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...

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.

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. A beautifully written Surrealist novel cum political allegory, Flesh-Coloured...

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...

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.

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...

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...

Fourteen years after fleeing Kenya with her baby daughter, Corinne returned in the summer of 2004 to meet Lketinga and his family again in their village, Barsaloi. Nervous as she was, and uncertain as to how he would react on seeing her again, she found to her relief that she was welcomed unreservedly by all those who remembered her - by Lketinga, who still thought of her as his 'wife number one', by his br...

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...

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.

Mario Leme is a low-ranking detective in the Sao Paolo civil police. Every day on the way to work he sets off early and drives through the favela known as Paraisopolis - Paradise City. It's a pilgrimage: his wife Renata was gunned down at an intersection here a year ago, the victim of a stray bullet in a conflict between drug dealers. One morning, parked near the place where Renata died, he sees an SUV care...

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.

An instant bestseller in nine languages, 'Confessions' is an astonishing story of one man's life, interwoven with a narrative that stretches across centuries to create an addictive and unforgettable literary symphony.

This epic exploration of thirteen countries takes Gandolfi across desert and over mountains, through the Amazon forest and the length of the Appalachians. Guide books may warn of thieves, bandits, corrupt police and border officials; Gandolfi writes of the remarkable kindness and generosity he encounters. Courtesy, patience and good humour are his passports while hurry is his anathema. Whether in village or...

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...

Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament and the luxury life in Budapest provide the backdrop for this gripping, prescient novel, forming a chilling indictment of upper-class frivolity and political folly, in which good manners cloak indifference and brutality. Abady becomes aware of the plight of a group of Romanian mountain peasants and champions their cause, while Gyeroffy...

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...

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...