In just a few hundred years, a modest peninsula off the northwest corner of Asia has seen the rise and fall of several empires; served as the crucible for scientific dynamism, cultural innovation, and economic revolution; and witnessed cataclysms and bloodshed that have almost destroyed it several times over. This is Europe: a continent whose identity emerged not so much by virtue of geographic or ethnic continuity, but by a long and storied struggle...

"The Middle Ages have just begun when Vigdis Adelaïs, a young woman from a prosperous French family, falls in love with David Todros, a student at the city's yeshiva, and the son of a rabbi. To be together, they must flee their city, Vigdis renouncing a life of privilege and comfort. Pursued by her father's knights and in constant danger of betrayal, the lovers embark on a dangerous journey to the south of France, only to find their brief happiness...

From Robyn Cadwallader, author of the internationally acclaimed novel The Anchoress, comes a deeply profound and moving novel of the importance of creativity and the power of connection, told through the story of the commissioning of a gorgeously decorated medieval manuscript, a Book of Hours. London, 1321: In a small shop in Paternoster Row, three people are drawn together around the creation of a magnificent book, an illuminated manuscript of prayers,...

A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. In a major reassessment, Wilson argues that religion was not the catalyst, but one element in a lethal stew of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict--a conflict that ultimately transformed the map of the modern world.

The incredible story of the 1983 war game that triggered a tense, brittle period of nuclear brinkmanship between the United States and the former Soviet Union. "The Cold War's most dangerous moment: a high-stakes and secretive game of nuclear brinksmanship that played out in the forests of Germany, in stealthy submarines underneath the Atlantic and Pacific, in hidden London compounds, in fortified bunkers and code rooms across the globe. The year...

Recounts the story of the six double agents -- Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle, Garbo, and a shadowy sixth spy whose heroic sacrifice is revealed here for the first time -- who would weave a web of deception so intricate that it ensnared Hitler's army and helped to carry thousands of troops across the Channel in safety on 6 June 1944, D-Day. The story of D-Day has been told from many points of view, but never before from the perspectives of the...

British-occupied Palestine, 1946: Elderly writer Elias Lind isn't convinced by reports that his scientist brother, Raphael, died in a concentration camp. Too frail to search for Raphael himself, Elias persuades a contact in the Jewish resistance to send someone in his place. Lilya joined the resistance movement to help form a new state, not to waste her time on a fruitless chase across a war-ravaged continent at the request of a frail, most likely...

The shared history of Christianity and Islam began, shortly after Islam emerged in the seventh century A.D., with a question: Who would inherit the world of the Mediterranean? Sprung from the same Abrahamic source, the two faiths played out what historian O'Shea calls "sibling rivalry writ very large." Their clashes on the battlefield were balanced by long periods of coexistence and mutual enrichment, and by the end of the sixteenth century the religious...

Traces the history of the Gypsies from their origins in India through the twentieth-century, examines their distinctive culture, and discusses how they managed to survive despite enslavement, harassment, and prejudice.