Dually armed with military and strategic prowess, the Wagner Group created a new market in a vast geopolitical landscape increasingly receptive to the promises of private actors. In this trailblazing account of the Group’s origins and operations, John Lechner—the only journalist to report across its many warzones—brings us on the ground to witness Wagner partner with fragile nation states, score access to natural resources, oust peacekeeping missions, and cash in on conflicts reframed as Kremlin interests.

David Enrich, the New York Times Business Investigations Editor and the #1 bestselling author of Dark Towers, produces his most consequential and far-reaching investigation yet: an in-depth exposé of the broad campaign—orchestrated by elite Americans—to silence dissent and protect the powerful.

Everyone knows about the Cambridge Spies from the fifties, identified and broken up after passing national secrets to the Soviets for years. But no spy ring was ever unearthed at Oxford. Because one never existed? Or because it was never found...?

More than a century ago, the new Bolshevik government began sending Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to pose as foreign aristocrats, merchants, and students. Over time, this grew into the most ambitious espionage program in history. Many intelligence agencies use undercover operatives, but the KGB was the only one to go to such lengths, spending years training its spies in language and etiquette, and sending them abroad on missions that could last for decades. These spies were known as “illegals.”

From Tim Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, an urgent and gripping account of the 75-year battle between the US and Russia that led to the election and impeachment of an American president.

We think of the FBI as America’s police force. But secret intelligence is the Bureau’s first and foremost mission. Enemies is the story of how presidents have used the FBI as the most formidable intelligence force in American history. This is the first definitive history of the FBI’s secret intelligence operations, from an author whose work on the Pentagon and the CIA won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The Coming Storm is a bracing, powerful book on the interventions necessary to prevent a cataclysm akin to the First World War, which left 40 million dead and wounded worldwide. As Westad writes, “If there are lessons from history, now is the time when we need to heed them, so that we do not end up in another Great Power war because of the fatal combinations of jingoism, fear, fatalism, and sheer stupidity that set off the first major war of the 20th century.”

In June 1944, an Allied army of British, American, and Canadian troops sought to open up a Second Front in Normandy. But they were not only fighting to bring the Second World War to an end. After decades of Anglo-American struggle for dominance, they were also contending with one another—to determine who would ascend to global hegemony once Hitler's armies fell. Marc Milner traces this bitter rivalry as it emerged after the First World War and evolved during the fragile peace which led to the Second.

From one of the greatest foreign correspondents of our time, whose essential and profound on the ground reporting from Afghanistan for The New Yorker from before 9/11 to the return of the Taliban to power in 2021 has definitively shaped our understanding of the country and its fate, comes the complete accounting of that era, combining previously published dispatches and new reporting into a narrative of great impact and lasting value.

This engrossing history of the Revolutionary War conclusively shows that those caught up in it believed they had nothing to lose by fighting without regard for the rules of so-called “civilized warfare.” The clarion call to arms “Liberty or Death” was far more than just rhetoric. At its grimmest level, it was a conflict in which military restraint was more the exception than the rule, a struggle in which combatants believed their very existence was in question.

A major new history that transforms our understanding of World War II—tracing the conflict and its most infamous crime, the Holocaust, to Germany’s implacable hostility towards Soviet Russia.

Opening the Gates of Hell is based on over a decade’s research in archives and sites across Europe. It is a ground-breaking examination of the start of the Nazi–Soviet conflict, a narrative history not just of the fighting, but also the impact on civilians, the atrocities committed by both sides and ethnic cleansing carried out by the inhabitants of the regions invaded. This fascinating history tells the stories of bravery, cowardice, misery and horror through the eyes of those who were there including ordinary soldiers, generals, leaders, politicians and civilians on both sides.

For centuries, Britain has told itself and the world that it is an abolitionist nation, one that, unlike the United States, rejected human bondage and dismantled its Atlantic slave empire without tearing itself apart in violence. An abolitionist nation headed by a just, humane monarch who liberated enslaved Africans and recognized their descendants as free and equal subjects of the British Crown. As Prince William put it recently, “We’re very much not a racist family.” When slaveholding nations write their collective history, the enslavers hold the pen.

In May 1945 and then again in August and early September, the seemingly endless World War II finally came to a close in eight dramatic surrender ceremonies, six in Europe and the last two in Japan. On the 80th anniversary of those historic moments, celebrated historians James Holland and Al Murray chronicle these momentous events in turn, focusing especially on the human dramas behind each surrender and relating stories and perspectives on the end of the war that have not previously been told.

The Undiscovered Country strips away the layers of myth to reveal the true story of the American West. From the forests of Pennsylvania and Kentucky to the snow-crested California Sierras, and from the harsh deserts of the Southwest to the buffalo range of the Great Plains, Paul Andrew Hutton masterfully chronicles a story that defined America and its people. From Braddock’s 1755 defeat to the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, he unfolds a grand narrative steeped in romantic impulses and tragic consequences.

The Sword of Freedom has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

This is the book the CIA does not want you to read. For the last 60 years, the CIA has maintained a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, never disclosing its blunders to the American public. It spun its own truth to the nation while reality lay buried in classified archives. Now, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Tim Weiner offers a stunning indictment of the CIA, a deeply flawed organization that has never deserved America's confidence.

On a cold day in early January 1864, Robert E. Lee wrote to Confederate president Jefferson Davis "The time is at hand when, if an attempt can be made to capture the enemy's forces at New Berne, it should be done." Over the next few months, Lee's dispatch would precipitate a momentous series of events as the Confederates, threatened by a supply crisis and an emerging peace movement, sought to seize Federal bases in eastern North Carolina.

Tim Queeney is a sailor who knows more about rope and its importance to humankind than most. In Rope, Queeney takes listeners on a ride through the history of rope and the way it weaves itself through the story of civilization. From Magellan's world-circling ships, to the fifteenth-century fleet of Admiral Zheng He, to Polynesian multihulls with crab claw sails, he shows how without rope, none of their adventurous voyages and discoveries would have been possible.

California's 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the "instant city" of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state's vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional "city."