True stories of heroism, endurance & survival

  • Challenger

    £10.99

    On the morning of the 28th of January 1986, just 73 seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Like the assassination of JFK, the disaster is a defining moment in 20th century history – one that forever changed the way America thought of itself and its optimistic view of the future. Based on extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting, this book follows a handful of central protagonists – including each of the seven members of the doomed crew – through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself and into the investigation that followed.

  • Operation Pimento

    £22.00

    On 14 August 1943, Adam Hart’s great-grandfather Frank Griffiths took off from RAF Tempsford, the SOE ‘Special Duties’ airbase in rural England. Frank and his crew were on a secret midnight mission codenamed Operation Pimento, but they were shot down near Annecy in southeast France. Only Frank survived. Though seriously injured, Frank felt it was his duty to get back to England to continue the fight against the Nazis. He embarked on a perilous, 1200-mile, 108-day escape across Europe, via the attic of a brothel, a Frenchwoman’s chimney and a Spanish prison cell. 79 years later, Frank’s 22-year-old great-grandson Adam Hart retraced the epic escape through France, Switzerland and Spain. His emotional encounters with descendants of people who’d risked their lives to help his great-grandfather reveal the enduring legacy of Operation Pimento and how we should never forget their sacrifice.

  • The Spy in the Archive

    £25.00

    The compulsively readable new book from The Rest is Classified host Gordon Corera. About how one man – Vasili Mitrokhin – turned first disaffected dissident and then traitor to the KGB, stealing the most secret Soviet archives and smuggling them to the West.

  • Knife

    £10.99

    Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12th, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. ‘Knife’ is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art – and finding the strength to stand up again.

  • Lest we forget

    £22.00

    A monumental new history of British conflict, publishing for the eightieth anniversary of VE Day

    ‘An impressive audit of the monuments all around us and their often forgotten back-stories. A hundred individual histories, skillfully assembled, built into a poignant meditation on why they still matter.’ David Olusoga

  • The convoy

    £18.99

    Prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s harrowing, urgent memoir documents and reconstructs her escape, at the age of fifteen, from the Rwandan massacres of 1994, in which 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered.

  • Looking at women, looking at war

    £20.00

    WITH A FOREWORD FROM MARGARET ATWOOD

    ‘This book would always have been important evidence that the Ukraine people were suffering criminal attack. Written by a poet, it is also a work of literature, published after the author lost her life doing her research. It is an icon of a young woman’s heroism’ Philippa Gregory

  • Every man for himself and God against all

    £10.99

    Werner Herzog is the undisputed master of extreme cinema: building an opera house in the middle of the jungle; walking from Munich to Paris in the dead of winter; descending into an active volcano; living in the wilderness among grizzly bears – he has always been intrigued by the extremes of human experience. From his early movies to his later documentaries, he has made a career out of exploring the boundaries of human endurance: what we are capable of in exceptional circumstances and what these situations reveal about who we really are. During the making of his films, Herzog pushed himself and others to the limits, often putting himself in life-threatening situations. As a child in rural Bavaria, a single loaf of bread had to last his family all week. The hunger and deprivation he experienced during his early years perhaps explain his fascination with the limits of physical endurance.

  • Chernobyl roulette

    £25.00

    On 24th February 2022, the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, armoured vehicles approached the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. It was the most direct way for them to reach the capital – and an extraordinarily reckless plan after the disaster that had taken place there three decades earlier. Russian occupation of the plant had begun. It would last thirty-five days.Closely reported and narrated from multiple perspectives, this is the story of the Ukrainians who were held hostage and worked shifts for weeks instead of days to spare the world a new nuclear accident. We meet Valentyn Heiko, the foreman who had also been there for the clean-up of the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and turned sixty during the occupation; plant workers who found a way to celebrate International Women’s Day despite all odds; and many others.

  • The forgers

    £10.99

    Between 1940 and 1943, a group of Polish diplomats in Switzerland engaged in a wholly remarkable – and until now, completely unknown – humanitarian operation. In concert with Jewish activists, they masterminded a systematic programme of forging passports and identity documents for Latin American countries, which were then smuggled into German-occupied Europe to save the lives of thousands of Jews facing extermination in the Holocaust. ‘The Forgers’ tells this extraordinary story.

  • Challenger

    £25.00

    On the morning of the 28th of January 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Like the assassination of JFK, the disaster is a defining moment in 20th century history – one that forever changed the way America thought of itself and its optimistic view of the future. Based on extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting, this book follows a handful of central protagonists – including each of the seven members of the doomed crew – through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself and into the investigation that followed.

  • Hitler, Stalin, mum and dad

    £10.99

    THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

    A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

    Winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2023

    ‘Epic, moving and important’ ROBERT HARRIS

Nomad Books