Non-Fiction Books

In this enthralling and sometimes harrowing memoir, the acclaimed author of The Promise of Light gives us a masterly companion to such classics as Brideshead Revisited and A Separate Peace . At the age of seven, Paul Watkins was roughly transplanted from his home in Rhode Island to England's Dragon School. He was greeted by a delegation of bullies who, in time, would become his friends and whose rules would become his own. For at Dragon, and later at Eton, "there was no middle ground. You could not go here and come out not caring one way or the other. You had to stand before your God and commit." Here are the masters who paddle boys for small infractions and then offer them sweets; the seniors who pamper pretty favorites and subject all others to humiliating servitude; the deep friendships and sudden, devastating betrayals. Above all, here is the exhilaration of a boy discovering own capacities for learning and creativity, in a book that conveys with astonishing insight the pangs of growing up.

From the author of The Ice Soldier, comes a real-life adventure among the fjords and icy mountains of Norway. Certain geographies speak to people. We are awed by mountains, challenged by the ocean, haunted by the bleakness of deserts. The effect of landscape on human consciousness is at the heart of novelist Paul Watkins's exhilarating travel story. Long bewitched by the stark beauty of the Scandinavian Alps, Watkins sets off among the ice-clad peaks and dark fjords of the arctic with only a tent and rucksack. On the way, he stops at rustic inns, follows the paths of other solitary travelers, navigates the punishing weather, and confronts the magisterial presence of the past among these mountains--a journey that makes for one of our finest accounts of the life and the land in the frozen north.

A biography of the twentieth-century British Royal Navy officer and Victoria Cross recipient, who fought below, above, and on the waves. Of all the acts of gallantry in World War II few were as audacious as the attack by midget submarines on the pride of the German fleet, the battleship Tirpitz , lying in her heavily fortified lair deep in a Norwegian fjord. Lieutenant Godfrey Place was in command of submarine X7 in September 1943 and travelled over 1,000 miles, negotiating minefields and anti-submarine nets to place four tons of high explosive accurately under the hull of the Tirpitz . For this he was awarded the Victoria Cross in 1944, at the age of twenty-two. Taken prisoner he was repatriated to England at the end of the war, and continued to serve in the Royal Navy for twenty-five years, flying with 801 squadron in the Korean War, and serving on aircraft carriers at Suez, Nigeria and the withdrawal from Aden. On his retirement in 1970 he had the distinction of being the last serving naval officer to hold the Victoria Cross. This overdue biography details Godfrey Place VC’s eventful life, from a childhood spent partly in East Africa to being the hugely respected Chairman of the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association for over twenty years. Thanks to the author’s extensive access to previously unpublished material, including Place’s own recollections of the attack, there is unlikely to be a better or more thrilling account of the attack on the Tirpitz.