Mutiny on the Bounty meets Lord of the Flies in this harrowing tale of mutiny, treachery, and survival. David Grann, bestselling author andstaff writer for The New Yorker, delivers a gripping, vivid, can’t-put-it-down read.
When the British man-of-war HMS Wager foundered near the remote southern tip of Patagonia in 1741, almost 150 surviving crewmen fought the elements – and each other – to survive on a desolate, uninhabited island. Grann recreates life inside the “wooden world” of a square-rigged Royal Navy ship in rich detail and uses sailors' memoirs and journals to chronicle how naval discipline broke down, and the desperate, marooned men descended into anarchy and mutiny. Miraculously, more than thirty officers and crewmen made it back to England.
'The beauty of The Wager unfurls like a great sail... one of the finest nonfiction books I've ever read' Guardian
'The greatest sea story ever told' Spectator
'A cracking yarn... Grann's taste for desperate predicaments finds its fullest expression here' Observer
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER
From the international bestselling author of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE LOST CITY OF Z, a mesmerising story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.
On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the…
John Edgar Hoover ran the Federal Bureau of Investigation for almost fifty years, from 1924 until his death at the helm in 1972.
His tenure as the country’s chief lawman stretched from the “War on Crime” battles against Depression-era bank robbers and kidnappers to the eve of the Watergate scandal. Yale history professor Beverly Gage offers an authoritative and engagingly written biography of the Washington powerbroker who built a law-enforcement empire and used it to fight his personal enemies as well as America’s.
An important book that documents one man’s outsized impact on his country and his times.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2023 Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography Winner of the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy Winner of the American History Book Prize Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
When he became director of the FBI in 1924, J. Edgar Hoover was a dazzling wunderkind buzzing with big ideas for reform.
He transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal, into a modern machine. He believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its…
Few names can send a chill down the spine quite like Colditz. The clifftop castle near Leipzig housed the most troublesome and incorrigible Allied officers the Germans captured during World War Two.
While the stone bastion looked escape-proof, getting out became a challenge and an obsession for the men locked inside. Ben Macintyre, the prolific and bestselling author of real-life thrillers on espionage and wartime covert operations, works his magic and brings fresh insights to the saga of this infamous POW camp.
His formidable storytelling skills, coupled with an eye for drama and colorful characters, make this the definitive account of the battles of wits fought between captives and captors.
'A master at setting the pulse racing' Daily Mail 'A fine feat of storytelling . . . will surely become the last word on the subject' Telegraph _____________________________
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 of the real story.
In Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre takes us inside the walls of the most infamous prison in history to meet…
Before Jack the Ripper, before The Devil in the White City’s H.H. Holmes, the world's deadliest serial killer was the Canadian doctor Thomas Neill Cream. He murdered at least nine women and one man in Canada, the United States, and England before he was finally brought to justice in London 1892. This is the first complete account of his crimes, his victims, and how Scotland Yard’s best detectives struggled to identify and capture the ruthless “Lambeth Poisoner.” It exposes the flawed police investigations and primitive forensic tests that enabled him to evade suspicion and detection, how he was convicted and imprisoned in the midst of his poisoning spree, and why he was freed to kill again.
