Paddy Ashdown at the Cheltenham Literary Festival

Jon Owens listens to Paddy Ashdown discuss his new book A Brilliant Little Operation: The Cockleshell Heroes and the Most Courageous Raid of World War 2.

An extract from Double Cross

Their codenames were Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle and Garbo. This is their story.

Read an extract from Ben Macintyre’s Double Cross…

Double Cross

Ben Macintyre, author of Double Cross on The True Story of The D-Day Spies… their codenames were Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle and Garbo….

Discover The Emperor of Lies

Now published in over twenty languages, Steve Sem-Sandberg’s award winning The Emperor of Lies is one of the great Holocaust novels of the twenty-first century by one of Scandinavia’s most admired authors. Read an extract.

An extract from Rifleman, by Victor Gregg, with Rick Stroud

This is the story of a true survivor.

A Front-line Life from Alamein and Dresden to the Fall of the Berlin Wall…

Undercover with Nicholas Rankin: Ian Fleming’s Commandos

In his new book, Nicholas Rankin gives us the true story of Ian Fleming’s Second World War unit – 30 Assault Unit – from which, in his rank of Commander Ian Fleming RNVR, was born the real-life inspiration for James Bond.

Anna Reid discusses her new book Leningrad

On 8 September 1941, eleven short weeks after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. Had the city fallen, the history of the Second World War – and of the twentieth century – would have been very different.

The Far to Go Reading Guide

Download the reading guide to Alison Pick’s Booker long-listed novel, a powerful and profoundly moving story about one family’s epic journey to flee the Nazi occupation of their homeland in 1939, and above all to save the life of a six-year-old boy…

Read an extract from Far to Go, by Alison Pick

A powerful and profoundly moving story about one family’s epic journey to flee the Nazi occupation of their homeland in 1939, and above all to save the life of a six-year-old boy…

Take a sneak peek at Ghastly Business, by Louise Levene

Ghastly Business conjures the world of interwar London with gleeful vigour: a time when a woman’s body was only mentioned if someone had dismembered it; when the scars of the Great War were still fresh and when a pretty young bluestocking needed to tread very carefully in order to avoid becoming yet another of its casualties.

An interview with the Rifleman

Rifleman is the astonishing life of a young working-class man, Victor Gregg, who fought throughout the Second World War from Alamein to the invasion of Sicily, was captured at Arnhem and as a POW survived the Allied bombing raid on Dresden.

Watch an interview with the author.

We Die Alone: an introduction

The following is Andy McNab’s introduction to David Howarth’s We Die Alone. During World War Two, Howarth ran a spy ring from which this volume and his previous best-seller, The Shetland Bus, both derive. Mr Howarth, who died in 1991, was the author of two dozen major books of history.

The Round-up: Military History

Bookhugger’s publishers present a selection of true tales of heroism, survival, strategy and tragedy from the all-conquering Ottoman Empire of the mid-sixteenth century to behind lines operations in the ‘Alpine Redoubt’ area of Austria in World War Two…

Read the first chapter of The Very Thought of You, by Rosie Alison

Fresh from its shortlisting for the Orange Prize for fiction, enjoy the first chapter of this haunting coming-of-age novel.

Read an extract from Coward at the Bridge, by James Delingpole

Trapped in a cupboard with a nubile blonde nymphomaniac; crossing the Waal under a hail of fire with the US paratroops of 82nd airborne; rattling in a jeep through the Dutch countryside with the men of 1st Airborne Recce Squadron; trying to take out a self-propelled gun with a ruddy useless PIAT. It’s all in a day’s work for Lt Dick Coward and Sgt Tom Price.

March non-fiction round-up

Enjoy Bookhugger’s roundup of the fantastically diverse non-fiction titles that have hit the bookshops this March – from Mussolini to the Mafia, and Eastenders to Okinawa, it’s all here.

The Children’s Invasion Book

In this second short film featuring Faber archivist Robert Brown, he introduces us to another of Faber’s wartime publications – The Children’s Invasion Book. Published in 1944, this book wasn’t a guide to help British children prepare for the possibility of a German invasion of the UK, but a display of the Allied military hardware which was about to be unleashed on D-Day…

David Peace on Occupied City

George Miller talks to David Peace about the background to and writing of his latest novel, the second in his Tokyo Trilogy, Occupied City, and we have clips of David Peace reading from the novel too.

The Booklist – Winter Warmer

Curl up in front of the fire, and spend some time with a loner in the woods, his cabin insulated by his books; explore the Canadian Northwest with an anthropologist gone native; warm yourself with a wonderful tales from WWII and the Napoleonic Wars; then witness explorers pushing themselves to the limit, all from the comfort of your armchair!

Andrew Roberts on If Hitler Comes

A classic of ‘imaginary history’, If Hitler Comes was first published only 2 months after the Fall of France, whilst the Battle of Britain was being fought. Now republished for the first time in 68 years and, in the view of historian Andrew Roberts it deserves its place at the head of what has become an emerging literary genre.

Barbara Kingsolver on The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver wasn’t able to come to the UK for publication of her spellbinding new novel The Lacuna (though she hope to visit in 2010), so Faber did the next best thing – went to her with their questions.

The Booklist: After the War

The act of War has affected hundreds of millions of people in so many different ways over the centuries. These memories should never be allowed to be forgotten. Bookhugger’s publishers present some of the most haunting fiction and non-fiction you will ever read…