the era of Le Corbusier, Simone de Beauvoir and Chairman Mao. But amid the waves of revolution and idealism there are also fears of globalisation, a dread of the atom bomb, and an unexpressed longing for a past forever gone. WWII was one of the most catastrophic events in human history, but how did the experience and memory of bloodshed - and bonding - affect the modern world? How did fears of violence, dreams of equality, and craving for freedom and belonging affect the world, countries and communities we live in today? The book describes and analyses a period of unprecedented geopolitical, social and economic change. The new order as it emerged after 1945 saw the collapse of European colonialism and the birth of two new superpowers - the USA and the Soviet Union - in a new, global Cold War. Scientists delivered new technologies beginning the nuclear age. Politicians fanaticised about overhauled societies. Some argued for global government, others for independence. Living standards were altered dramatically. It was a time of both terror and wonder which resonates in the arguments about nationalism, immigration and globalisation that exist today. Chapters include Planned Utopias, Equality and Diversity, Freedom and Belonging, The Birth of An Asian Nation, An African Nation, Democracy in Latin America and Israel. 561pp, 45 illustrations and 17 colour plates. Maps on endpapers.

Sub-titled 'The Greatest Lost Love Letters of the Second World War', Eileen Alexander graduated in 1939 with a brilliant First Class degree in English from Girton College, Cambridge. Her subsequent accident in a car driven by her future husband, Gershon Ellenbogen, begins the correspondence and their love affair. There were approximately 1,400 of these letters, written almost daily, covering the years 1939 to 1947. Eileen became a noted teacher, writer and translator, especially of George Simenon's Maigret books. Her husband who was in the RAF in WW2 worked for British Military Intelligence in Cairo. With war brewing in 1939, Eileen wrote her first letter from her hospital bed, the first in this book after the car accident: 'Monday 17th July Gershon - what everyone seems to have forgotten is that if I hadn't asked you to drive me to London that Tuesday, you would never have had your arm broken and your life thoroughly disorganised for a considerable period of time. Furthermore if I had directed you rightly we'd never have got into that damned death trap of a side-road.' Her letters are vibrant, intimate, joyous, dark, angry, obsessive, neurotic, generous, scurrilous and very, very funny by turns and speak of the remarkable woman who wrote them. She is frank about sex and her ambitions, hilariously caustic about colleagues, rationing rules and life on the home front, and painfully honest about loving a man away at war. A magical literary find, condensed into one superb heavyweight volume of 474pp with 16 pages of archive b/w photos. 2020 first edition.

Here you will meet Jewish heroes of the Bible, Rome's Captain of the Gate, Queen Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Cromwell, Wellington, Napoleon's marshals, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton, Sir John Moore at Corunna, Michael Strachan's vignette of Colonel J. Enoch Powell in 1943 in North Africa and Rory Stewart's 2004 experience of Iraq may come fresh. Max Hastings has drawn upon writers and narratives that have stirred his imagination over a lifetime. Modern scholars scorn for instance C. V. Wedgwood's writings on the English Civil Wars, those of Cecil Woodham-Smith about the Crimea, and Barbara Tuchman's Big Books. All were brilliant narrative historians who have been his faithful companions for 60 years. Likewise he has included several of Elizabeth Longford's vignettes of Wellington. Her account of the June 1815 Duchess of Richmond's ball before Waterloo, that glittering 'revelry by night' is 'more vivid than that of any other writer I know, save Byron and Thackeray.' Dr Johnson quoted a French savant who noted that 'There are many puerilities in war'. Most of those who fight are young, and thus the spirit of armies is distilled from a mingling of soldiers' physical vigour and intellectual immaturity with their licences to kill and opportunities to die. Soldiers is a very personal gathering of sparkling, gripping tales which rings the changes through the centuries. The nearly 350 stories illustrate vividly what it was like to fight in wars, to live and die as a warrior, from Greek and Roman times through recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are tales of great writers who served in uniform including Cobbett and Tolstoy, Edward Gibbon and Siegfried Sassoon, Marcel Proust and Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell and George MacDonald Fraser. Here are also stories of the female 'abosi' fighters of Dahomey, and heroic ambulance drivers of WW1. Max Hastings also shows compassion for the victims, above all civilians. 517pp, 16 pages of colour and other illus.