Angela Merkel has always been an outsider. A pastor’s daughter raised in Soviet-controlled East Germany, she spent her 20s working as a research chemist, entering politics only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And yet, within 15 years, she had become chancellor of Germany and, before long, the unofficial leader of the West. In THE CHANCELLOR, acclaimed biographer Kati Marton sets out to pierce the mystery of Merkel’s unlikely ascent. With unparalleled access to the chancellor’s inner circle and a trove of records only recently come to light, she teases out the unique political genius that had been the secret to Merkel’s success.

TRUE BELIEVER reveals the life of Noel Field, an American who betrayed his country and crushed his family. Field, once a well-meaning and privileged American, spied for Stalin during the 1930s and '40s. Then a pawn in Stalin’s sinister master strategy, Field was kidnapped and tortured by the KGB and forced to testify against his own Communist comrades. How does an Ivy League-educated, US State Department employee, deeply rooted in American culture and history, become a hardcore Stalinist? Communism promised the righting of social and political wrongs, and many in Field’s generation were seduced by its siren song. Few, however, went as far as he did in betraying their own country.