New Releases

Together with his own life-changing encounters with animals around the world, Martin has celebrated the intelligence, loyalty, and companionship of some truly extraordinary creatures whose lives have been entwined with our own. By turns heart-warming, inspiring and always fascinating, Meetings With Remarkable Animals gives us a chance to meet them too.

Sir Nicholas Winton rescued 669 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia at the brink of World War II. Most never saw their parents again. This is his story.

In August 1944, the most successful POW escape of the Second World War took place—106 Allied prisoners were freed from a camp in Maribor, in present-day Slovenia. The escape was organized not by officers, but by two ordinary soldiers: Australian Ralph Churches (a bank clerk before the war) and Londoner Les Laws (a jazz pianist by profession), with the help of intelligence officer Franklin Lindsay. The American was on a mission to work with the partisans who moved like ghosts through the Alps, ambushing and evading Nazi forces.

Lidia was just three years old when she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother, grandparents and foster brother. They were from Belarus, their ‘crime’ that they supported the partisan resistance to Nazi occupation. Lidia was picked by Dr Josef Mengele for his experiments and sent to the children’s block where she survived eighteen months of hell. Injected with infectious diseases, desperately malnourished, she came close to death. Her mother - who risked her life to secretly visit Lidia - was her only tie to humanity.

On 11 June 2011, three days short of his sixth-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban suffered a stroke which left him unable to use the right side of his body, wheelchair-bound in a rehab facility and endlessly frustrated by his newfound physical limitations. As he resisted the overbearing ministrations of the nurses helping him along the road to recovery, Raban began to reflect not only on the measure of his own life but the extraordinary story of his parents’ early marriage, conducted for three years by letter while his father fought in the Second World War.

Malka was three when the German invaders forced her family into the Jewish ghetto in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, a city in present-day Ukraine. Her father was killed in the first pogrom, but before he died he said to her mother Rivka: ‘save the children’. And despite her heartbreak, that is what she set out to do. Rivka kept Malka and her two older brothers alive through eighteen traumatic months, as the ghetto got smaller and smaller. They saw the worst of humanity but there were acts of kindness too.

Charles de Gaulle stands among the greatest statesmen in history. Even after the official French government collapsed under the weight of Nazi Germany, de Gaulle refused to accept defeat. He and his followers were pushed into exile, but still they fought on, never losing sight of an eventual victory over their oppressors. This book delves into Charles de Gaulle’s extraordinary journey—from leading the Free French forces during World War II to playing a key role in the rebuilding of postwar France.

In June 1940, a covert new force - the Special Operations Executive (SOE) - was set up to wage a secret war. Its agents were tasked with sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines, and over the course of the next five years, 470 special agents would be sent into France. Only 25 female SOE agents would return. None before have told their story in their own words.

“Don’t cry darling. We need this baby. You will see.” With these words from her husband, Zoltán, Ibolya Rechnitzer’s fear of being pregnant during the uncertainty of wartime is somewhat eased. But in November 1942, four months after their baby, Andy, is born, Zoltán is drafted into the forced labour service of the Hungarian army and Ibolya must cope, alone, as a single mother and a Jew facing persecution in Budapest. Her son gives her a reason to fight, and Ibolya protects him fiercely during the war and after, when she must make a crucial decision that will forever alter their lives.