The summer of 1940 found 60-year-old firebrand Leon Trotsky living in exile in Coyoacan, Mexico, still agitating with his pen and raging against the death he felt certain Stalin was bound to deliver - any day now. In The Death of Trotsky, Cecelia Holland brings this fated and fatal day to life, from its quotidian beginnings to its dramatic close. Between Trotsky's waking and his final rest, she probes the outer-workings and inner thoughts of those who were with him till the end, illuminating a man who exited life as he lived it: defiantly.

My Thoughts Be Bloody, a sweeping family saga, revives an extraordinary figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the story of President Lincoln's death. Edwin Booth, John Wilkes's older brother by four years, was in his day the biggest star of the American stage. Without an account of Edwin Booth, author Nora Titone argues, the real story of Lincoln's assassin has never been told.

Winner of the 2001 Christy Award, Lynn Austin captures the turmoil of the Civil War in this stirring novel. From vast plantations to the cramped closets of the Underground Railroad, it follows one young woman's inspiring journey of risk and sacrifice.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) had never set his sights on becoming president; after all, he'd grown up in a log cabin on the frontier and had hardly any formal schooling. But as the question of slavery threatened to destroy the United States, this self-taught lawyer with a sharp mind and passion for justice found himself at the center of the greatest debate the nation had ever faced.

Published for the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, Rebel Sisters is the number one Irish best seller from award-winning novelist Marita Conlon-McKenna, who writes with all the emotional depth and warmth of Maeve Binchy. With the threat of the First World War looming, tension simmers under the surface of Ireland. Growing up in the privileged confines of Dublin's leafy Rathmines, the bright, beautiful Gifford sisters, Grace, Muriel, and Nellie, kick against the conventions of their wealthy Anglo-Irish background and their mother Isabella's expectations.

Easter Rising tells the dramatic minute-by-minute account of a heroic band of rebels who faced the might of the British Empire in 1916 Dublin. The Irish rebel leader, Patrick Pearse, perished in front of an English firing squad; however, his actions led to the eventual formation of a modern, independent Ireland. Easter rising brings history to vibrant, flaming life.

A stunning portrait of the devastation left by the American Civil War, as seen through the eyes of a woman who played a part at the heart of it. With her marriage prospects ruined in the wake of her father's financial decline, teenage Varina Howell decides her best option is to wed the much older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects a life of security as a Mississippi landowner. 

Spanning 15 years of work, Everywhere I Look is an audiobook full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of rereading Pride and Prejudice.

It's late 1938. Thomas Heiselberg has built a career in Berlin as a market researcher for an American advertising company. In Leningrad, 22-year-old Sasha Weissberg has grown up eavesdropping on the intellectual conversations in her parents' literary salon. They each have grand plans for their lives. Neither of them thinks about politics too much, but after catastrophe strikes they will have no choice.

On the morning of April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, received a telegram from General Robert E. Lee. There is no more time - the Yankees are coming, it warned. Shortly before midnight, Davis fled the capital, setting off an intense and thrilling chase in which Union cavalry hunted the Confederate president. Two weeks later, President Lincoln was assassinated, and the nation was convinced that Davis was involved in the conspiracy that led to the crime.

The funny and poignant autobiography of Jerome K Jerome, who is best known for his comic novel Three Men in a Boat. Jerome struggled against poverty and obscurity, not to mention his improbable name, for many years before Three Men in a Boat made him a celebrity and the friend of other celebrities. A man of deep human sympathies and principles, he lived through and engaged with, a time - like our own - of unprecedented changes and inventions.

Few books have had such an impact as Wild Swans: a popular best seller and a critically acclaimed history of China that opened up the country to the world. Through the story of three generations of women in her own family - the grandmother given to the warlord as a concubine, the Communist mother, and the daughter herself - Jung Chang reveals the epic history of China's 20th century. Breathtaking in its scope, unforgettable in its descriptions, this is a masterpiece that is extraordinary in every way.

A huge novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women. It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London.

The second volume of Woodruff's memoirs begins with him arriving in Poplar in the early 1930s. Luckily he gets a job at a steel foundry, and lives with an old couple in Bow. It also covers his winning of a place at Oxford and his part in the war effort.

The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears.