European History Books

Haunting stories from the Soviet-Afghan War from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature - A new translation of Zinky Boys based on the revised text - From 1979 to 1989 Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan…

This landmark global study makes us rethink what happened when the Cold War ended and our present era was born. The world changed dramatically as the Berlin Wall fell and protest turned to massacre in Tiananmen Square. Now, with d…

In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did the unthinkable: they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain - and held a picnic.Word had spread of what was going to happen. On wisps of rumour, thousands of …

The chilling and little-known story of Adolf Hitler's eight-year march to the pinnacle of German politics.On the night of January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler leaned out of a spotlit window of the Reich chancellery in Berlin, bursting w…

Do you know what is at stake in Ukraine? Urgent, compelling reading from the author of Chernobyl on the defining conflict of our times On 24 February 2022, Russia stunned the world by launching an invasion of Ukraine. In the midst…

Read this prize-winning historian's "immersive" ( New York Times) account of the famous writers who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism They were an astonishing group: glamo…

Without the benefit of hindsight, how do you interpret what's right in front of your eyes?; The events that took place in Germany between 1919 and 1945 were dramatic and terrible but there were also moments of confusion, of doubt …

The astonishing year when German democracy faced crisis and near destruction.1923 was one of the most remarkable years of modern European history. In January, France and Belgium militarily occupied Germany's economic heartland, th…

A place of exceptional diversity, rapid change, and high energy, Europe has literally been at the crossroads of the world ever since the interaction of Asia, North America and Africa formed the tropical island archipelago that wou…

From the great storyteller of Russia, a spellbinding account of the stories that have shaped the country's past - and how they can inform its present. No other country has been so divided over its own past as Russia. None has chan…

For months, the omens had pointed in one scarcely believable direction: Russia was about to invade Ukraine.And yet, the world was stunned by the epochal scale of the assault that began in February 2022. It was an attempt by one na…

Follow bioarchaeologist Cat Jarman - and the cutting-edge forensic techniques central to her research - as she uncovers epic stories of the Viking age and follows a small 'Carnelian' bead found in a Viking grave in Derbyshire to i…

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SAS: ROGUE HEROES Colditz Castle: a forbidding Gothic tower on a hill in Nazi Germany. You may have heard about the prisoners and their daring and desperate attempts to escape, but that's only part o…

As she did for the Modernists In Montmartre, noted art historian and biographer Sue Roe now tells the story of the Surrealists in Montparnasse.In Montparnasse begins on the eve of the First World War and ends with the 1936 unveili…

A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa’s greatest houses—and the lives of its occupants When Norman Eisen moved into the US ambassador’s re…

A groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions from the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II - and how the world allowed them to get away with it. In 1946, Gunther Quandt - patriarch of …

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the iron curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different Ger…

Discover the history of Europe - from the Dark Ages to present day - by the author of the bestselling A Short History of EnglandEurope is an astonishingly successful place. But it would take volumes to tell its story, right? Wrong…

The little-known story of Hitler's war on modern art and the mentally ill. In the first years of the Weimar Republic, the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn gathered a remarkable collection of works by schizophrenic patients that …

Original, knowledgeable and endlessly entertaining, France: An Adventure History is an unforgettable journey through France from the first century BC to the present day. Drawn from countless new discoveries and thirty years of exp…

In 1982, East Germany's fearsome secret police - convinced that writers were embedding subversive messages in their work - decided to train their own writers, weaponising poetry in the struggle against the class enemy. Once a mont…

The mystery has haunted generations since the Second World War: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And why? Now, thanks to radical new technology and the obsession of a retired FBI agent, this book offers an answer. Rosemary …

On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, China Mieville tells the extraordinary story of this pivotal moment in history. In February of 1917 Russia was a backwards, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, af…

The Empire Must Die portrays the vivid drama of Russia's brief and exotic experiment with civil society before it was swept away by the despotism of the Communist Revolution. The window between two equally stifling autocracies - t…

Hidden deep in the Bavarian mountains lies the picturesque village of Oberstdorf - a place where for hundreds of years people lived simple lives while history was made elsewhere.Yet even this remote idyll could not escape the brut…

Drawing on remarkable and never-before-seen material, the extraordinary story of one of the most horrific and devastating encounters of the Second World War. On June 22nd, 1941 the largest military invasion in human history was la…

Flat, fertile, and fatally tempting to invaders, for centuries Ukraine was fought over by more powerful neighbours. Though its modern national movement dates back to the early nineteenth century, it did not win real independence u…

With characteristic urbanity and wit, lifelong Francophile John Julius Norwich recounts two millennia of French history, from Vercingetorix‘s last stand against Caesar, via the folies de grandeur of Louis XIV and Napoleon, to the …

London, Paris and New York in the eighteenth century, as today, were places where political authority, commerce and money, art and intellectual life intersected. They straddled an Atlantic world where ships powered by nothing more…

A dazzling short history of the Balkans from the Romans to the present, which provides vital historical and cultural background to contemporary Balkan politics. At the end of the twentieth century people spoke as if the Balkans ha…