As a foreign correspondent and TV journalist David Tereshschuk has reported from many of the world's most intractable troublespots but one question continues to elude him: who his father was.
Michael Goldfarb's translator and guide when covering the Second Gulf War for NPR in 2003 was Ahmad Shawkat, an Iraqi Kurd who longed for Iraq to be free from tyranny. Not long after the USA had declared victory, Shawkat was assassinated by one of the Islamic terror groups he had railed about.
Wembley Speaks is a criss between oral history and grassroots sociology: an authentic picture of a London suburb built on what its residents have said to each other in spontaneous comments about the issues that concern them.
Before deciding what crime has been committed and how it needs to be punished, Lene Hansen suggests exploring what harm has been done and what remedy would be the most benign.
Medieval monk Brother Jacobus has devoted his life to using his beloved reason and logic to test harmful superstition. But when he tries to solve a misery in the North of England, ancient mysteries force him to rethink his assumptions about science and religion.
When composer Luke Ottevanger lost his ability to write music, he sent himself on a series of therapeutic musical journeys, to explore how the landscapes of Britain had liberated musicians in the past. The Sound of the Place is his thoughtful account of his self-imposed quest.
When an English pilot and a German baron appear in a down-at-heel town in neutral southern Ireland at the start of WW2, ex-convent-girl Mary Collins's hopes of making it to Hollywood get caught up in a comic battle for survival.
Back in England after four years' banishment in the Caribbean, Belle Nash tries to help Pablo Fanque, the black bare-back rider from Norfolk who longs to start his own circus, only to be thwarted by the hated Lord Servitude, a die-hard advocate of slavery. Set in 1835, William Keeling's second novel in The Gay Street Chronicles series balances a satire on the manners of the English with a stern morality tale about bigotry and racism.
The Romanian artist George Tomaziu expected to be imprisoned for monitoring German troop movements during the Second World War. He also expected that, after the war and his release, he might be honoured for fighting Fascism. Instead the new Communist government sent him back to prison and stranded him there, for 13 years. This is his memoir.
Brian Verity was a fragile character with a horror of Huntington's disease. He married the nurse who had cared for him in hospital after the breakdown of his marriage, then noticed she was developing the same worrying signs as other members of her family. What to do?
Unable to cope with the death of his girlfriend, Londoner Michael Roberts tries to find comfort in memories of his first love in Belfast but the memories are elusive until he uncovers painful truths that challenge all he ever knew about himself and the world he has put behind him.
Robert Dudley Best (1892-1984) had a ringside seat at the birth of the Modern Movement in England and this remarkable memoir sets the story straight on what the real issues were as British design emerged into the 20th century.
A wake-up call to the dangers that threaten the Jarawa, a group of palaeolithic tribespeople in the Andaman Islands, off the coast of India. Researched and written by the first director of the Royal African Society, Dr Jonathan Lawley, it chronicles the people's African origins, 100, 000 years ago, and their vulnerability to civilisation and tourism
After befriending Germany in the 1900s, Robert Best and his brother were eagerly fighting it in the 1910s. In this extraordinary memoir, one of Britain's most important industrial designers tracks his career from the progressive idealism of his school days at Bedales to his passionate enlistment into the Royal Flying Corps just a few years later.
Bitter-sweet stories about cosmopolitan, self-confident women in an era just before the birth of feminism, conventional in their expectations of men, their pasts behind them but still looking for their anchor in the present, always just a step away from displacement and alienation.
Torn from his parents as a boy, Stephen Mzamane is trained by the Anglican mission to be a preacher in southern Africa but finds challenges go beyond those of his flock: his unresolved relationship with his family and people, the condescension of church leaders towards black pastors, and "That Woman"-seen once in a photograph and never forgotten.
For 50 years Michael Holman has covered Africa's post-colonial successes and setbacks, from accounts of atrocities committed in the 1960s and 70s to interviews with Africa's future leaders and assessments of how they actually performed. His writings evoke the joy and humour of Africa as well as the tragedy of strategic mismanagement and corruption.
