Book of the week

Tim Carroll has done a superb job in tracking down a mine of entertaining information on this unjustly forgotten figure

The biography of a swashbuckling adventurer right out of the pages of an Ian Fleming novel

Carroll has drawn on half a century's research - but he's also had the perspective that the passage of time can bring

Beautifully written, brilliantly perceptive and often moving… With the opening of the archives, many excellent histories of communist eastern Europe have appeared in recent years… but I cannot think of any that succeed so well as this. In combining subtle historical judgements with literary flair, Shore has produced a masterpiece.

The Taste of Ashes is about more than the floodwaters of history; it's the story of those who learned to swim, those who didn't, and those still adapting to an era of accelerated change. This is a brilliant, lyrical and gripping book, one woven from stories that will linger in the minds of readers for years to come.

With deep respect for what the historian can and cannot know and what the witness can and cannot share, Marci Shore has achieved something rare: a narrative history that is also a philosophy of history. Her subject is Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Stalinism, but her stories of people and places - tragic, ironic, carnavalesque - have a universal appeal.

Marci Shore has written a one-of-a-kind book - a personal, intellectual, literary and historical tour of contemporary Central Europe - with something in it for everyone who wants to understand this fascinating part of the world.

Shore … writes first rate reportage in these cool-eyed but warm-hearted dispatches from the former Soviet bloc.

Shore is attentive to the ethnic strife unleashed by the ‘Pandora’s Box’ of one-party dictatorship as well as to the sinister propaganda of fundamentalist Christians.

Gripping…[Shore] describes her travels and expresses her feelings so openly and engagingly.

Absorbing.

This is history at its most disturbing, and yet also most interesting.

Tracy Borman tells this strange, compelling and ultimately inconclusive story.

Borman’s enthusiasm and diligence keeps the history in place, while the central story, and the mysteries, lies and obfuscations that surround it, add a flavour of the detective novel.

The interest here lies in the accurate and plausible portrait of a whole society, from top to bottom… The details are fascinating

The avowed aim of this fascinating history of neighbours is to explore the delicate balance between people’s determination to protect their privacy and their simultaneous wish to cultivate contact with those who live close by

A very personal encounter with Roman Britain… Invites us to see our landscape and history as the Romans first imagined and wrote about them – strange and exotic islands, perched on the edge of the known world.

[Higgins] is as sharp and sensitive an observer of the latest version of Britannia as she is of the earliest one… Each chapter is not just a regional itinerary but also a brilliantly constructed and often exhilaratingly poetic treatment of wider themes.

Records [Higgins’] own travels around the island in search of Roman traces. She includes plenty of anecdotes about the continuing fascination with the Roman past and its penetration of the present.

Higgins produced another remarkable British travelogue… that was at once thoughtful, learned, witty and superbly written.

Filled with passion and personal interest… Higgins walks us around the landscape of this country as it would have been 2,000 years ago, and in doing so she ably captures the spirit of Britain now, Britain then and Britain in between.

Whether at Hadrian’s Wall or in a car park in the City, she [Higgins] shows how Roman traces are woven through British life.

A fascinating look at how we have viewed Rome's presence in these islands and what a debt we still owe to Roman achievements.

Part history, part travelogue, [Higgins] also brings to life the eccentric archaeologists who have tried to recapture that lost civilisation.

A fresh and readable account

Under Another Sky is not only a work of personal history, it is more personal than that... It is conversational, anecdotal, in a way that makes it easy for [Higgins] to slip in quite a lot of information

A delightful, effortlessly engaging handbook to the half-lost, half-glimpsed world of Roman Britain... The result is an utterly original history, lyrically alive to the haunting presence of the past and our strange and familiar ancestors

The beauty of this book is not just in the elegant prose and in the precision with which [Higgins] skewers her myths. It is in the sympathy she shows for the myth-makers.

Evocative...a keen-eyed tour of Britain.

Packed with fascinating and thought-provoking insights.

A captivating travelogue.

A delightfully heady and beautifully written potpourri of a book.

A fascinating look at the debt we owe to Roman achievements

One of those fantastical novels that tells us more about the realities of being human than most realist novels do…the most thrilling and moving experience fiction has to offer this year.

Kate Atkinson's audacious novel plays a virtuoso game with the nature of fiction...her best book to date and a worthy winner of a Costa Prize.