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Ten years ago, Jess left a high-powered finance job to become a stay-at-home mom. She thought she’d left her past behind, but it keeps coming back to haunt her. First, there was the blackmail video of her cheating husband. Then, the revelation that her former co-workers were the ones responsible. Now, she’s being targeted by an international crime syndicate that’s hell-bent on silencing her. This is her incredible true story.

On October 25, 1947, the United States government helped the Chinese Nationalist Party, Kuomingtang (KMT) President Chiang Kai-Shek flee the overwhelming communist forces. President Chiang established the new democratic government known as the Republic of China on an island later to be known as Taiwan, previously a major trading center called the “the beautiful isle” or Formosa. This audiobook will not only account for the transformation of Taiwan in the eyes of the colonizers but understand the detrimental impact that the reshaping caused.

Violent confrontation between armed groups over the supply of illegal narcotics is something we commonly associate with criminal gangs in modern cities, but in the mid-19th century Great Britain went to war with Imperial China in order to continue to supply Chinese addicts with opium. The two wars that followed have become known as the Opium Wars, and they led to the utter defeat of China, the establishment of a British colony in Hong Kong, and the continuation of a narcotics trade that was worth millions of pounds each year to the British.

The Japanese progressed throughout the eras because of the emperor, but they also progressed despite him. These are people who never let go of their sacred history, and their story is told and retold in art, film, literature, and even graphic novels across the entire world. Terms such as shoguns, samurai, haiku, anime, and manga are familiar to many in the Western world today. Westerners also learn flower arranging, martial arts, meditation, and enjoy a variety of visual and digital art forms because of the unique culture of Japan.

Pol Pot was a Cambodian political leader and revolutionary who worked as Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 till 1979. He was a key member of Cambodia's communist party, the Khmer Rouge, from 1963 to 1997, and acted as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963 to 1981. He was a Marxist-Leninist and a Khmer nationalist. Cambodia was changed into a one-party communist state under his management, and the Cambodian genocide happened.

'In a Nutshell', the new audiobook series from Naxos AudioBooks, continues with a fascinating history of Tibet. Part of China for many years, yet with a clearly distinctive culture (with the central devotion of its people being to Buddhism and the Dalai Lama), Tibet has a unique character in the panoply of world nations. Here we have an independent view of its history and the customs and beliefs of its people - and a commentary on the current situation.

This clearly written and engrossing book presents a global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present. Unlike most studies, which assume that the "rise of the West" is the story of the coming of the modern world, this history, drawing upon new scholarship on Asia, Africa, and the New World, constructs a story in which those parts of the world play major roles.

The idea of the sword-wielding samurai, beholden to a strict ethical code and trained in deadly martial arts, dominates popular conceptions of the samurai. As early as the late 17th century, they were heavily featured in literature, art, theater, and even comedy. This book gives listeners access to the real samurai as they lived, fought, and served. Much as they capture the modern imagination, the samurai commanded influence over the politics, arts, philosophy, and religion of their own time, and controlled Japan from the 14th century until their demise in the mid-19th century.

The history of China as a single nation began more than 2,000 years ago, when Qin Shi Huangdi first united a group of warring kingdoms into a single empire. China was then ruled by a series of imperial dynasties until the last one—the Qing Dynasty—fell in 1912. The 275-year period of Qing rule saw China becoming a world superpower, gaining dominance over present-day Korea, Tibet, and Vietnam, as well as becoming the center of global trade.

In 1837, Hong Xiuquan failed the notoriously difficult exam to gain entry to the Chinese Civil Service and suffered a nervous breakdown. In a weakened state, he had visions which he later interpreted to be messages from God, telling him that he is the younger brother of Jesus Christ and, therefore, the second son of God.

To say that the so-called Supreme Commanders of North Korea have been sticklers for submission would trivialize the more-than-troubling state of affairs that has plagued this precarious place for decades. The fearsome Kim regime, though relatively fresh in comparison to powerful dynasties that lasted for centuries, has become one of history's most controversial bloodlines, and not without cause.

The Gurkha Regiment is without question one of the most storied regiments of the British Army. Somewhat like the French Foreign Legion, however, it has traditionally been a regiment of adventurers and soldiers of fortune, with the simple difference that the Gurkhas represent only a minor ethnicity of the wider Nepalese population, distinguished by a long and august martial tradition. Traditionally, the officer corps of the various Gurkha regiments have been drawn from the regular ranks of the British Army, with fluency in Nepali a basic requirement.

Kwasi Kwarteng is the child of parents whose lives were shaped as subjects of the British Empire, first in their native Ghana, then as British immigrants. He brings a unique perspective and impeccable academic credentials to a narrative history of the British Empire, one that avoids sweeping judgmental condemnation and instead sees the Empire for what it was: a series of local fiefdoms administered in varying degrees of competence or brutality by a cast of characters as outsized and eccentric as anything conjured by Gilbert and Sullivan.

In this brilliant narrative of America's first limited war, Toland lets both the events and the participants speak for themselves, employing scrupulous archival research and interviews as the bases for the drama and accuracy of his writing. In Mortal Combat reveals Mao's prediction of the date and place of MacArthur's Inchon landing, Russia's indifference to the war, Mao's secret leadership of the North Korean military, and the true nature of both sides' treatment and repatriation of POWs.

In his own time (701-762), Li Bai's poems - shaped by Daoist thought and characterized by their passion, romance, and lust for life - were never given their proper due by the official literary gatekeepers. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of court entertainers, tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty. The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it and whose ability to live, love, and mourn without reservation produced some of the most enduring verses.  

In this book, we explore British Colonialism in India, a history of oppression and exploitation, whilst celebrating the contributions that the diaspora and its descendants have made to British society. We explore the origins of the British East India Company, navigating through the dark history of a struggle for independence. On the way we meet Mahatma Gandhi, and recognize his significance in the fight for independence, before we discuss the partition of India and creation of Pakistan. We conclude with Indian emigration to the UK, and the history of the modern-day British Indian.

In 1467, the Onin War ushered in a period of unparalleled conflict and rivalry in Japan that came to be called the Age of Warring States. In this book, Stephen Turnbull offers a masterly exposition of the wars, explaining what led to Japan’s disintegration into rival domains after more than a century of relative peace, the years of fighting that followed and the period of gradual fusion when the daimyo (great names) strove to reunite Japan under a new Shogun. Peace returned to Japan with the end of the Osaka War in 1615.

A sweeping, interdisciplinary history of the world's third-largest river, a potent symbol across South Asia and the Hindu diaspora. Weaving together geography, environmental politics, and religious history, Sen offers a remarkable portrait of one of the world's largest and most densely populated river basins.

The Art of War, literally The Laws of War by Master Sun is the most famous ancient Chinese treatise, dedicated to a military strategy and policy, written by Sun Tzu. The treatise by Sun Tzu influenced crucially on a whole military art of the East. Although it is the first treatise on the military art, it includes clearly expressed common principles of strategy as well as tactics. A special place in a military theoretical literature belongs to comments on Sun Tzu, the earliest of which appeared in the Han era (206-220 AD), and the new ones are still being created.

This is the story of three terrible famines. The first is an Gorta Mór, the great hunger of Ireland, which began in 1846. The second is the deadly famine that struck Bengal in 1943. The third is the Ethiopian famine, which first sprung up in lethal form in the 1970s under Emperor Haile Selassie and then reappeared under the brutal dictator Mengistu in the 1980s.