Arcadia Books

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...

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...

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 the sequel to They Were Counted Balint Abady is forced to part from the beautiful and unhappily married Adrienne Uzdy. Gyeroffy is rapidly heading for self-destruction through drink and his own fecklessness. The politicians, quarrelling among themselves and stubbornly ignoring their countrymen's real needs, are still pursuing their vendetta with the Habsburg rule from Vienna. Set in picturesque Translvan...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

Olivia is thirty-two and living back home with her mother in Caprock, small-town Texas. Her therapist is a girl she went to high school with; her promising career in journalism has dwindled to nothing, and she spends her days hawking jewellery in a Mall following a favour from a friend. Life is back on an even-keel after her descent into drug abuse, but it's a far cry from the one she imagined ...Then, unde...

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...

Back in 1969 when Morocco's ancient capital was a hashish clouded happy mecca, Crosby, Stills and Nash recorded their cheesy (and hopelessly inaccurate) foot-tapping anthem 'Marrakech Express'. A generation on, award-winning journalist, author, and one-time glamrock fan Peter Millar uses what is now the country's best visited tourist destination as the embarkation point for a literally reverse-engineered tr...

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...

Berlin. A city where nightclubs stay open from Friday night till Monday morning. A city with an underbelly as dark and addictive as the 24-hour drugs, drinking, dancing and sex in filthy toilets that it serves up. Three young men, from different backgrounds, meet here by chance, struggling to find a future and to escape from the past. Tobias was violated as a child and tossed from one city to another by sep...

At 60 and with a diagnosis of early Alzheimer's, Adria Ardevol re-examines his life before his memory is systematically deleted. He recalls a loveless childhood where the family antique business and his father's study becomes the centre of his world. His mother, a cold, distant, and pragmatic woman leaves him to his solitary games. An accident ends the life of his enigmatic father, filling Adria's world wit...

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...

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.

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 an exquisite personal pilgrimage, Corinne Hofmann delves into the slums of Nairobi to uncover the heart-warming and heart-breaking stories of unforgettable people and places, then treks 500 miles across the Namibian desert to discover the lives of the nomadic Himba people.

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.