British Nonfiction

Margot Asquith was perhaps the most daring and unconventional prime minister's wife in British history. Known for her wit, style, and habit of speaking her mind, she transformed 10 Downing Street into a glittering social and intellectual salon. Yet her last four years at Number 10 were a period of intense emotional and political turmoil in her private and public life.

She slept with the devil. She killed with the devil. She never stopped loving the devil. July 1963: All of England is rocking to the music of Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, and Elvis. It’s also the month when Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, two of England’s most prolific serial killers, would claim their first victim. He was a child they buried in the muddy, swampy moors near Manchester. Sleeping With The Devil: A Shocking True Crime Story of the Most Hated Woman in Britain is the tale of two bloody years in the 1960s. It was a time when British parents hugged their children a little tighter to ...

A stranger telephoned a Liverpool chess club and left an address that did not exist. The next evening, while a husband walked the cold streets looking for it, his wife was beaten to death in their own front parlour. Nobody invented that. There is a court transcript. Britain keeps its horror in filing cabinets. Not in haunted castles, but in police files, inquest records, government documents and yellowing newspapers. This is a collection of thirty-one true stories that sound like fiction and are not — arranged as one story for every night of October, building towards Halloween itself. ...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Discover the global phenomenon that tells an unforgettable story of love, loss, courage, and healing. “Compellingly artful . . . [a] blockbuster memoir.”—The New Yorker (Best Books of the Year) It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it...

THIRD EDITION — Fully Revised, Fact-Checked and Updated to September 2026 The most current edition of Britain's strangest true crime collection — rewritten line by line, with three brand-new cases and every investigation brought up to date. In this expanded Third Edition of 50 Bizarre True Crime Cases That Shocked Britain, Julian Maddox returns to the darkest corners of British criminal history: the killers nobody stopped, the victims nobody believed, and the cold cases that refuse to close. From Dennis Nilsen's drains in Muswell Hill to a Victorian skull unearthed in a Richmond garden ...

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian: a searing study of the British Empire that probes the country's pervasive use of violence throughout the twentieth century and traces how these practices were exported, modified, and institutionalized in colonies around the globe Sprawling across a...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “addictively readable” (The Washington Post) inside story of the British royal family’s battle to overcome the dramas of the Diana years—only to confront new, twenty-first-century crises “Frothy and forthright, a kind of Keeping Up with the Windsors...

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Tender, affecting, wise - a deeply human and uplifting story' CHLOE DALTON 'A moving, vulnerable portrait of love, nature and a life well-lived' RORY STEWART 'A warm, rich, generous book. A pleasure from first page to last.' KATHERINE RUNDELL The long-awaited...

Based on a comprehensive, landmark investigation, this ground-breaking history reveals the true significance of the trade in enslaved Africans in Britain’s development as a modern nation. *ACCOMPANIED BY A MAJOR BBC DOCUMENTARY* They came from a wide range of backgrounds: plumbers as well as...

THE MULTI-MILLION COPY INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING GILLIAN ANDERSON AND JASON ISAACS "Polished, poignant... an inspiring story of true love."—Entertainment Weekly A BEST BOOK OF 2019, NPR's Book Concierge SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK AWARD The true story of a...

Bloomsbury presents The Anarchy by William Dalrymple, read by Sid Sagar. THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2020 LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019 A...

In the summer of 1924, a thirty-one year old Swedish immigrant named Albert Ostman packed an eighty-pound kit into the mountain wilderness above Toba Inlet, British Columbia, looking for a lost gold mine. He was a practical man — a construction worker and logger with more than a decade of backcountry experience and a reputation, in the camps where he worked, for plain dealing and plain speaking. He expected three weeks of solitude and prospecting. What he got was six days of captivity in a hidden mountain valley, held by something that no field guide has ever catalogued and no scientific ...

In a work of extraordinary narrative power, filled with brilliant personalities and vivid scenes of dramatic action, Robert K. Massie, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and Dreadnought, elevates to its proper historical importance the role of sea...

A remarkable audio edition of C.S. Lewis' beloved classic—the only existing recording of Lewis reading his own work. C.S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great...

The wildly engaging new history of the British monarchy from bestselling historian Lucy Worsley. 'Fabulously enjoyable... a great big treat of a book.' SUNDAY TIMES 'Filled with nuggets of historical delights... highly readable and thoughtfully curated.' DAILY MAIL 'A glorious, glorious book...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER This “excellent, all-embracing” (The New York Times) biography of Queen Elizabeth II is a magisterial study of the woman known only from a distance—and a captivating window into her decades-long reign. From the moment of her ascension to the throne in 1952 at...

The #1 Sunday Times bestseller Named a best book of the year by Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, and Kirkus Reviews “One of the best books on politics our era will see . . . A book of astonishing literary quality.” —Matthew Parris, The TLS “[Rory Stewart] walked across Asia, served...

A stunning narrative from one of the most powerful young writers at work today, and the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary, Sugarcane, We Survived the Night interweaves oral history with hard-hitting journalism and a deeply personal father-son journey into a searing portrait of...

The Histories Of All The Canadian Provinces In One Blockbuster Volume Canada is not one story. It is ten provinces and three territories, each with its own ancient landscapes, founding peoples, contested histories, and hard-won identities. In this landmark work, Daniel Hardy brings them all together for the first time — a sweeping, authoritative account of how a nation was made, one province at a time. From the windswept headlands of Newfoundland, where rock two billion years old meets the ghost of a Viking settlement, to the river valleys of Prince Edward Island, the industrial ...