But exactly who is the man in the bunker?'MASTER OF THE WARTIME SPY THRILLER' - FINANCIAL TIMES________________Germany, late summer 1945 - The war is over but the country is in ruins. Millions of refugees and holocaust survivors strive to rebuild their lives in displaced persons camps. Millions of German soldiers and SS men are held captive in primitive conditions in open-air detention centres. Everywhere, civilians are desperate for food and shelter. No one admits to having voted Nazi, yet many are unrepentant.Adolf Hitler is said to have killed himself in his Berlin bunker. But no body was found - and many people believe he is alive. Newspapers are full of stories reporting sightings and theories. Even Stalin, whose own troops captured the bunker, has told President Truman he believes the former Führer is not dead. Day by day, American and British intelligence officers subject senior members of the Nazi regime to gruelling interrogation in their quest for their truth.Enter Tom Wilde - the Cambridge professor and spy sent in to find out the truth...Dramatic, intelligent, and brilliantly compelling, THE MAN IN THE BUNKER is Rory's best WWII thriller yet - perfect for readers of Robert Harris, C J Sansom and Joseph Kanon.

    The gay Vienna of her youth had disappeared – vanished as utterly as if it had never existed.”Vienna 1938: Austria’s leading couturier, Christina Lehmann, sits at the pinnacle of Viennese society. Her lover, the renowned painter, Max Hauser, is at the height of his career. But Max harbours a secret, and it is only a matter of time before the Gestapo finds out. The situation takes a dramatic turn on Kristallnacht, when the pogrom against the Austrian Jews escalates and one of Christina’s Jewish seamstresses is brutally murdered.In order to protect both Max and her couture house, Christina begins a double life, plunging her into the shadowy world of Nazi oppression, fear, and mistrust fuelled by ancient hatreds.As Vienna descends into chaos, hunger and disillusionment, will her deception be enough to save Max – or will it end in tragedy?Based on actual events, this is an epic story of courage and resilience. It is the kind of book that wraps around your soul and leaves an impression.“Brilliant and moving, The Viennese Dressmaker is a compelling and vivid portrait of wartime Vienna; a story of human relationships, and the will to survive under the shadow of the most evil power the world has ever known.” –JJ Toner, author of The Black Orchestra"Filled with suspense from the first chapter to last, The Viennese Dressmaker is a nail-biting story masterfully crafted to show the oppressive reality of life in Vienna during the dark days of WWII. I feared for Christina at every turn as she confronted threats and dangers lurking in every corner to help the victims and those she loved. For WWII resistance fiction fans, Gauci never disappoints.” — Alexa Kang, USA Today bestselling author of the Rose of Anzio series.“Triumphs, defeats, and loss. Kathryn Gauci’s characters bleed from the pages in this perfectly paced novel set in Vienna. This great historical novel transported me to Austria and allowed me to see, smell and feel the streets beneath my feet as I walked alongside the characters.” – Jana Petken, the #I bestselling author of “The German Half-Bloods Trilogy.”“With The Viennese Dressmaker, Kathryn has once again created a page-turning story based on well-researched historical detail. Searing and heart-breaking, Christina’s story will stay with you long after you finish the final page. I loved it.” – Eoin Dempsey, bestselling author of White Rose, Black Forest and The Longest Echo.“The Viennese Dressmaker is a WWII novel in all the best traditions of the genre. Deeply touching and captivating, this is a power tale of courage and self-sacrifice under the pressure of unrelenting terror. The brilliantly portrayed characters, breathtaking twists of fate, and a surprise ending will take you on a journey you won’t soon forget.” – Marina Osipova, multi-award-winning historical fiction author of How Dare the Birds Sing.

    Two manuscripts are found in rubble, each one narrating conflicting versions of the life of an Irish spy during the war.One of them is the journal of a German military intelligence officer and an anti-Nazi cowed into silence named Adrian de Groot, charting his relationship with his agent, friend, and sometimes lover, an Irishman named Frank Pike. In De Groot's narrative, Pike is a charismatic IRA fighter sprung from prison in Spain to assist with the planned German invasion of Britain, but who never gets the chance to consummate his deal with the devil.Meanwhile, the other manuscript gives a very different account of the Irishman's doings in the Reich. Assuming the alter ego of the Celtic hero Finn McCool, Pike appears here as the ultimate Allied saboteur. His mission: an assassination campaign of high-ranking Nazi doctors, culminating in the killing of Hitler's personal physician.The two manuscripts spiral around each other, leaving only the reader to know the full truth of Pike and De Groot's relationship, their ultimate loyalties, and their efforts to resist the fascist reality in which they are caught.

    Matthew Passion.In 1727, Stefan Silbermann is a grief-stricken thirteen-year-old, struggling with the death of his mother and his removal to a school in distant Leipzig. Despite his father's insistence that he try not to think of his mother too much, Stefan is haunted by her absence, and, to make matters worse, he's bullied by his new classmates. But when the school's cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach, takes notice of his new pupil's beautiful singing voice and draws him from the choir to be a soloist, Stefan's life is permanently changed.Over the course of the next several months, and under Bach's careful tutelage, Stefan's musical skill progresses, and he is allowed to work as a copyist for Bach's many musical works. But mainly, drawn into Bach's family life and away from the cruelty in the dorms and the lonely hours of his mourning, Stefan begins to feel at home. When another tragedy strikes, this time in the Bach family, Stefan bears witness to the depths of grief, the horrors of death, the solace of religion, and the beauty that can spring from even the most profound losses.Joyous, revelatory, and deeply moving, The Great Passion is an imaginative tour de force that tells the story of what it was like to sing, play, and hear Bach's music for the very first time.

    but who is determined to escape to freedom.Twelve-year-old Sophie has spent her entire life behind the Berlin Wall, guarded by land mines, towers, and attack dogs. A science lover, Sophie dreams of becoming an inventor... even though that's not likely on her side of the Wall, where the Stasi, the secret police, are always watching.Though she tries to avoid their notice, when her beloved neighbor is arrested, Sophie is called to her principal's office. There, a young Stasi officer asks Sophie if she'll spy on her neighbor as an informant once she is released. Sophie doesn't want to agree, but in reality has no choice: The Stasi threaten that her mother, who has a disability from post-polio syndrome, could be taken to an institution if Sophie does not comply.Sophie is backed into a corner, until she learns secrets about her family on the other side of the Wall. This could be what she needs to attempt an escape with her mother to freedom -- if she can invent her way out.

    

    The view from this apartment window offers a ringside seat onto the city's theatre of action. The building has stood on the banks of the Landwehr Canal in central Berlin since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma. When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell - a British-American art critic, adrift, in her mid-forties - becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. She came to Berlin in 2001, and moved into this house in 2014 with her then-husband and two sons. But before her was Herr Zimmermann, the wood-dealer who built the house, and the Salas, a family of printers who took it over in 1908, and lived here through both world wars. Their adopted daughter Melitta Sala, a Kriegskind or 'child of the war', inherited the building and takes hold of her imagination. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, it is Kirtsy Bell's turn to look out of this apartment window. She looks to the lives of the house's various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city's familiar narratives. Humane, thought-provoking and moving, The Undercurrents is a hybrid literary portrait of a place that makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities and our histories.

    In Karl Lagerfeld: A Life in Fashion, journalist Alfons Kaiser, who knew Lagerfeld personally for many years, introduces readers to the public and private life of the charismatic fashion designer. Kaiser explores the many eras of Lagerfeld's life: the youthful outsider in the north German flatlands; the urbane genius in Paris; the tireless draftsman; the enthusiastic photographer; the passionate book collector; and the disciplined Prussian workaholic. What is behind this larger-than-life figure who, despite a massively public persona, kept his own life story a secret? Drawing from many previously untapped sources, this biography investigates the man behind the persona: the precocious boy who preferred to draw in the attic than play with his peers; the son who quarreled with his parents but never got away from them; Yves Saint Laurent's competitor, whom he outshone in the end; the brother, uncle, friend—and finally the partner of Jacques de Bascher, the great love of his life.

    Yet the history of the Holocaust extends beyond those notorious sites. In the former territory of Transnistria, located in occupied Soviet Ukraine and governed by Nazi Germany’s Romanian allies, many Jews perished due to disease, starvation, and other horrific conditions. Through an intimate blending of memoir, history, and reportage, So They Remember illuminates this oft-overlooked chapter of the Holocaust. In December 1941, with the German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in its sixth month, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy named Motl Braverman, along with family members, was uprooted from his Ukrainian hometown and herded to the remote village of Pechera, the site of a Romanian death camp. Author Maksim Goldenshteyn, the grandson of Motl, first learned of his family’s wartime experiences in 2012. Through tireless research, Goldenshteyn spent years unraveling the story of Motl, his family members, and their fellow prisoners. The author here renders their story through the eyes of Motl and other children, who decades later would bear witness to the traumas they suffered. Until now, Romanian historians and survivors have served as almost the only chroniclers of the Holocaust in Transnistria. Goldenshteyn’s account, based on interviews with Soviet-born relatives and other survivors, archival documents, and memoirs, is among the first full-length books to spotlight the Pechera camp, ominously known by its prisoners as Mertvaya Petlya, or the “Death Noose.” Unfortunately, as the author explains, the Pechera camp was only one of some two hundred concentration sites spread across Transnistria, where local Ukrainian policemen often conspired with Romanian guards to brutalize the prisoners. In March 1944, the Red Army liberated Motl’s family and fellow captives. Yet for decades, according to the author, they were silenced by Soviet policies enacted to erase all memory of Jewish wartime suffering. So They Remember gives voice to this long-repressed history and documents how the events at Pechera and other surrounding camps and ghettos would continue to shape remaining survivors and their descendants.

    Berlin is a shape-shifting city that continues to fascinate and its 20th century history is the fascinating backdrop - from the underground cabaret culture, to rise of the Nazis, the radical left wing, to the falling of the Wall, and its re-emergence as a city of artists.