IAN FLEMING THE COMPLETE MAN Winner of the 2024 CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche and global [...]

The Sandpit (publication July 2020) When John Dyer returns to Oxford from Brazil with his young son, he doesn’t expect to find them both in danger. Every day is the same. He drops Leandro at his smart prep school and walks to the library to research his new [...]

Six Minutes in May: how Churchill unexpectedly became Prime Minister (published on 5 October 2017) London, early May 1940: Britain is under threat of invasion and Neville Chamberlain’s government is about to fall. It is hard for us to imagine the Second World War without Winston Churchill taking [...]

Priscilla, The Hidden Life of An Englishwoman in Wartime France, 2013. Priscilla was the author’s mysterious aunt, who lived on a mushroom farm in East Wittering, overlooking the Isle of Wight. The eldest daughter of the author and broadcaster S.P.B. Mais, she had spent the war in Occupied [...]

Stories From Other Places Nicholas Shakespeare’s collected stories take us across oceans and continents into the intimate lives of his characters and the dilemmas and temptations they face. The opening novella, Oddfellows, tells the little-known history of horrifying events that occurred on 1st January 1915 in the Australian [...]

Inheritance, 2010 (Longlisted Dublin IMPAC Award) What would you do if you suddenly and unexpectedly inherited £17 million? This is what happens to Andy Larkham, recently jilted lover, and resentfully underpaid publishing minion. Arriving late to the funeral of his favourite schoolteacher, he ends up in the wrong [...]