Historical Survival

The Orphanage Girls come back together in The Orphanage Girls Reunited, the second installment of the moving wartime saga set in London’s East End. From the bestselling author of The Jam Factory Girls, Mary Wood. Ellen. Abandoned by her father for the second time, left scarred from the...

In the deadly chaos of the First World War, one horse witnesses the reality of battle from both sides of the trenches. Bombarded by artillery, with bullets knocking riders from his back, Joey tells a powerful story of the truest friendships surviving in terrible times. One horse has the seen the best and the worst of humanity. The power of war and the beauty of peace. This is his story.

As the most celebrated European to explore Asia, Marco Polo was the original global traveler and the earliest bridge between East and West. A universal icon of adventure and discovery, he has inspired six centuries of popular fascination and spurious mythology. Now, from acclaimed author Laurence Bergreen, comes the first fully authoritative biography of one of the most enchanting figures in world history.

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.

After promising Sigmund on his deathbed that they would reunite the family in a peaceful and friendly country, they make their way via ship to Colombia, the country Nellie had made her home just as the Nazi movement in Germany was gaining momentum. After their safe arrival, Freddy is forced to look for work in order to support his mother and himself while adjusting to new surroundings at the same time. After some fortuitous, work-related encounters, Freddy decides to not only run his own lingerie business but produce the raw materials he needs himself.

Emmeline knows she’s not supposed to explore the woods outside her settlement. The enemy that wiped out half her people lurks there. Living with the shame of her grandmother’s insubordination, Emmeline has learned to keep her head down and her quick tongue silent. When the settlement leader asks for her hand in marriage, it’s an opportunity for Emmeline to wash the family slate clean - even if she has eyes for another. But before she’s forced into an impossible decision, her dreams urge her into the woods, where she uncovers a path she can’t help but follow.

Mister Tidwell is a scholarly Oxford professor snatched out of his bookish world and pressed into service aboard Lord Nelson’s legendary British fleet - in the position of schoolmaster. Such is the life of the land-loving, seafaring Mister Tidwell, Gunner. Thrust into service at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, Tidwell soon finds himself directly in the line of fire and way out of his depth. Fate has cast him into a terrible and terrifying spot - alone on deck to face the fearsome approach of a French man-o’-war.

Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan. When Captain John Smith was captured by these Indians in 1607, he was brought before Powhatan, who sentenced him to death. Sixteen-year-old Pocahontas convinced her father to spare Captain Smith's life, thus becoming a friend of the settlers and eventually influencing her father to be friendly, too.

Best friends Tamanna and Yasmine cannot believe their good fortune when a school is set up in their Afghan village; however, their dreams for the future are shattered when the Taliban burn down the school and threaten the teacher and students with death. As Tamanna faces an arranged marriage to an older man, and the Taliban target Yasmine’s Western-educated family, the girls realize they must flee.

Run Rachel Run is a true story, not just based on a true story. Rachel Blum was 12 when the Nazis invaded her town. Over the next three years, she witnessed war, risked her life to smuggle food for her family, escaped liquidation, hid with a kind Polish couple whose son worked for the SS, was questioned if she was a Jew by an SS General, and engineered an incredibly dangerous scheme to overturn a moving trainload of 1,000 Nazi soldiers.

When Jewher Ilham's father, Ilham Tohti, an internationally known advocate for peaceful dialogue between his Uyghur people and Han Chinese, was detained at the Beijing airport in February 2013 on charges of "separatism," and later sentenced to life in prison, Jewher was forced to begin a new life apart from her family in a new country. There, she found her voice as an advocate for her father, and for Uyghur people being forced into concentration camps by the Chinese government.

As a five-year-old boy, Pao Lor joined thousands of Hmong who fled for their lives through the jungles of Laos in the aftermath of war. After a difficult and perilous journey that neither of his parents survived, he reached the safety of Thailand, but the young refugee boy’s challenges were only just beginning.

An infectiously edifying, not-so-saintly self-help book that dives into the wild, wise, and unconventional lives of 16th- and 17th-century nuns, offering advice for our modern age and proving one thing: no matter the century, nuns know best. When most of us think of nuns, we picture hands...

A Barnes & Noble Best History Book of 2025 Four men in a lifeboat. Two weeks without food. One impossible choice that would reshape the boundaries between survival and murder. “A perfect enunciation of the classic philosophical conundrum: can you sacrifice one innocent life to save many?"...

September, 1939. The six Zaks siblings watch in silent horror as the Wehrmacht marches into their quiet hometown in southern Poland. Concerned for their survival, Yisrael Zaks leads his wife Haiya and his brothers Volf and Avraham toward the Russian border. But their escape does not go unhindered; and as they are captured by the invading German forces, they can hear their father’s last commandment still echoing behind them: “Never break the family apart. And whatever you do: never, ever leave any one of your siblings behind.”

In 1894, 12-year-old Matilda flees the city slums to find her unknown father and his farm. But drought grips the land, and the shearers are on strike. Her father has turned swaggie, and he's wanted by the troopers. In front of his terrified daughter, he makes a stand against them, defiant to the last. "You'll never catch me alive," said he....

Mt. Clemens, Michigan, 1887. Seventeen and headstrong, with marriage on her mind, Maggie is sure she has found her one true love. But when she collides head-on with betrayal, overwhelming loss, and ill-treatment, her life unravels. In a time when women had few rights, Maggie rises above adversity through rare determination and grit, becoming an independent woman ahead of her time. Yet before she can truly find peace, one heartbreaking, life-altering decision remains.

In the last months of the Nazi occupation of Poland, two children are left by their father and stepmother to find safety in a dense forest. Because their real names will reveal their Jewishness, they are renamed "Hansel" and "Gretel". They wander in the woods until they are taken in by Magda, an eccentric and stubborn old woman called "witch" by the nearby villagers.

Roman Halter was a spirited, optimistic schoolboy in 1939 when he and his family gathered behind the curtains to watch the Volksdeutsche (German Polish) neighbors of their small town in western Poland greet the arrival of Hitler's armies with kisses and swastika flags. Within days, the family home had been seized, 12-year-old Roman had become a slave of the local SS chief, and, returning from an errand, he silently witnessed his Jewish classmates being bayoneted to death by soldiers at the edge of town. So began his remarkable six-year journey through some of the darkest caverns of Nazi Europe....

Helen Colijn's account of her wartime experiences is a window into a largely overlooked dimension of World War II, the imprisonment of women and children in Southeast Asia by the Japanese and how these prisoners of war responded to their dire circumstances. The conditions were harsh, terrible. Food was scarce, medicine unavailable. Held in captivity for three and a half years, more than a third of the women in Helen's camp died of disease or starvation.