Andrew Morton tells the story of the feckless Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor; his American wife, Wallis Simpson; and the bizarre wartime Nazi plot to make him a puppet king after the invasion of Britain and the attempted cover-up by Churchill, General Eisenhower and King George VI of the duke's relations with Hitler. From the alleged affair between Simpson and the German foreign minister to the discovery of top secret correspondence about the man dubbed "the traitor king" and the Nazi high command, 17 CARNATIONS is a saga of intrigue, betrayal and deception.

Michael Signer takes a fresh look at the life of our fourth president. His focus is on James Madison before he turned 36, the years in which he did his most enduring work: battling with Patrick Henry over religious freedom; introducing his framework for a strong central government; becoming the intellectual godfather of the Constitution; and providing a crucial role at Virginia’s convention to ratify the Constitution in 1788, when the nation’s future hung in the balance.

In the spring of 1864, Robert E. Lee faced a new adversary: Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. Named commander of all Union armies in March, Grant quickly went on the offensive against Lee in Virginia. On May 4, Grant’s army struck hard across the Rapidan River into north-central Virginia, with Lee’s army contesting every mile. They fought for 40 days until, finally, the Union army crossed the James River and began the siege of Petersburg.

King George VI and Winston Churchill were not destined to be partners, let alone allies. Yet together --- as foils, confidants, conspirators and comrades --- the unlikely duo guided Britain through war while inspiring renewed hope in the monarchy, Parliament, and the nation itself. In CHURCHILL AND THE KING, Kenneth Weisbrode explores the delicate fashioning of this important, though largely overlooked, relationship.

Confucius is perhaps the most important philosopher in history. Today, his teachings shape the daily lives of more than 1.6 billion people. Throughout East Asia, Confucius’s influence can be seen in everything from business practices and family relationships to educational standards and government policies. It is impossible to understand East Asia, journalist Michael Schuman demonstrates, without first engaging with Confucius and his vast legacy.

The sinking of the Lusitania is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. DEAD WAKE brings to life a cast of evocative characters --- from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love.

Thanks to William Shakespeare, the death of Julius Caesar is the most famous assassination in history. But what actually happened on March 15, 44 BC is even more gripping than Shakespeare’s play. In THE DEATH OF CAESAR, Barry Strauss tells the real story. Shakespeare shows Caesar’s assassination to be an amateur and idealistic affair. The real killing, however, was a carefully planned paramilitary operation, put together by Caesar’s disaffected officers and designed with precision.

ELIOT NESS follows the lawman through his days in Chicago and into his forgotten second act. As the public safety director of Cleveland, he achieved his greatest success: purging the city of corruption so deep that the mob and the police were often one and the same. And it was here, too, that he faced one of his greatest challenges: a serial killer known as the Torso Murderer who terrorized the city for years.

ENCOUNTERS AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were for centuries at the center of the North American universe. Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves their history by piecing together important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology and nutritional science, offering us a new perspective on early American history, a new interpretation of the American past.

For two months every year, from 1946 to his death 18 years later, Ian Fleming lived at Goldeneye, the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white sand beach on Jamaica’s stunning north coast. All the James Bond novels were written here. This book explores the huge influence of Jamaica on the creation of Fleming’s iconic post-war hero and traces his relationship with the land and the people of Jamaica.

Acclaimed historian Thomas Fleming examines how the differing temperaments and leadership styles of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson shaped two opposing views of the presidency --- and the nation. The clash between these two gifted men, both of whom cared deeply about the United States of America, profoundly influenced the next two centuries of America's history and resonates in the present day.

Marc Morris examines afresh the forces that drove Edward I throughout his relentless career: his character, his Christian faith, and his sense of England's destiny --- a sense shaped in particular by the tales of the legendary King Arthur. He also explores the competing reasons that led Edward's opponents (including Robert Bruce) to resist him. The result is a sweeping story, immaculately researched yet compellingly told, and a vivid picture of medieval Britain at the moment when its future was decided.

HOTEL FLORIDA traces the tangled wartime destinies of three couples against the backdrop of a critical moment in history. From the raw material of unpublished letters and diaries, official documents, and recovered reels of film, Amanda Vaill has created a narrative of love and reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth: finding it out, telling it and living it --- whatever the cost.

America’s foremost chronicler of the upper crust, journalist and bestselling author Michael Gross, turns his gimlet eye on the new-money wonderland that’s sprung up on the southwest rim of Central Park. Gross creates a dishy exposé of today’s wealthiest and most famous --- recounting the record-setting building’s inspired genesis, costly construction, and the flashy international lifestyle it has brought to a once benighted and socially déclassé Manhattan neighborhood.

In a powerful narrative layered with revealing detail, Todd S. Purdum tells the story of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, recreating the legislative maneuvering and the larger-than-life characters who made its passage possible, from the Kennedy brothers to Lyndon Johnson, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Hubert Humphrey and Everett Dirksen. Purdum brings to life this signal achievement in American history and stands as a lesson for our own troubled times about what is possible when patience, bipartisanship and decency rule the day.

One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln’s death, the full story of his extraordinary relationship with Jews is told here for the first time. LINCOLN AND THE JEWS provides readers both with a captivating narrative of his interactions with Jews, and with the opportunity to immerse themselves in rare manuscripts and images --- many from the Shapell Lincoln Collection --- that show Lincoln in a way he has never been seen before.

History casts Tammany Hall as shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft and patronage personified by notoriously crooked characters. In his groundbreaking work, MACHINE MADE, journalist and historian Terry Golway dismantles these stereotypes, focusing on the many benefits of machine politics for marginalized immigrants. As thousands sought refuge from Ireland’s potato famine, the very question of who would be included under the protection of American democracy was at stake.

As an Army chaplain during World War II, Lutheran minister Henry Gerecke tended to the battered bodies and souls of wounded and dying GIs outside London. At the war’s end, Gerecke was recruited for the most difficult engagement of his life: ministering to the 21 Nazi leaders awaiting trial at Nuremburg. MISSION AT NUREMBERG takes us inside the Nuremburg Palace of Justice, into the cells of the accused, and the courtroom where they faced their crimes.

Renowned Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson leads us through space as much as time: from the Nile's mystical sources to Thebes, the fertile Delta, Giza, and finally, to the pulsating capital city of Cairo, where the Arab Spring erupted on the bridges over the Nile. Along the way, he introduces us to mysterious and fabled characters. With matchless erudition and storytelling skill, through a lens equal to both panoramas and close-ups, Wilkinson brings millennia of history into view.

In 1936, the British monarchy faced the greatest threats to its survival in the modern era --- the crisis of abdication and the menace of Nazism. The fate of the country rested in the hands of George V’s sorely unequipped sons. PRINCES AT WAR is a riveting portrait of these four very different men miscast by fate, one of whom had to save the monarchy at a moment when kings and princes from across Europe were washing up on England’s shores as the old order was overturned.

Making use of previously classified materials from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, and the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, as well as the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and 300 hot war messages between Roosevelt and Stalin, Susan Butler tells the story of how the leader of the capitalist world and the leader of the Communist world became more than allies of convenience during World War II.

Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Clafli were two sisters whose radical views on sex, love, politics and business threatened the white male power structure of the 19th century and shocked the world. Here, award-winning author Myra MacPherson deconstructs and lays bare the manners and mores of Victorian America, remarkably illuminating the struggle for equality that women are still fighting today.

In 1789, as George Washington became the first president of the United States, the world was all but certain that the American experiment in liberty and representative government would founder. More than a few Americans feared that the world was right. In WASHINGTON’S CIRCLE, we see how Washington and his trusted advisers, close friends and devoted family defied the doomsayers to lay the foundation for an enduring constitutional republic.

In 1907, Irish immigrant William Mulholland conceived and built one of the greatest civil engineering feats in history: the aqueduct that carried water 223 miles from the Sierra Nevada mountains to Los Angeles --- allowing this small desert city to grow into a modern global metropolis. Les Standiford vividly captures the larger-then-life engineer and the breathtaking scope of his six-year, $23 million project that would transform a region, a state and a nation at the dawn of its greatest century.

On June 14, 1940, German tanks entered a silent and nearly deserted Paris. Eight days later, France accepted a humiliating defeat and foreign occupation. WHEN PARIS WENT DARK evokes the detail of daily life in a city under occupation, and the brave people who fought against the darkness. Relying on a range of resources, Ronald C. Rosbottom has forged a groundbreaking book that will forever influence how we understand those dark years in the City of Light.

In the early 1870s, local children begin disappearing from the working-class neighborhoods of Boston. Several return home bloody and bruised after being tortured, while others never come back. With the city on edge, authorities believe the abductions are the handiwork of a psychopath, until they discover that their killer --- 14-year-old Jesse Pomeroy --- is barely older than his victims. The criminal investigation that follows sparks a debate among the world’s most revered medical minds, and will have a decades-long impact on the judicial system and medical consciousness.