Prisoners of war – The Bell Bookshop

The Glass Mountain

Emma — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The bestselling author of The Ruin of All Witches returns with a gripping, vividly told journey into his family’s wartime past

Malcolm Gaskill knew two things about his great-uncle Ralph’s wartime adventures: he’d been a prisoner in Italy, and he’d cut his way out of a train with a knife and fork. Apart from that, he’d faded into family folklore, lost to view. Until, one hot afternoon in an English country garden, a chance conversation set Gaskill on his uncle’s trail?

What Ralph really did in the war was, he discovers, even more extraordinary than the exaggerations of family myth. From last-ditch fighting in the Libyan desert and incarceration in a Puglian prisoner-of-war camp, to desperate, dramatic escapes and the assuming of an entirely new identity among the peasants and partisans of the Italian Alps, Gaskill traces a life transformed by conflict, while lifting the curtain on a long-forgotten episode of the Second World War.

Yet The Glass Mountain is about more than war: it’s a haunting exploration of what it means to encounter the past, and how we remember, forget and recover it. As he follows his uncle’s path through dusty archives and the landscapes, towns and villages of present-day Italy, Gaskill finds himself confronted by questions that go to the heart of how we think about the people who came before us: Why do stories matter? How much of the past can ever be true?

The narrow road to the deep north

Emma — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.

In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.

*WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014*

‘An unforgettable story of men at war’ The Times

This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war – each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.

Colditz

Emma — Thu, 25 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER – AND PERFECT GIFT FOR HISTORY BUFFS!

‘A master at setting the pulse racing’ Daily Mail
‘A fine feat of storytelling . . . will surely become the last word on the subject’ Telegraph
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FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SAS: ROGUE HEROES

Colditz Castle: a forbidding Gothic tower on a hill in Nazi Germany. You may have heard about the prisoners and their daring and desperate attempts to escape, but that’s only part of the real story.

In Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre takes us inside the walls of the most infamous prison in history to meet the real men behind the legends. Heroes and bullies, lovers and spies, captors and prisoners living cheek-by-jowl for years in a thrilling game of cat and mouse – and all determined to escape by any means necessary.

Deeply researched and full of incredible stories, this is a tale of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances – and will change how you think about Colditz forever.
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‘Like watching a black-and-white photograph being colourised’ Spectator
‘Every Ben Macintyre book is a treat’ The Tablet

Sunday Times bestseller, November 2022

The Greatest Escape

Emma — Thu, 18 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The gripping, vividly told story of the largest prisoner of war escape in of the Second World War – organized by an Australian bank clerk, a British jazz pianist and an American spy.

In August 1944, the most successful POW escape of the Second World War took place – 106 Allied prisoners were freed from a camp in Maribor, in present-day Slovenia. The escape was organized not by officers, but by two ordinary soldiers: Australian Ralph Churches (a bank clerk before the war) and Londoner Les Laws (a jazz pianist by profession), with the help of U.S. intelligence officer Franklin Lindsay. The American was on a mission to work with the partisans: a group who moved like ghosts through the Alps, ambushing and evading Nazi forces.

Told here for the first time is the story of how these three men came together – along with the partisans – to plan and execute the escape is told here for the first time. The Greatest Escape, written by Ralph Churches’ son Neil, takes us from Ralph and Les’s capture in Greece in 1941 and their brutal journey to Maribor, with many POWs dying along the way, to the horror of seeing Russian prisoners starved to death in the camp. The book uncovers the hidden story of Allied intelligence operations in Slovenia, and shows how Ralph became involved. We follow the escapees on a nail-biting 160-mile journey across the Alps, pursued by German soldiers, ambushed and betrayed. And yet, of the 106 men who escaped, 100 made it to safety. Thanks to research across seven countries, The Greatest Escape is no longer a secret.

It is one of the most remarkable adventure stories of the last century.

Free Fall

Emma — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

‘Marvellous.’ A.S. Byatt
‘Astonishing.’ John Gray
‘Luminous.’ Rose Tremain

I could take whichever I would of these paths.

Sammy Mountjoy is an artist who has risen from poverty to see his pictures hung in the Tate Gallery. Swept into World War II, he is captured as a German prisoner of war, threatened with torture and locked in a cell of total darkness. He emerges transfigured by his ordeal, realising how his choices have made him the author of his life, interrogating religion and rationality, early loves and formative beliefs – and questioning freedom itself.

Nagasaki

Emma — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of the most remarkable untold stories of the Second World war. At 11.02 am on an August morning in 1945 America dropped the world’s most powerful atomic bomb on the Japanese port city of Nagasaki. The most European city in Japan was flattened to the ground ‘as if it had been swept aside by a broom’. More than 70,000 Japanese were killed. At the time, hundreds of Allied prisoners of war were working close to the bomb’s detonation point, as forced labourers in the shipyards and foundries of Nagasaki.These men, from the Dales of Yorkshire and the dusty outback of Australia, from the fields of Holland and the remote towns of Texas, had already endured an extraordinary lottery of life and death that had changed their lives forever. They had lived through nearly four years of malnutrition, disease, and brutality. Now their prison home was the target of America’s second atomic bomb.In one of the greatest survival stories of the Second World War, we trace their astonishing experiences back to bloody battles in the Malayan jungle, before the dramatic fall of Fortress Singapore, the mighty symbol of the British Empire. This abject capitulation was followed by surrender in Java and elsewhere in the East, condemning the captives to years of cruel imprisonment by the Japanese. Their lives grew evermore perilous when thousands of prisoners were shipped off to build the infamous Thai-Burma Railway, including the Bridge on the River Kwai. If that was not harsh enough, POWs were then transported to Japan in the overcrowded holds of what were called hell ships. These rusty buckets were regularly sunk by Allied submarines, and thousands of prisoners lived through unimaginable horror, adrift on the ocean for days. Some still had to endure the final supreme test, the world’s second atomic bomb.The prisoners in Nagasaki were eyewitnesses to one of the most significant events in modern history but writing notes or diaries in a Japanese prison camp was dangerous. To avoid detection, one Allied prisoner buried his notes in the grave of a fellow POW to be reclaimed after the war, another wrote his diary in Irish. Now, using unpublished and rarely seen notes, interviews, and memoirs, this unique book weaves together a powerful chorus of voices to paint a vivid picture of defeat, endurance, and survival against astonishing odds.

The Confidence Men

Emma — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during the First World War, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, cunningly join forces. To stave off boredom, Jones makes a handmade Ouija board and holds fake séances for fellow prisoners. One day, an Ottoman official approaches him with a query: could Jones contact the spirits to find a vast treasure rumoured to be buried nearby? Jones, a lawyer, and Hill, a magician, use the Ouija board – and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception-to build a trap for their captors that will lead them to freedom.The Confidence Men is a nonfiction thriller featuring strategy, mortal danger and even high farce – and chronicles a profound but unlikely friendship.

The Greatest Escape

Emma — Thu, 26 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The gripping, vividly told story of the largest POW escape in the Second World War – organized by an Australian bank clerk, a British jazz pianist and an American spy.

In August 1944 the most successful POW escape of the Second World War took place – 106 Allied prisoners were freed from a camp in Maribor, in present-day Slovenia. The escape was organized not by officers, but by two ordinary soldiers: Australian Ralph Churches (a bank clerk before the war) and Londoner Les Laws (a jazz pianist by profession), with the help of intelligence officer Franklin Lindsay. The American was on a mission to work with the partisans who moved like ghosts through the Alps, ambushing and evading Nazi forces.

How these three men came together – along with the partisans – to plan and execute the escape is told here for the first time. The Greatest Escape, written by Ralph Churches’ son Neil, takes us from Ralph and Les’s capture in Greece in 1941 and their brutal journey to Maribor, with many POWs dying along the way, to the horror of seeing Russian prisoners starved to death in the camp. The book uncovers the hidden story of Allied intelligence operations in Slovenia, and shows how Ralph became involved. We follow the escapees on a nail-biting 160-mile journey across the Alps, pursued by German soldiers, ambushed and betrayed. And yet, of the 106 men who escaped, 100 made it to safety. Thanks to research across seven countries, The Greatest Escape is no longer a secret.

It is one of the most remarkable adventure stories of the last century.

The Confidence Men

Emma — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during the First World War, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, cunningly join forces. To stave off boredom, Jones makes a handmade Ouija board and holds fake séances for fellow prisoners. One day, an Ottoman official approaches him with a query: could Jones contact the spirits to find a vast treasure rumoured to be buried nearby? Jones, a lawyer, and Hill, a magician, use the Ouija board – and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception-to build a trap for their captors that will lead them to freedom. The Confidence Men is a nonfiction thriller featuring strategy, mortal danger and even high farce – and chronicles a profound but unlikely friendship.