In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped Europe, seeking safety in British Mandatory Palestine. By 1942, horrifying reports began to spread about industrialised killing centres in Poland and a chilling campaign to exterminate Europe’s entire Jewish population. When it became clear that the Allies were unwilling to spare any forces from the war effort to save civilians, the Jewish community in Palestine came up with a daring plan.

Working with British Military Intelligence, an elite unit of young Jewish paratroopers volunteered to return to eastern Europe. Once behind enemy lines, they would use their expertise in the local languages and terrain to rescue thousands of downed Allied pilots and escaped POWs. At the same time, these volunteer commandos would help Jewish civilians escape deportation to death camps or take up arms in resistance against the Nazis. Hannah Senesh was one of only three female paratroopers who risked everything to infiltrate occupied Europe.

In 1939, at just eighteen years old, Hannah emigrated from Hungary to British Mandatory Palestine, where she dreamed of being a poet and a schoolteacher. Instead, she became a poet and a paratrooper. Five years after fleeing Europe, Hannah parachuted back into occupied territory as a freedom fighter with the most crucial role in her team: the wireless operator tasked with sending and deciphering top secret British radio codes. Though captured after crossing the border into Hungary, she refused to give up her radio codes or any information about her mission, despite enduring months of torture. Her final act of defiance – choosing to die before a firing squad rather than beg for clemency – cemented her legendary status as the ‘Jewish Joan of Arc’, and her posthumously published poems, translated into more than twenty languages, continue to inspire new generations of readers.

More than just a gripping historical account of Hannah’s life and afterlife, Crash of the Heavens offers a powerful reminder of the human spirit’s ability to shine, even in the darkest of times.

In eleventh-century Scotland, feral wolf-child Wulva is brought up by witches and then sent to live at a Scottish castle, where she falls under the spell of cruel, ambitious Lord Macbeth.

Three hundred years later, gentle Brother Rowan goes on a strange and perilous journey to a remote and ancient monastery to write a history of the Scottish king-line.

Misfits in their own time, seekers after truth, Wulva and Rowan are deeply connected despite the centuries that separate them.

Hagtale explores the power of stories lost and found, their transformative potential, and who gets to be the owner of the tale

Dr Kate Marvel is a renowned climate scientist and researcher whose work on climate change led her to grapple with strong, complicated emotions. Initially, she resisted those feelings, afraid they would interfere with her objective scientific judgement. But over time she realised that there is no one way to think – or feel – about climate change. To live on and care for our changing planet, we need to embrace the full spectrum of human emotion.

As Marvel argues, we need every emotion we can muster if we’re going to counter the usual myopic perspectives on climate change and care enough to make better decisions. And this book is a dazzling call to care.

In Human Nature, each chapter uses a different emotion to illustrate the science behind our changing climate. We feel the wonder of being able to use climate models to predict the future. We feel anger at those who have knowingly destroyed the planet for profit. We feel love for our beautiful Earth, the only good planet. With Marvel as our guide, we get to feel it all – and we can begin to turn our strong feelings into strong action.

Human Nature is a remarkable, hopeful look at climate science that prioritises feelings – and in doing so charts a path forward for life together.

For decades after World War II, histories of the French Resistance were written almost exclusively by men and largely ignored the contributions of women. Many current overviews of the subject continue to underplay the extent and importance of women’s participation in the Resistance, treating the subject, in the words of one historian, as ‘an anonymous background element in an essentially male story’.

The Sisterhood of Ravensbru ¨ck corrects that omission, surveying the bond between four women – Germaine Tillion, Anise Girard, Genevieve de Gaulle, and Jacqueline d’Alincourt – who fought valiantly against Nazi oppression. While the women belonged to different Resistance movements and networks, they were united by a common thread: they were arrested by the Gestapo, underwent merciless interrogations and beatings, were jailed – and, most significantly, survived, if just barely, the hell of Ravensbru ¨ck, the only concentration camp designed specifically for women. In an institution designed to dehumanise and kill, the sisterhood maintained their sense of self and joined together to face down death.

Remarkably, in the aftermath of World War II, the women once again joined forces to find a way to transcend the horrors of the war and turn it into something good for themselves and the world. The Sisterhood of Ravensbru ¨ck is an illuminating, inspiring account.

Remember the books that shaped your childhood, sparked your imagination, and ignited a lifelong love of reading? In The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation, some of the world’s most beloved authors share their own transformative reading experiences – the books and stories that set them on the path of becoming the readers and writers they are today.

Following the success of its first edition, The Gifts of Reading, this heartwarming collection of essays is a testament to the enduring power of books. By exploring the stories that shaped them, our authors provide a powerful guide to fostering a love of reading in the children and young people in your life.

With contributions from Tristan Bancks, William Boyd, Shankari Chandran, Horatio Clare, Nicola Davies, Imtiaz Dharker, Ursula Dubosarsky, Maisie Fieschi, Pico Iyer, Wayne Karlin, Colum McCann, JohnMichael McCann, Ann Morgan, Sir Michael Morpurgo, Dina Nayeri, Matt Ottley, Nguy?n Phan Qu? Mai, Alice Pung, Diana Reid, Nilanjana Roy, Nikesh Shukla, Nardi Simpson, Madeleine Thien, Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and John Wood, and an afterword by Julia Eccleshare.

All royalties generously donated to the two organisations founded by John Wood, Room to Read, and U-Go, promoting literacy and education for girls and young women.

An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination.

Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognises Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth?

In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatised man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest works of literature can achieve.

When Gareth Gore was dispatched to report on the sudden collapse of Banco Popular, he uncovered one of the most brazen cases of corporate pillaging in history, perpetrated by a group of men sworn to celibacy and self-flagellation.

Drawing on unparalleled access to bank records, insider accounts, and exclusive interviews with whistleblowers from within Opus Dei, Gore reveals how money from the bank was used to lure unsuspecting recruits – some of them only children – into a life of servitude. He also tracks the ascent of Opus Dei around the globe, exposing its role in bankrolling many right-wing causes, including the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Our gut is as important as our brain or heart, yet we know very little about how it works and many of us are too embarrassed to ask questions.

In Gut, Giulia Enders breaks this taboo, revealing the latest science on how much our digestive system has to offer.

From our miraculous gut bacteria – which can play a part in obesity, allergies, depression and even Alzheimer’s – to the best position to poo, this entertaining and informative health handbook shows that we can all benefit from getting to know the wondrous world of our inner workings.

In Monsterland, award-winning author Nicholas Jubber goes on a journey to discover more about the monsters we’ve invented, lurking in the dark and the wild places of the earth – giants, dragons, ogres, zombies, ghosts, demons – all with one thing in common: their ability to terrify.

His far-ranging adventure takes him across the world. He sits on the thrones of giants in Cornwall, visits the shrine of a beheaded ogre near Kyoto, travels to an eighteenth-century Balkan vampire’s forest dwelling, and paddles among the shapeshifters of the Louisiana bayous. On his travels, he discovers that the stories of the people and places that birthed them are just as fascinating as the creatures themselves.

Artfully written, Monsterland is a spellbinding interrogation into why we need these monsters and what they can tell us about ourselves – how they bind communities together as much as they cruelly cast away outsiders.