‘My favourite kind of history book: grippingly written, full of incredible drama, and focussing on individuals rather than numbers and statistics’ James Holland

On December 7th 1941, the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor. For many Americans, the surprise attack was a call to arms – but for the soldier sons of Japanese-American immigrant parents, it brought prejudice and scrutiny over where their loyalties lay.

In Facing the Mountain, Daniel James Brown tells the unforgettable story of the Japanese-American men who volunteered for the US Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team and displayed incredible courage on the brutal battlefields of Europe. Achieving the impossible in often near-suicidal missions, including rescuing a ‘lost battalion’ surrounded by Nazis in the French mountains, the 442nd went on to become one of the most decorated units in US history. Yet at the same time, their parents were put in camps and stripped of their livelihoods, and an equally brave battle was being fought in the courtroom back home.

A cinematic tour de force, Facing the Mountain puts a real-life band of brothers in the history books where they belong and reminds us that victory is rarely as simple as we think.

Cast aside by his family at an early age, abandoned and left to fend for himself in the woods of Washington State, young Joe Rantz turns to rowing as a way of escaping his past.

What follows is an extraordinary journey, as Joe and eight other working-class boys exchange the sweat and dust of life in 1930s America for the promise of glory at the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. Stroke by stroke, a remarkable young man strives to regain his shattered self-regard, to dare again to trust in others – and to find his way back home.

Told against the backdrop of the Great Depression, Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat is narrative non-fiction of the first order; a personal story full of lyricism and unexpected beauty that rises above the grand sweep of history, and captures instead the purest essence of what it means to be alive.

‘I really can’t rave enough about this book . . . I read the last fifty pages with white knuckles, and the last twenty-five with tears in my eyes’ – David Laskin, author of The Children’s Blizzard and The Long Way Home.