Shortlisted for the 2023 Military History Matters Book of the Year Award The only way to truly understand what it was like to fight in the Second World War is to listen to the experiences of those men who were there. And often, there was nowhere more dangerous than on the ground. In Footsloggers, Peter Hart reconstructs one infantry battalion's war in staggering detail. Based on his interviews with members of the 16th Durham Light Infantry, Hart bears witness not only to their comradeship, suffering, dreadful losses and individual tragedies, but also their courage and self-sacrifice as they fought their way across North Africa, Italy and Greece. This is a human look at the inhuman nature of war from the author of At Close Range and Burning Steel.

Late summer 1941. Louisianas piney woods are engulfed by a tidal wave of soldiers engaged in the largest army maneuvers ever undertaken on American soil. For many of these young men, as well as the isolated Southern communities, life will never be the same. Although no one knows it, our nation will be at war in three months. Elizabeth Reed is a young Louisiana schoolteacher who dislikes soldiers. Harry Miller is a Wisconsin soldier who hates Louisiana. It only makes sense that they should meet and fall in love. Their story begins with a bulletan empty cartridge tossed from a truckload of soldiers. The note inside it will change the destinies of these two young people. In the midst of large-scale battles between the red and blue armies, Harry and Elizabeth are each fighting their own war with dark secrets from their pasts. They have nothing in common except mutual desires to escape these pasts. In spite of clashing at every turn, they run right into each others arms as they jointly learn that the hardest person to forgive is yourself. Within this clash of cultures lies the core message of A Spent Bullet. Rural Louisiana is never the same, and neither are the soldiers who learn about Louisiana mud, mosquitoes, and misery mixed with memorable Southern hospitality. More than a love story, A Spent Bullet recreates a memorable but largely forgotten time in Louisiana and our nations history. Told in the warm and touching style loved by readers of his previous eight books, Curt Iles weaves a story of love, history, and redemption.

On 7 May 1945, Grand Admiral Donitz, named in Hitler's will as head of state, authorised the unconditional surrender of all German forces to the Allies on the following day. World War II in Europe was at an end. But many of the German people would continue to endure hardships, as both the country and the capital were to be divided between France, the UK and the USA in the west and the USSR in the east. East and West Germany, and East and West Berlin, would remain divided until 1989. By October 1990, however, the two countries were reunited, and the Berlin Reichstag was once again the seat of government. Here, politicians would put East and West back together again, marrying a totalitarian, atheist, communist system with a democratic, Christian, capitalist one. How did this marriage affect the everyday life of ordinary Germans? How did combining two telephone systems, two postal services, hospitals, farm land, property, industry, railways and roads work? How were women's rights, welfare, pensions, trades unions, arts, rents and housing affected? There had been no warning of this marriage and no preparation for it - and no country had ever tried putting two completely opposite systems together before. This is the story of what happened, in the words of the people it happened to - the people's story of an incredible unification.

A long-lost French novel in which three soldiers return home from an unpopular, unspeakable war When On Leave was published in Paris in 1957, as France's engagement in Algeria became ever more bloody, it told people things they did not want to hear. It vividly described what it was like for soldiers to return home from an unpopular war in a faraway place. The book received a handful of reviews, it was never reprinted, it disappeared from view. With no outcome to the war in sight, its power to disturb was too much to bear. Through David Bellos's translation, this lost classic has been rediscovered. Spare, forceful, and moving, it describes a week in the lives of a sergeant, a corporal, and an infantryman, each home on leave in Paris. What these soldiers have to say can't be heard, can't even be spoken; they find themselves strangers in their own city, unmoored from their lives. Full of sympathy and feeling, informed by the many hours Daniel Anselme spent talking to conscripts in Paris, On Leave is a timeless evocation of what the history books can never record: the shame and the terror felt by men returning home from war.