The Last Crusade puts the reader on da Gamas ships in the midst of a perplexing terrifying yet exciting new world & in doing so traces the ancestry of antagonism between the worlds two dominant faiths Christianity & Islam. In 1498 a young captain sailed from Portugal circumnavigated Africa crossed the Indian Ocean & discovered the sea route to the Indies opening up access to the fabled wealth of the East. It was the longest voyage known to history; the ships were pushed to their limits their crews were racked by storms & devastated by disease. However the greatest enemy was neither nature nor the fear of venturing into unknown worlds. With blood-red Crusader crosses emblazoned on their sails the explorers arrived in the heart of the Muslim East at a time when the old hostilities between Christianity & Islam had intensified. In two voyages that spanned six years Vasco da Gama would fight a running sea battle that would ultimately change the fate of three continents. The Last Crusade is an epic tale of spies intrigue & treachery; of bravado brinkmanship & confused
- often comical collisions
- between cultures encountering one another for the first time. With the world once again tipping back East The Last Crusade offers a key to understanding age-old religious & cultural rivalries resurgent today.

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The Last Crusaders is about the titanic contest between Hadsburg-led Christendom & the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth & sixteenth centuries the last great conflict between East & West
- the battles that were fought & the men who led the armies that fought them. It was in its way the first world war.
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Three of these stories were previously published in Victoria Hislop's ebook collection One Cretan Evening. In ten powerful stories Victoria Hislop takes us through the streets of Athens & into the tree-lined squares of Greek villages. As she evokes their distinct atmosphere she brings vividly to life a host of unforgettable characters from a lonesome priest to battling brothers & from an unwanted stranger to a groom troubled by music & memory. These bittersweet tales of love & loyalty of separation & reconciliation captured in Victoria Hislop's unique voice will stay with you long after you reach the end. ...

Three of these stories were previously published in Victoria Hislop's ebook collection One Cretan Evening. In ten powerful stories Victoria Hislop takes us through the streets of Athens & into the tree-lined squares of Greek villages. As she evokes their distinct atmosphere she brings vividly to life a host of unforgettable characters from a lonesome priest to battling brothers & from an unwanted stranger to a groom troubled by music & memory. These bittersweet tales of love & loyalty of separation & reconciliation captured in Victoria Hislop's unique voice will stay with you long after you reach the end. ...

Three of these stories were previously published in Victoria Hislop's ebook collection One Cretan Evening. In ten powerful stories Victoria Hislop takes us through the streets of Athens & into the tree-lined squares of Greek villages. As she evokes their distinct atmosphere she brings vividly to life a host of unforgettable characters from a lonesome priest to battling brothers & from an unwanted stranger to a groom troubled by music & memory. These bittersweet tales of love & loyalty of separation & reconciliation captured in Victoria Hislop's unique voice will stay with you long after you reach the end. ...

Glasgow 1971. The old way of life is under threat for the tight-knit community in Dalbeattie Street Maryhill. The shadow of the wrecker's ball looms large over their homes & they must face the choice of moving to a new estate or dispersing throughout the city. But powerful friendships refuse to be broken. These characters have gone through too much together to be destroyed by some measly planning scheme. They'll face this with the same inimitable Scottish humour & strength of spirit that have carried them through other tough times. Douglas' vivid portrait of Seventies Glasgow recreates in glorious detail a particular time & place but at its heart are the universal themes of love friendship & community. ...

If you like The Artist youll love Daisy Waughs Last Dance with Valentino. One night. One dance. One love to last a lifetime. 1916. Leaving war-ravaged London Jenny Doyle sets sail for New York where she is to work for the de Saulles family. Their home Gatsby-like in elegance is rife with intrigue & madness. Only Jennys friendship with dancer Rodolfo offers escape! until one tragic day the household is changed forever. 1926. America booms prohibition rules & Rodolfo has taken his place on the silver screen as Rudolph Valentino. Will the worlds most desired film star & his lost love have their Hollywood happy ending or will the tragic echoes from their time with the de Saulles thwart them one last time? ...

Indie filmmaker Kyle Freeman is a man at the end of his tether. He faces bankruptcy & obscurity until he lands a commission to make an unusual documentary. The Temple of the Last Days was a notorious cult which reached its bloody endgame in the Arizona desert in 1975. Ever since the group's rumoured mystical secrets & paranormal experiences have lain concealed behind a history of murder sexual deviancy & imprisonment. Kyle & his one-man crew film the cult's original bases in London & France -- finally visiting the desert crime scene where the cult self-destructed in a night of ritualistic violence. But when Kyle interviews survivors uncanny events plague his shoots. Frightening out-of-body experiences & nocturnal visitations follow along with the discovery of ghastly artefacts. Until Kyle realises too late that they've become entangled in the cult's hideous legacy. Praise for Adam Nevill: ' This novel grabs from the very first page.. . Superb' Guardian ' Lean compelling dark at times frightening' The Herald ' Horrifyingly scary.. . Nevill sinuously ramps up the tension' Sunday Times ...

By the end of the nineteenth century Detroit founded by the French as a fur-trading post was thriving. In 1913 Henry Ford began mass-producing cars at his Model T plant transforming the area into the Silicon Valley of its day. By 1920 it was the fourth largest city in America & by the mid-1950s General Motors had become the single biggest employer on earth. Here indeed was the most modern city in the world the city of tomorrow. But by the time Berry Gordy founded Motown Records in 1960
- thereby creating twentieth-century Detroits other great assembly line
- the cracks were already beginning to show: big industry was looking elsewhere for cheaper sites cheaper labour & better tax breaks; urban planning was in meltdown; corruption was rife; racial tensions were running high. The 1967 riots
- at the time the worst in US history
- left 43 dead more than 7 000 arrested & 3 000 buildings destroyed. Detroit a former beacon of the capitalist dream had degenerated into an urban wilderness where unemployment ran at 50 per cent. With more guns in the city than people the murder rate was the highest in America
- three times that of New York. Mark Binelli returned to live in his native Detroit after a break of many years. He tells the story of the boom & the bust
- & of the new society to be found emerging from the debris: Detroit with its urban farms & vibrant arts scene; Detroit as a laboratory for the post-industrial post-recession world. Heres what an iconic rust-belt city now looks like & how it might transform & regenerate itself in the twenty-first century.





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Brilliantly written & researched The Last Days of Hitler remains the most vivid account of the final Wagnerian chapter of Hitlers tyranny Max Hastings In September 1945 the fate of Adolf Hitler was a complete mystery. He had simply disappeared & had been missing for four months. Hugh Trevor-Roper an intelligence officer was given the task of solving the mystery. His brilliant piece of detective work not only proved finally that Hitler had killed himself in Berlin but also produced one of the most fascinating history books ever written. The Last Days of Hitler tells the extraordinary story of those last days of the Thousand Year Reich in the Berlin Bunker. Besieged in the shattered capital but still dominating the remains of his court Hitler reiterated the original alternative of Nazism: either total victory or annihilation. This book is the record of that carefully prepared ceremonious finale to a terrible chapter of history. This is an incomparable book by far the best written on any aspect of the second German war: a book sound in scholarship brilliant in its presentation.. . No words of praise are too strong A. J. P. Taylor New Statesman A masterpiece The Times A brilliant study Guardian ...