20th Century

A shocking true story of murder, extreme politics and the deep scars left by the Troubles in Ireland of the 1970s and the human consequences. A taut tale of murder, extreme politics, institutionalised violence and the deep scars left by such turmoil....

A new and fascinating account of the life of Agatha Christie from acclaimed historian Lucy Worsley....

Longstanding political columnist and commentator Daniel Finkelstein's powerful memoir explores both his mother and his father’s devastating experiences of persecution, resistance and survival during the Second World War....

A thrilling history with enormous historical implications, The Escape Artist is the astonishing, forgotten story of the hero who escaped from Auschwitz to reveal the truth of the Holocaust....

Based on first-hand accounts and extensive new research, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer presents the history of the GDR as never before—as a kaleidoscope of perspectives, experiences and stories....

The Second World War began in August 1939 on the edge of Manchuria and ended there exactly six years later with the Soviet invasion of northern China....

When they are girls, Cibi, Magda and Livia make a promise to their father - that they will stay together, no matter what.... 

The incredible story of the greatest female spy in history, from one of Britain's most acclaimed historians....

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most perilous event in history, when mankind faced a looming nuclear collision between the United States and Soviet Union. During those weeks, the world gazed into the abyss of potential annihilation....

As Germany and then Japan surrendered in 1945, there was a tremendous hope that a new and much better world could be created from the moral and physical ruins of the conflict....

Renowned World War Two historian James Holland presents an entirely new perspective on one of the most important moments in recent history....

The author of Travellers in the Third Reich—the Sunday Times top-three best seller and Waterstones Book of the Month—presents a stunningly evocative portrait of Hitler’s Germany through the people of a single village....

The 20th century proved to be overwhelmingly the most violent, frightening and brutalised in history, with fanatical, often genocidal warfare engulfing most societies....

From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refugee to the moment she places a diary in Otto Frank's hands, Miep Gies remembers her days with simple honesty and shattering clarity....

Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews - now with a new afterword and additional photographs....

1930s Europe - as the Roaring Twenties wind down and the world rumbles towards war, the great minds of the time have other concerns....

In his major new work, Michael Palin - former Monty Python stalwart and much-loved television globe-trotter - brings to life the world and voyages of HMS Erebus....

In the darkest moment of history, one child found the courage and strength to survive the unimaginable. This is Henry’s true story....

J. Robert Oppenheimer, an iconic figure of the 20th century, was a brilliant physicist who led efforts to build an atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress....

In the early 1970s, Britain seemed to be tottering on the brink of the abyss....

Audible is proud to present One Summer: America, 1927, the new book by Britain’s favourite writer of narrative nonfiction, Bill Bryson....

Peter Hook, as co-founder of Joy Division and New Order, has been shaping the course of popular music for 30 years....

This is a true story of a great victory against all the odds. Forty years on, Goose Green is still the biggest, bloodiest battle the British Army has fought in modern times....

The Nuremberg Interviews reveals the chilling innermost thoughts of the former Nazi officials under indictment at the famous postwar trial....

In 1944, 16-year-old Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz. There she endured unimaginable experiences, including being made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele....

1930s Europe - as the Roaring Twenties wind down and the world rumbles towards war, the great minds of the time have other concerns. Jean-Paul Sartre waits anxiously in a Parisian café for his first date with no-show Simone de Beauvoir. Marlene Dietrich slips from her loveless marriage into the dive bars of Berlin. Father and son Thomas and Klaus Mann clash over each other's homosexuality. And Vladimir Nabokov lovingly places a fresh-caught butterfly at the end of Verá's bed. Little do they all know, the book burning will soon begin.

The classic, human-scale account of the soldiers who fought in World War II, by Pulitzer Prize winner Ernie Pyle—America’s most famous and most loved war correspondent—featuring a new introduction by David Chrisinger, the author of the new Ernie Pyle biography, The Soldier's Truth.

Spain's transition to democracy after Franco's long dictatorship was widely hailed as a success, ushering in three decades of unprecedented progress and prosperity. Yet over the past decade, its political consensus has been under severe strain. A stable two-party system has splintered, with disruptive new parties on the far left and far right. No government has had a majority since 2015. Michael Reid overturns the stereotypical view of Spain as a country haunted by its Francoist past.

Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world did not recognize their destruction equally. In the years and decades following the war, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, educators, curators, and politicians, while the genocide of Europe's Roma went largely ignored. Rain of Ash is the untold story of how Roma turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought to gain recognition and compensation for their wartime suffering.

As an orphaned survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) compelled the world to confront the Holocaust with his searing memoir Night. How did this soft-spoken man from a small Carpathian town become such an influential figure on the world stage? Drawing on Wiesel’s prodigious literary output and interviews with his family, friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger seeks to answer this question.

Carter B. Forbes was born in Texas in 1905 and said, "I don’t remember a thing about it, and if I had, my mother would have been the most embarrassed woman in twenty-seven counties." And the stories go on from there. He grew up in the first part of the 20th century on a farm in the panhandle of Texas and tells the tales of his life that reveal the character of the time, the place, and the man involved.

The good, the bad, and the ugly of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine are explored in these entertaining biographies of the world’s most highly recognized scientists. From unapologetic Nazis to dedicated humanitarians who carried out prize-winning research while being resistance fighters or peace activists, these engaging true stories reveal the depths of both the human strength and depravity of the people who forged medical progress in the 20th century.

On the night of August 6, 1930, Joseph Force Crater, a newly appointed judge and prominent figure in many circles of Manhattan, hailed a taxi in the heart of Broadway and vanished into thin air. Despite a decades-long international manhunt led by the New York Police Department's esteemed Missing Persons Bureau, the reason for Crater's disappearance remains a confounding mystery.

Marine Lance Corporal Jack Swan crested the face of a bare, rocky knoll in the Que Son Valley of South Vietnam. Following Swan were the 164 Marines of Mike Company, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, First Marine Division. Their mission was to locate and rescue two understrength and isolated companies of felow Marines who were under attack by the North Vietnamese Army.

What do we owe the past? How to make peace with a dark family history? Burkhard Bilger hardly knew his grandfather growing up. His parents immigrated to Oklahoma from Germany after World War II, and though his mother was an historian, she rarely talked about her father or what he did during the war. Then one day a packet of letters arrived from Germany, yellowing with age, and a secret history began to unfold.

When uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world after 1945, Britain responded with overwhelming and brutal force. Although this period has conventionally been dubbed "postwar," it was punctuated by a succession of hard-fought, long-running conflicts that were geographically diffuse, morally ambiguous, and impervious to neat endings or declarations of victory. Age of Emergency traces facts and feelings about violence as torture, summary executions, collective punishments, and other ruthless methods were employed in "states of emergency."

This biography traces the Holocaust through the eyes of young Nathan Poremba and examines the difficult emotional and physical choices he had to make to survive. His father was murdered by the Nazis before his hometown went under deportation orders, so he made the heart-wrenching decision to flee his home in Southern Poland (Wieliczka) and leave his mother and sisters behind.

Jackie Kohnstamm's mother rarely talked about what had happened during the war and had kept little evidence of her early life. It was only after her uncle and aunt had died that Jackie inherited an archive of material relating to the family back in Germany. Jackie's mother had managed to get out of Berlin in 1936, following her brother and sister who had already escaped. But Jackie's grandparents had remained.

Evelyn Dove embraced the worlds of jazz, musical theatre and, most importantly, cabaret, in a career spanning five decades from the 1920s through to the 1960s. A black British diva with movie star looks, she captivated audiences and admirers around the world, enjoying the same appeal as the ‘Forces Sweetheart’ Vera Lynn throughout the Second World War.

Today, the world is in the midst of the transformative and ever-developing digital age, otherwise referred to as the “age of Information.” It has been an unprecedented, remarkable, and explosive era marked by social media and computer-generated imagery (and with it, deep fakes), among other novel, previously unimaginable concepts.