Livia Manera is a wonderful detective-companion to lead us through this rich and complex world of princesses and prisoners of war, love and deceit, secrets and discovery... a thoroughly engaging read

'Remarkable and compelling. I loved this book'

Nuanced but relentlessly curious, Livia Manera Sambuy has a gift not only for listening to other people's stories but for probing and unfolding exceptional narratives. In Search of Amrit Kaur - an ambitious, absorbing work that peels back the layers of its enigmatic subject and digs deeply into the author's own emotional vicissitudes - is her crowning jewel

'An exemplary sleuth, both astute and open-minded . . . Manera Sambuy writes with impassioned style and insight'

Fascinating

An intimate and engrossing portrait of an extraordinary woman by a writer whose sense of story and place is perfect in every way

Part personal odyssey, part history, part detective story, In Search of Amrit Kaur is a vivid and intriguing account of the quest - spanning three continents - to uncover the story of a tragic Indian princess

A remarkable book about an extraordinary woman... impossible to put down. It offers a rare window into a vanished and exotic world

A luminous portrait of both Amrit Kaur and Livia Manera: two exceptional women who had to question their assigned fates as daughters, wives, lovers and mothers in order to define themselves

Plenty of jewels, plenty of balls, plenty of secret agents and adventurous characters but also plenty of pain in the story that Manera tells, intertwining the destiny of a special woman to the vortex of equally special times.

'This biography is a many-faceted gem'

Weaving together biography and her personal narrative . . . [this is] an engaging book, with twists, turns, and detours galore'

'[Manera Sambuy's] eloquent and poetic prose enlivens the searching historiography. Original and difficult to classify, [In Search of Amrit Kaur] is a pleasure to read'

Rich with originality and memoiristic detail

A fluent and authoritative account of Europe since the Second World War

An insightful analysis of the transformation of central and eastern Europe in the decades between the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Garton Ash is a clear-headed chronicler of the Continent [and] Homelands is an engaging read

An authoritative big picture well matched with revealing, important human details

Timothy Garton Ash tells the epic story of ... [postwar] Europe

Excellent ... Read as a letter, such gemlike vignettes can be treasured. Because in them, Garton Ash has captured something of what it means to be European. Though he is proudly in love with Europe, he is not blind to its faults

Part memoir, part history and is fascinating, rich in anecdote, and at times intensely moving

A panoramic contemporary history of Europe, in which sharp political analysis is enlivened with personal memoir — drawn from decades of distinguished work as a journalist and academic

Extraordinary. Exhaustively researched and beautifully (and wittily) written, a thrilling and immersive tale that offers the reader a rare window into the terrifying events of the English Civil War when religion and ambition divided families, friends and neighbours. One of the finest books I've read for years, a stunning achievement

The Siege of Loyalty House is not only deeply researched. Childs has composed a wonderfully poetic narrative and adds a touch of the gothic

This heroic story has not been told before in such detail and with such an eye for the tragedies of civil war. Childs handles a remarkable amount of source material with masterly skill...Thrilling

Gripping ... The accumulation and deployment of facts is impressive. The understanding of what they signify is profound. The elegance, wit and brio of the writing is sheer delight

The Siege of Loyalty House is exciting and scholarly, vivid and accessible. It is a perfectly-crafted triumph of narrative history...one of the most pulsating books on seventeenth-century England I have read for many years

In Jessie Childs [Basing House] finds at last a writer able to bring out in full its excitement, pathos, glory and tragedy, with a deep political, military and social context. As so many of the defenders of the house were transplanted Londoners, it is a tale that links the heart of Hampshire to the heart of the capital. Local Civil War history does not get better than this.

Childs brilliantly shows us the world of the civil war

Enthralling... This is history as rip-roaring narrative. ... Both her previous books won awards, and I would be amazed if this does not make it a hat-trick

Fantastically well written

A masterpiece

Jessie Child's The Siege of Loyalty House turns an English Civil War stand-off into a fable of murderous polarisation: gripping, timely history

The Siege of Loyalty House ... tingles with a discerning historical imagination

[A] thrilling tale of war

[A] gripping tale of a royalist house standing its grown against the Roundheads ... Atmospheric, unflinching, and at times extraordinarily witty

[A] poignant book... the story is timeless

Compelling

Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, [The Siege of Loyalty House] tells the story of the epic two-year siege of Basing House, a royalist mansion finally captured by Oliver Cromwell in 1645.

When you are as good a writer as Jessie Childs, and as assuredly immersed in the archives, the pages zing with the technicolour of celluloid. ... [A] masterpiece.

Childs writes an engrossing, spellbinding narrative while laying out a clear and comprehendible history

The broad subject of this poignant book is what happens to people during civil war: how quickly and imperceptibly order becomes chaos and decency yields to cruelty. In other words, how close to inhumanity humanity always is. The focus is on an episode in the English civil war, but the story is timeless

A gripping account of the agony at Basing, The Siege of Loyalty House is also a potted social history of the civil wars and how they started. Jessie Childs, [is] a gifted storyteller