Category: Books

Centenary News Review:’The chronological approach allows Diana Souhami to slow down time and focus in on the minutia of Edith Cavell’s last days. As we come closer to the execution, the chapters are split into the mornings, afternoons and evenings of the days leading up to it. Whilst this primarily provides us with a detailed account of Cavell’s last days and the attempts made or not made by various British and American officials, it also draws us into her narrative. These final chapters are well balanced – between the political side and Cavell’s personal experience – and hugely emotive.’

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Publisher’s Description:’Lyrical and tender, filled with images of blazing intensity, While the Gods Were Sleeping asks how it is possible to record the dislocation of war; to describe the indescribable. It is a breathtaking novel about the act of remembering, how the past seeps into our lives and how those we have lost leave their trace in the present.’

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Publisher’s Description:’When they met at a motorcycle club in 1912, Elsie Knocker was a thirty year-old motorcycling divorcee dressed in bottle-green Dunhill leathers, and Mairi Chisholm was a brilliant eighteen-year old mechanic, living at home and borrowing tools from her brother. Little did they know, theirs was to become one of the most extraordinary stories of the First World War.’

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Publisher’s Description:’It was a war that shaped the modern world, fought on five continents, claiming the lives of ten million people. Two great nations met each other on the field of battle for the first time. But were they so very different? For the first time, and drawing widely on archive material in the form of original letters and diaries, Peter Doyle and Robin Schäfer bring together the two sides, ‘Fritz’ and ‘Tommy’, to examine cultural and military nuances that have until now been left untouched: their approaches to war, their lives at the front, their greatest fears and their hopes for the future.’

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Publisher’s Description: ‘1914 dawned with Britain at peace, albeit troubled by faultlines within and threats without: Ireland trembled on the brink of civil war; suffragette agitation was assuming an ever more violent hue; and suspicions of Germany’s ambitions bred a paranoia expressed in a rash of ‘invasion scare’ literature. Then when shots rang out in Sarajevo on 28 June, they set in train a tumble of diplomatic dominos that led to Britain declaring war on Germany.’

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Publisher’s Description: ‘Three lives torn apart by the strangest campaign of WWI. Three people finding a way through this war of devastating proportions. Three people testing the strength of relationships forged in wartime.Glory is the story of the men and women of Gallipoli and the tragic events of 1915. Of the determination to survive, the love stories enduring across the war-torn miles, the decisions cast, the errors made and the dark reality of the heroic dream.’

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Publisher’s Description:’A Fool for Thy Feast is a modern assessment of the career of this remarkable man. Tubby was pursuing a conventional clerical career when war changed his course. He became an army chaplain and ran the famous Talbot House in Poperinghe, the ‘Haven in Hell’ just behind the lines, visited by thousands of the troops fighting in the Ypres Salient.’

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Publisher’s Description:’The Battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. Alistair Horne’s classic work is a profoundly moving, sympathetic study of the battle and the men who fought there.’

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Publisher’s Description:’When war broke out between the British and Turkish empires in 1914, the 6th (Poona) Division sailed from India to Basra to bolster Britain’s allies. This detailed history places the campaign in context of Allied operations in the Middle East and sheds light on several unsung heroes of the war.’

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Publisher’s Description:’The Ottoman Endgame is the first, and definitive, single-volume history of the Ottoman empire’s decade-long war for survival. The consequences, well into the 21st century, could not have been more momentous.’

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