Arcadia Books

After that summer in Kabul province, the young freelancer became a staff reporter for The Times of London, covering conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Gulf, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Balkans but Afghanistan never let him go.A young, devil-may-care Englishman, determined to report on the Soviet war and make a name for himself, makes a fateful commitment to a swashbuckling Afghan guerrilla commander. Not on...

Winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2016. Stanfords London Book of the Month March 2017 Recruited to work on a big documentary project, Julian goes to New York convinced he has hit big time at last. Finding the project cancelled he wanders the city streets and hitchhiking to San Francisco slowly starts to seem like the most sensible option for his ca...

Where do you go to when you only have a pittance for a home away from home for a huge family? Ian Ross realises that his small inheritance won't get him a place in France or even Spain, so he heads for southern Italy where he remembers the Blue Guide describing long empty sandy beaches in southern Calabria.

Award-winning, bestselling author Michael Arditti's tenth novel that documents the history of homophobia and religion. God's vengeance on the wicked city of Sodom is a perennial source of fascination and horror. Michael Arditti's passionate and enthralling new novel explores the enduring power of the myth in five momentous epochs. A young Judean exile transcribes the Acts of Abraham and Lot in ancient Ba...

It is 1982 and the British prime minister and the Argentine president are both clinging to power. Downing Street, having ignored alarm bells coming from the South Atlantic, finds itself in a full-blown crisis when Argentina invades the remote and forgotten British territory of the Falklands Islands. Catesby is dispatched urgently to prevent Argentina from obtaining more lethal Exocet missiles by fair me...

When Baroness Valtraute von Bruegen's officer husband's body is severed in two she is delighted to find that the lower half has been sewn onto the upper body of the humble local Captain Ulste. She conceives a child only to see the return of her husband in one piece. What happens next is both indescribably funny and darkly painful.

Follow Peter Millar on a journey in the heart of Cold War Europe, from the carousing bars of 1970s Fleet Street to the East Berlin corner pub with its eclectic cast of characters who embodied the reality of living on the wrong side of the wall.

London today is embattled as rarely before. In a city of enormous wealth, poverty is rampant. The burnt-out hulk of Grenfell Tower stands as an appalling reminder that inequality can be so acute as to be murderous.

In this powerful book, a pioneering young woman, Amy Buller, recounts the hopes and fears of Germans engulfed in the rise of fascism during the 1930s. During the years leading up to the outbreak of war, Buller defied her critics and social norms by leading delegations of British intelligentsia to Germany to learn about and confront the appeal of the Nazis.The book speaks of how Hitler and the Nazis stripped...

Starting in the ramshackle but romantic capital of Havana, Peter Millar travels with ordinary Cubans, sharing anecdotes, life stories and political opinions to the far end of the island, the Guantanamo naval base and detention camp.

On a frosty January day in Bergen, Private Detective Varg Veum is visited by a prostitute. Her friend Margrethe has disappeared and hasn't been seen for days. Before her disappearance, something had unsettled her: she'd turned away a customer and returned to the neighbourhood in terror. Shortly after taking the case, Veum is confronted with a brutal, uneasy reality. He soon finds the first body - and it won...

In his novel Rainy Season, Augualusa returns to the present again, following a journalist who is trying to find out what happened to the Angolan poetess and historian Lidia de Carmo Ferreira. What at first seems like a fictive biogaphy of Ferreira gradually turns out to be a depiction of the devastating history of a country tormented by 30 years of war.

They Were Divided reflects the rapidly disintegrating course of events in central Europe on the eve of WWI. A literary masterpiece, in the foreground, it tells the story of Balint and his flawed cousin, Laszlo Gyeroffy, told with humour and bittersweet nostalgia for a paradise lost through folly. In the background, the sinister and fast-moving events in the Balkans eventually not only lead to a horrific war...

Messengers sees Julian Sayarer return to work as a London bicycle courier, after six months cycling around the world. From saddle and kerbside, his stories of delivering flowers to politicians, and administration notices to banks toppled by the financial crisis, make for a social history of a less seen city, written from the perspective of someone stuck in one of London's most insecure and poorly paid jobs....

Four friends decide to run away from the horror of their everyday lives in a children's home in the English countryside. They head for the woods, their sense of freedom surprises them, and for the first time they feel the exhilaration of adolescence. Yet the forest slowly asserts its own power and what happens there will affect the four boys' lives forever.

When a picture of two Danish girls who disappeared on a boat bound for England in 1985 emerges many years later in an old suitcase from a British second-hand dealer, the journalist Nora Sand's professional curiosity is immediately awakened.But before she knows it, she is mixed up in the case of a serial killer who is serving a life sentence in a notorious prison and the quest to discover the truth about the...

Julian Tremayne is a missionary priest in a remote Philippine village during the Marcos dictatorship. After championing the communist rebels, he finds himself imprisoned for the murder of a local military commander. Three decades later, following his own mysterious death, a cult develops around Julian & there are calls for him to be made a saint. When Philip Seward is sent out to investigate on behalf o...

Based on a lifetime living in and reporting on Germany and Central Europe, award-winning journalist and author Peter Millar tackles the fascinating and complex story of the people at the heart of our continent. Focussing on nine cities (only six of which are in the Germany of today) he takes us on a zigzag ride back through time via the fall of the Berlin Wall through the horrors of two world wars, the patc...

At the age of 52 and with a shoestring budget, Peter Millar set about rediscovering the United States by following the last traces of the technological wonder that created the country in the first place - the railroad. On a rail network now ravaged and reduced, he managed to cross the continent in slow motion, talking to people and taking in their stories and concerns while watching the vast landscape unfol...

Behind the island paradises, panoramic views and historical sites there often lies a different story. Using her twenty-year experience in the field of human rights, personal anecdotes and the testimonies of survivors, Lucy Popescu explores the various abuses that often go unnoticed or are carefully hidden from the tourist. From torture in the Maldives, the labour camps of China, seeking asylum in Australia ...