'A story destined to be told. A fascinating history of blood for the front line. Humbling, awe inspiring and life affirming.' Sue Black, author of All That Remains

The Lifesavers were a little-known band of men and women at the forefront of groundbreaking battlefield care in the Second World War.

As part of a new and pioneering service, unconventional and iconoclastic, they pushed and pulled blood from hundreds of thousands of donors into the veins of battle casualties all over the world. Deploying expert teams – officially the smallest units in the British Army – who risked their own lives to reach the wounded and sick, they transformed survival rates with an impact comparable to that of penicillin.

Among them were pre-war GPs, conscientious objectors and a communist doctor who had transfused his first casualty in the Spanish Civil War. Prominent was Gladwin Buttle, a larger-than-life dynamo, who, in North Africa, defied shortages by sending blood into the desert in cleaned-out whisky bottles and sterilizing kit with a broken-down steamroller. Directing was Lionel Whitby – ‘the greatest vampire the world has known’ he was called in 1945 – whose own life was saved in 1918 by blood transfused on the Somme.

Their skills and innovations saw action in some of the most important battles in recent history, forging lifelines that allies sought to replicate but enemies – to their cost – did not. Some continue to inspire life-saving methods of emergency care today.

Bestselling historian Roderick Bailey follows their trailblazing work from the start of the conflict to its end, from Dunkirk and El Alamein to Normandy and the Burmese jungle. Unearthed from rigorous research among diaries, letters and other first-hand accounts, The Lifesavers – a gripping narrative of the Second World War presented from an entirely new angle – tells the full tale for the first time.

‘Vivid and compelling’ John Lancaster
‘A delectable serving of escapist nostalgia’ The Times, Book of the Week

Newfoundland, 1919. Buffeted by winds, an unwieldy aircraft – made mainly from wood and stiff linen – struggled to take off from the North American island’s rocky slopes. Cramped side by side in its open cockpit were two men, freezing cold and barely able to move, but resolute. They had a dream: to be the first in human history to fly, non-stop, across the Atlantic Ocean. But there were three other teams competing against them, and as the waves raged a few miles below, memories of wartime crashes resurfaced . . .

Mining letters, diaries and evocative unpublished photographs, David Rooney’s deeply researched account of this audacious contest shows how it was the airmen’s thrilling wartime experiences that ultimately led them to the ‘Big Hop’, and brought old friends together for one more daring adventure.

‘Excellent… consists of colourful biographical sketches of the aviators who took part in the competition and thrilling accounts of their efforts’ Daily Mail

‘A glorious romp through an overlooked part of aviation history, stuffed full of intriguing characters and white-knuckle courage’ Sunday Times

'Miranda Seymour has written a wonderful and unputdownable book about an astonishing woman' MEL GIEDROYC

Vera Gedroits was a towering, sweet-faced lesbian princess, an ardent supporter of workers’ rights who regularly performed true medical miracles of surgery. On one occasion, she even frogmarched an inquisitive Rasputin out of a ward for wounded officers.

While working for César Roux at the world’s best known medical institute in Lausanne, Vera became the world’s first woman surgeon. Off the back of this, she was appointed by the doomed Tsarina to teach the women of the Romanov family how to be nurses.

In 1919, Vera was sent to Kyiv, where her hospital reforms, innovative work and academic papers crowned an extraordinary career. During the troubled 1920s, in times of extreme danger, she completed a remarkable series of memoirs. The princess-surgeon’s prose, including a startling candid account of her early years as a revolutionary factory doctor, has been compared to that of Pasternak.

Some years later, Vera and her widowed lover Countess Maria Nirod were seized in the middle of the night and taken away at gunpoint during the Soviet purge of scientific intellectuals. Their whereabouts for the next few months were never disclosed. Vera’s pension was cancelled. The hospital and institute were closed. Living in extreme poverty, Vera died two years later of uterine cancer. She was just 61.

The princess’s name was removed from official Soviet medical records; her tremendous contribution to medicine and the radical improvements to wartime surgery she pioneered as the first female battlefield surgeon have remained unacknowledged to this day. Now, Miranda Seymour uncovers the riveting story of a daring and brilliant woman who chose to make Ukraine her homeland, someone adored by her friends and patients and whose achievements as an administrator and bold reformer invite comparisons to Florence Nightingale.

‘The extraordinary story of an extraordinary woman, whose unprecedented career as a surgeon, and also as a writer, made her a participant in every aspect of late Tsarist and early Soviet history, and at every level of Russian society … Miranda Seymour tells her story with compelling passion and the most extraordinarily wide understanding of the history and politics, the medicine and literature of the times. A remarkable book’ MICHAEL FRAYN

Quantum physics is the cornerstone of our world. Yet, at the same time, it’s one of the hardest subjects for ordinary mortals to grasp.

In Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics, a husband-and-wife duo – renowned physicist Frank Verstraete and writer Céline Broeckaert – demystifies the essential science behind how our world works. Together, they unravel the reasons the universe behaves in its weird ways – and just why it's so important to understand them.

In this book, you will discover:

• How symmetry governs the universe
• The untold history of quantum physics
• How quantum principles power our gadgets and lives
• The real essence behind quantum puzzles and discoveries

Part history and part popular science, Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics serves as a bridge between the complex world of quantum physics and the curious mind.

‘A physics book unlike any other. The scope, depth and artistry are breathtaking’ – John Preskill, theoretical physicist and Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech

'Quantum physics has long been mysterious, yet [the authors] succeed, often with brilliance, in making its history and mind-blowing ways accessible to lay readers' – Nature

‘Entertaining, unorthodox and highly readable’ – Ian Stewart FRS, bestselling author of The Science of Discworld

‘A delightful book for all those who do not speak the language of mathematics but are curious about the most beautiful of theories and their impact on our lives’ – Barbara Terhal, theoretical physicist

David Attenborough’s unforgettable meeting with gorillas became an iconic moment for millions of television viewers. Life on Earth, the series and accompanying book, fundamentally changed the way we view and interact with the natural world setting a new benchmark of quality, influencing a generation of nature lovers.

Told through an examination of animal and plant life, this is an astonishing celebration of the evolution of life on earth, with a cast of characters drawn from the whole range of organisms that have ever lived on this planet. Attenborough’s perceptive, dynamic approach to the evolution of millions of species of living organisms takes the reader on an unforgettable journey of discovery from the very first spark of life to the blue and green wonder we know today.

Now, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the book’s first publication, David Attenborough has revisited Life on Earth, completely updating and adding to the original text, taking account of modern scientific discoveries from around the globe. He has chosen beautiful, completely new photography, helping to illustrate the book in a much greater way than was possible forty years ago.

This special anniversary edition provides a fitting tribute to an enduring wildlife classic, destined to enthral the generation who saw it when first published and bring it alive for a whole new generation.

'Mallaby has done full justice to his kaleidoscopically interesting subject … expertly structured and vividly reported, the book presents the most insightful portrait of Hassabis to date' Financial Times

A revelatory portrait of the visionary behind Google DeepMind, the race to control the future – and what it means to win

Even in a tech world crowded with visionary leaders, Demis Hassabis is recognized as a special case. Born to working class, immigrant parents in North London, a chess prodigy by five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven-figure job offer from a video-game studio to study science at Cambridge. Long before the current obsession with AI, he founded the path-breaking company DeepMind in order to pursue a single, audacious goal: the dream of artificial superintelligence, which would solve humanity’s hardest problems, change life and work as we know it, and perhaps even unlock the deepest mysteries of the Universe. For his scientific achievements, he won a Nobel Prize in 2024, and his company, now Google DeepMind, is considered the tech giant’s engine room.

For the past three years, Sebastian Mallaby has had unprecedented access to Hassabis and DeepMind, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with him and his inner circle as well as detractors and rivals at other companies. The result is a revelation-packed portrait of a singular mind and a historic reckoning with the AI revolution, a shift potentially more significant than any since the dawn of complex thought 70,000 years ago.

As Mallaby chronicles, DeepMind is locked in an arms race with Silicon Valley competitors to build artificial general intelligence, and thereby become the keeper of humanity’s future. Yet this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis has remained in Britain, and unlike his rivals, his aims are not wealth and power but scientific enlightenment. Like them, however, he is haunted by the memory of Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atom bomb. He aims to control the technology, but the technology may ultimately control him – and humanity writ large.

‘Fascinating, gripping, vividly detailed, this is a wonderful book full of unforgettable lives.’ Kate Williams, author of Becoming Queen

French women have always had so much more to say than ‘let them eat cake’! Whether kicking the English out of Orléans, marching on Versailles or running messages for the French resistance, their stories of courage, creativity and genius have long defined French history.

Unveiling the lives of twenty-one women who changed the course of French history, Katherine Pangonis spins a new history of France from the fifth century to the present day.

Trace the rise of Eleanor of Aquitaine from teenage bride to the most powerful woman in medieval Europe; follow Berthe Morisot as she infiltrates art’s biggest boy’s club – the Impressionists; and discover how two of the twentieth century’s great fashion icons – Coco Chanel and Josephine Baker – found themselves spying for opposite sides during World War Two. Meet lesser known (yet no less influential) figures like  Christine de Pizan, a medieval proto-feminist, and Paulette Nardal, who took Paris’s overwhelmingly white, male literary establishment by storm. Fresh, funny and unapologetically feminist, A History of France in 21 Women reveals France as never before.

To achieve this, says Adrian Woolfson – founder of the genome writing company Genyro – we must transform biology into a predictive, programmable engineering material. That means decoding the generative grammar of DNA: the language of life itself. It may then be possible to author genomes – and, if we choose, even rewrite our own.

We are at the cusp of a technological revolution, driven by the convergence of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. Currently at the scribbling phase – writing the genomes of viruses, bacteria and yeast – we will eventually author the genomes of extinct and never-before-realised species. Life will become computable, detached from its past, and no longer bound by Darwinian evolution.

While offering extraordinary opportunities, this power also carries great risk and it is vital for everyone to understand what the future might hold. Genome writing can help preserve the planet, but may also undermine human nature and disrupt ecosystems. In this bold and visionary account, Woolfson provides a guide to how this might all be achieved and how we should navigate this astonishing new world, offering a moral compass to help us do so safely, wisely and ethically.

‘Nothing short of a literary miracle… I loved it.’ – Abi Morgan (OBE), screenwriter and author of This is Not a Pity Memoir

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It’s the sleepover from hell that no one prepared you for. The doctors have gone to medical school, the nurses have gone to uni – but what about the patients?

Be Patient is a warm, darkly comic account of Tilly’s desperate search for a diagnosis, against the backdrop of a hilariously funny, heartfelt and, at times, shocking insight into patient life.

A ‘medical mystery’ for over 20 years, Tilly has spent a lifetime navigating GP waiting rooms, A&E departments and hospital wards. She has been given a front row seat watching humanity at its worst (or its best, depending on how you look at it). Along the way, she has become highly qualified at two things: being a patient and being very patient.

Now, she is shining a bright hospital strip light onto a space that none of us want to occupy but one we know, with some certainty, that we will. Complete with ‘survival tips’ and fuelled with humour (the best medicine of all), Be Patient is an extraordinary memoir on resilience, hope and finding strength in the face of adversity.