Archives de catégorie : History

THE LOST VOICES OF POMPEII de Jess Venner

THE LOST VOICES OF POMPEII will transport readers into the final 24 hours of the ancient city, vividly detailing the lives of seven diverse characters. Through a blend of meticulous research and compelling storytelling, this book brings Pompeii’s last day to life in a way that is both immersive and unforgettable.

THE LOST VOICES OF POMPEII:
The Last 24 Hours
by Jess Venner
HarperCollins, Spring 2026
(via Northbank Talent Management)

In her thrilling new take on the ancient city, Dr Jess Venner casts aside traditional archaeological and historical perspectives to immerse readers in the vibrant daily lives of its inhabitants. We meet Julia Felix, a successful female entrepreneur defying Roman convention; a slave who gains his freedom during a night of revelry; and politician Gaius Cuspius Pansa who is hosting the Plebian Games at the amphitheatre.

Using real historical figures the book plausibly recreates their final day before the eruption; a fresh narrative approach that brings the ancient streets to life through the eyes of those who lived, worked, loved, and ultimately met their fate there.

Dr Jess Venner is an award-winning ancient historian and archaeologist, and a world-leading expert on Pompeii and Herculaneum. She is currently an academic at the prestigious Institute of Classical Studies in London and was elected as an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society for her contributions to history. She has a following of over 140,000 engaged history fans on TikTok as @lifeinthepastlane_, and has appeared in publications such as The Times, The Mirror, The Daily Star, and Ancient History Magazine.

MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS d’Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS: Essays & Writings
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Harper, June 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.
Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

In MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club Pick, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award, and five poetry collections, including the NAACP Image Award-winning The Age of Phillis, also nominated for the National Book Award. She teaches at the University of Oklahoma, where she holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English.

DER BLINDE FLECK de Stephan Lebert & Louis Lewitan

A blind spot in many families: the continuing impact of the Holocaust and the Second World War. A fascinating study of the generational trauma of war – and why families are finally beginning to talk.

DER BLINDE FLECK
(The Blind Spot)
by Stephan Lebert & Louis Lewitan
Heyne/PRH Germany, April 2025

It’s been 80 years since the Holocaust and the end of the Second World War, and only few eye witnesses are still alive. Yet the effects of the past persist. Shaped by a dark age that was over before they were even born, generations are suffering from a trauma whose cause they don’t fully understand: loved ones who show little emotion, feelings of guilt, fear, loneliness, a sense of rootlessness. Many families suffer from a leaden silence – suppressed memories, well-kept secrets, lies that won’t go away. It is an oppressive legacy, whose poison circulates to this day.

But now the armour of silence is starting to show cracks. Since ever fewer of them need to fear confrontation with parents or grandparents, they are beginning to investigate their family histories, hoping to discover how they have influenced their own lives. With DER BLINDE FLECK, trauma and stress expert Lewitan and award-winning journalist Lebert have created a unique book on the both difficult and freeing experience of finally facing up to the burden that is your family history. Based on deeply moving conversations with those affected, it is a highly topical contribution to memorial literature.

Stephan Lebert, born in Munich in 1961, is an award-winning journalist. Following spells at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Spiegel and Tagesspiegel, he is now special projects editor at Die Zeit. He most recently won the 2022 Theodor Wolff Prize, and is the author of Denn du trägst meinen Namen (‘Because you have my name’, 2000), about the descendants of leading Nazis.

Louis Lewitan, born in Lyon in 1955, is a psychologist and a renowned stress and trauma expert with international expertise, thanks to a period spent in New York as researcher and executive director at the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children. Elie Wiesel was the group’s honorary president, and its focus was on the delayed effects of the Shoah on child survivors. Lewitan is the author of several books and was interviewed by Zeit magazine for its ‘How I was saved’ series.

MILENA AND MARGARETE de Gwen Strauss

A profoundly moving and expertly researched WWII history from the author of The Nine. A celebration of love under the darkest of circumstances, Strauss sheds light on both an untold WWII love story and an untold chapter in queer history.

MILENA AND MARGARETE:
A Love Story in Ravensbrück
by Gwen Strauss
St. Martin’s Press, August 2025

From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish refugees. German Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But soon swept up in the fervor of the Bolshevik Revolution, she met her second partner, the Communist Heinz Neumann. Called to Moscow for his “political deviations,” he fell victim to Stalin’s purges while Margarete was exiled to the hell of the Soviet gulag. Two years later, traded by Stalin to Hitler, she ended up outside Berlin in Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp built for women.

Milena and Margarete loved each other at the risk of their lives. But in the post-war survivors’ accounts, lesbians were stigmatized, and survivors kept silent. This book explores those silences and finally celebrates two strong women who never gave up and continue to inspire. As Margarete wrote: “I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”

Gwen Strauss is the author of The Nine and a collection of poetry, Trail of Stones. Her poems, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals including The New Republic, London Sunday Times, New England Review, and Kenyon Review. She was born and spent her early years in Haiti. Strauss lives in Southern France, where she is the Executive Director of the Dora Maar Cultural Center.

NEPTUNE’S RANSOM de Julian Sancton

Julian Sancton’s follow-up to his thrilling, acclaimed debut, Madhouse at the End of the Earth, is the riveting story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Columbia in 1708 with over a billion dollars in gold and silver—and one man’s obsessive quest to find and excavate it.

NEPTUNE’S RANSOM
by Julian Sancton
Crown, January 2026

Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San Jose—he was looking for the galleon Mercedes. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime—the journey of a ship that had gathered a mountain of plundered riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain. But that ship, the San Jose, never reached Spanish shores. Somewhere miles off Cartegena, the Spanish armada was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean, its precise location unknown and its decaying hull shrouded in darkness beyond the reach of divers.

Dooley was at once an unlikely candidate to find it, but also a singular figure. Half Cuban by birth, his life stretched from the ballfields of Brooklyn to the shores of Castro’s Havana at the dawn of revolution, where he would help birth a fledgling nation’s diving program and make films with the likes of Jacques Cousteau before finding himself placed on an international watch list and barred from the United States. With academic training cobbled together across various disciplines, Dooley was no one’s idea of a credentialed academic, and yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to the science of ocean archeology—and to finding the San Jose—led him to breakthroughs thought impossible, as he jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors and ultimately homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three hundred year old shipwreck—or nothing at all.

Like The Orchid Thief, NEPTUNE’S RANSOM plunges into a rarified world through the eyes of an idiosyncratic protagonist, one whose work would spark the hopes of presidents and make real the dreams of a nation. In this tale of temerity and treasure, Julian Sancton blends the adventure of Indiana Jones with the international intrigue of XXX into a one-of-a-kind story of a lost fortune and a decades-long quest to shine light on the bounty of gold and silver at the bottom of the sea.

Julian Sancton is a senior features editor at Departures magazine, where he writes about culture and travel. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker, Wired, and Playboy, among others. He has reported from every continent including Antarctica, which he first visited while researching this book.