In a century of unrelenting, bloody warfare and religious persecution in Europe, Cromwell was, in many ways, a product of his times. As commander-in-chief of the army in Ireland, however, the responsibilities for the excesses of the military must be laid firmly at his door, while the harsh nature of the post-war settlement also bears his imprint.

Many people today think of Satan as a little red demon with a pointy tail and a pitchfork—but this vision of the devil developed over many centuries and would be foreign to the writers of the Old Testament, where this figure makes his first appearances. The earliest texts that mention the Satan—it is always “the Satan” in the Old Testament—portray him as an agent of Yahweh, serving as an executioner of evildoers. But over the course of time, the Satan came to be regarded more as God’s enemy than God’s agent and was blamed for a host of problems. Biblical scholar Ryan E. Stokes explains the development of the Satan tradition in the Hebrew scriptures and the writings of early Judaism, describing the interpretive and creative processes that transformed an agent of Yahweh into the archenemy of good. He explores how the idea of a heavenly Satan figure factored into the problem of evil and received the blame for all that is wrong in the world.

Through the mists of time, the last Templar and an Irish nun hunt an ancient, immortal evil. Tormond MacDonald, the last of the Templar Knights, was commissioned as Carnifex Dei, the Executioner of God, at Acre in the 13th century. His sacred mission - family, love, even his brother Templars - to fulfill his sacred vow, and he has pursued the enemy, a trio of witches, through the centuries. But always they elude him. Maebh O Broin, a 15th century nun, fleeing a different, undying evil, encounters the fearsome Executioner. They are thrown together by fate - or perhaps by Providence - and together, they travel the centuries. Every time they appear, they find a wrong to right, an evil to combat. But every time, the witches escape them. They run afoul of a demon, dealing a crippling blow to her malevolent designs. The demon plans her fiendish revenge upon Tormond and Maebh, and though it takes centuries . . . she will have them.

Since their first publication in 1821, de Maistre's dark writings have fascinated and appalled critics, with their relentless hatred of the Enlightenment and view of humans as murderous beasts who can only be controlled by the threat of overwhelming punishment. Terrifying and bizarre, The Executioner is a meditation on human evil like no other. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

This acclaimed novel imagining the life of Israeli soldier Shalom Nagar explores the legacy of the Holocaust: “A fascinating book that doesn’t let you go” (Neue Deutschland, Germany). In May 1962, twenty-two men gathered in Jerusalem to decide by lot who would be Adolf Eichmann’s executioner. These men had guarded the former Nazi SS lieutenant colonel during his imprisonment and trial, and with no trained executioners in Israel, it would fall to one of them to end Eichmann’s life. Shalom Nagar, the only one among them who had asked not to participate, drew the short straw. Decades later, Nagar is living on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, haunted by his memory of Eichmann. He remembers watching him day and night, the way he ate, the way he slept—and the sound of the cord tensing around his neck. But as he tells and re-tells his story to anyone who will listen, he begins to doubt himself. When one of his friends, Moshe, reveals his link to Eichmann, Nagar is forced to reconsider everything he has ever believed about his past. In the tradition of postwar trauma literature that includes Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Eichmann’s Executioner raises provocative questions about how we represent the past, and how those representations impinge upon the present. “Both curiously transparent and full of secrets, a simultaneously dense yet airy fabric of cryptic threads and references. . . . Nothing is gratuitous in this book, nothing coincidental; all is intricately interlaced.” —Frankfurter Rundschau, Germany