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Even to the Edge of Doom: a Love that Survived the Holocaust

In 1943, aged 23 and 19 respectively, William and Rosalie Schiff were married amidst the terror of the Second World War in the Kraków ghetto. They were forcibly separated shortly afterwards and sent on individual journeys through a ‘surreal maze of hate’. After Rosalie was saved by Oskar Schindler, the couple ended up at the Plaszów work camp, where they were at the mercy of the bestial SS commandant Amon Göth. While Rosalie was on ‘heaven patrol’ removing bodies from the camp, William worked in the factories. But when Rosalie was shipped by train to a different factory camp, William sneaked into a boxcar to follow, and found himself at Auschwitz instead. By turns riveting, harrowing and moving, and featuring illustrations from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archive, Even to the Edge of Doom is powerfully narrated by Craig Hanley and tells the story of two young people who manage to stay alive, against all odds, and find one another again at the end of the war.

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Unearthing London: The Ancient World Beneath the Metropolis

From the historic county town of Winchester to the coastal ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, and from the rural villages of the New Forest to

Unearthing London reveals the almost-forgotten ritual landscape which lies hidden beneath the streets of the modern capital. It is the city nobody knows, a vast and intricate network of hilltop shrines, tracks, sacred rivers, mounds, ditches, enclosures and man-made hills, all well over 2000 years old. This prehistoric landscape, moulded and shaped by early men and women, determined the position of landmarks such as St Paul's Cathedral, the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey.

However, it has not been completely obliterated by the concrete and tarmac of the modern city, and Simon Webb traces the forgotten history of the capital to explore what remains of these early sites. He also examines the religious beliefs and mythology of the pre-Roman area which became London and looks at how the legends tie in with the various ancient features of the city. The book also features a guide to walking the ritual landscape today — routes that take in both twenty-first century architecture and ancient intrigue.

Whether a lifelong Londoner or a curious visitor, Unearthing London will reveal things you never new about the global city.

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The Accidental Assassin: An Island, A Poodle, A Body ...

Victor Green is 37, unmarried and works at the tax office. He lives alone and is the sort of man who irons his underpants.

When Victor receives a letter from the council telling him to prune a lime tree in his front garden, he is anxious to oblige, although he is not much of a gardener and does not like heights. A disgruntled pigeon startles him and he falls from the tree, landing on a passer by. It takes a while for the police to discover that the victim is Tommy Hewson, a gangster generally known as Gruesome.

The local paper misprints Victor’s name, calling him Vincent Green, the name used by international hit-man Vincenzo Verdi. Expecting a turf war, two local gangs, the Pretty Boys and the Blues Brothers, embark on a campaign of destruction - both calling on the hapless Victor/Vincent to help. Inheriting Gruesome’s poodle, Fluffy, dubbed the Angel of Death, and pursued by a policeman’s daughter, Victor’s life is turned upside down.

Making friends and enemies along the way, as well as leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, Victor’s thrilling adventure will appeal to all crime fiction fans and leave you laughing out loud.

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Disasters on the Thames

The River Thames has been a vital lifeline for London since Roman warships sailed along it to the newly founded town of Londinium. Even then the peaceful-looking river had a lethal aspect which deceived many Thames sailors.

Throughout the centuries the River Thames has claimed the lives of crews of small boats and large naval warships, the scale of the tragedies growing with the sizes of the vessels involved. The danger to shipping was accepted as a necessary risk in order to keep trade flowing into London and many of the earlier tragedies, in the years before widespread news reporting, were quickly forgotten – at least until the wreck resurfaced in the Thames mud. From the little-known to the worst disaster in Thames history, the Princess Alice collision in 1878 with the loss of around 650 people, this illustrated book chronicles the surprising number of disasters and tragedies to have occurred on the River Thames up to the present day.

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