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The 2013 Winners are In!



Daunt Books Children's Short Story Competition 2013

Western Europe

• France
• Benelux
• Germany
• Austria
• Switzerland

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  Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying by Sonke Neitzel

  Price: £25.00    Add to Basket

  A landmark history book consisting of secretly taped conversations between German POWs during World War 2, with additional analysis by a psychologist.

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  Berlin City-Lit

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Featuring brief extracts from 60 authors this collection combines literature with travel writing in brilliant bite-size morsels. Highlights include Christopher Isherwood, Anna Funder and Chloe Aridjis, whose personal insights provide a perfect accompaniment to a more practical travel guide.

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  Still Life With A Bridle by Zbigniew Herbert

  Price: £12.00    Add to Basket

  This collection of essays by Zbigniew Herbert, the highly acclaimed Polish poet, bring to life the Dutch 17th century, with it's twin associations of tulipomania and Flemish art. A first class collection from a classical-minded avant-garde poet and essayist.

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  Boomerang by Michael Lewis

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Robert Harris describes Boomerang thus: 'Michael Lewis's bravura journey through Europe's economic underbelly brilliantly charts the consequences of a world plagued by debt...highly enjoyable...nicely politically incorrect, often very funny, and shot through with genuine insight'. The fantastically popular author of The Big Short and Liar's Poker tackles economic meltdown with his usual flair.

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  Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman by Stefan Zweig

  Price: £11.99    Add to Basket

  Austrian master Zweig applies his considerable gifts of observation and description to the life of Marie Antoinette, weaving a beautiful biography against the epic backdrop of revolutionary France. First published in 1933, this remains a favourite examination of the young Queen.

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  The Patagonian Hare by Claude Lanzmann

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  The unforgettable memoir of 70 years of contemporary and personal history from the great French filmmaker, journalist and intellectual Claude Lanzmann. Lanzmann recounts his time in the French resistance in the 1940's, the Sorbonne and Paris with Sartre and de Beauvoir, through Israel and Korea, his films, his journalism and philosophy. A true renaissance man of the modern age give us his story, as, to use in this case a very necessary cliche, only he can tell it.

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  Girl in a Green Gown by Carola Hicks

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  The Arnolfini portrait, painted by Jan van Eyck in 1434, is one of the world's most famous paintings. Carola Hicks, an acclaimed art historian, applies her forensic skills to decoding the mysteries surrounding the painting, tracking it through every single ownership from the mysterious Mr Arnolfini to the National Gallery. An inspiring gem of art history about a painting which has intrigued all those who see it.

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  Medical Muses: Hysteria in 19th-Century Paris by Asti Hustvedt

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  A fascinating and disturbing insight into the study of hysteria in 19th-Century France, which was led by controversial neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. The gruesome experiments carried out on these women became a fashionable public spectacle, and Charcot's contentious methods were increasingly caught up with science, ideology, medicine and the occult, hypnotism, sadism, love and theatre.

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  Keeping Up With The Germans by Philips Oltermann

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  Philips Oltermann's family transplanted from Germany to the UK in 1996, when he was 16. 15 years later, he has decided to look at the history of the Anglo-German relationship, a subject he is uniquely qualified to approach. Taking as his starting point 8 historical encounters, he chronicles the startling, often hilarious series of misunderstanding and collusions that have taken us from being wary of one another's cuisine to all-out war, and back again to a convivial, if sometimes grudging, respect.

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  On the Map by Simon Garfield

  Price: £16.99    Add to Basket

  A fascinating look at maps and how they relate to and realign our history, from early explorers to Google Maps and beyond. Simon Garfield, whose wit and narrative skill were showcased in his previous book Just My Type, brings the history and culture of cartography vividly to life.

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  The Dreyfus Affair by Piers Paul Read

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  Captain Alfred Dreyfus, star of the French artillery appeared to have everything. But when, in 1894, a memo containing military secrets was found, shredded, in a rubbish bin in the German embassy in Paris, a comedy of errors began, with accusations, imprisonments and anti-semitism rearing their heads at all levels of French society. Piers Paul Read deftly navigates this thrilling and fascinating story of a nation almost at war with itself.

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  Cruel Crossing by Edward Stourton

  Price: £20.00    Add to Basket

  In Cruel Crossing Stourton reveals the remarkable personal stories of endurance, betrayal and incredible bravery of those who struggled along the escape routes through the Pyrenees from France to Spain during the Second World War. Drawing on interviews with the few remaining survivors and the families of those who were there, Stourton's vivid history of this little-known aspect of WWII is shocking, dramatic and intensely moving. One of the best books on the war, and the personal tragedies suffered, to come along for some time.

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  1493 by Charles C. Mann

  Price: £12.99    Add to Basket

  A compelling new history of the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. When Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, he accidentally set off an ecological convulsion as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. Mann shows how this worldwide network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City - where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted - the centre of the world.

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  Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  An immensely entertaining and often very moving account of the Double Cross System; a core team of five double agents who successfully convinced the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong invasion force. It was one of the oddest military units ever assembled: a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a Serbian seducer, a wildly imaginative Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming, and a hysterical Frenchwoman whose obsessive love for her pet dog very nearly wrecked the entire deception. Their enterprise was saved from catastrophe by a shadowy sixth spy whose heroic sacrifice is here revealed for the first time.

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  A Place in the Country by W. G. Sebald

  Price: £20.00    Add to Basket

  Fusing biography and essay, and finding, as ever, inspiration in place - as when he journeys to the Ile St Pierre, the tiny, lonely Swiss island where Jean-Jacques Rousseau found solace and inspiration, the author brings his subjects to life in his distinctive, inimitable voice.
  
  A much anticipated translation of one of a much-missed writer's major works. Sebald reflects on 6 of the figures who shaped him as a person and as writer, fusing biography and essay, and, as ever, finding inspiration in a sense of place.

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  Ever the Diplomat by Sherard Cowper-Coles

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Sherard Cowper-Coles last book, Cables from Kabul showed us a very different Afghan front line, that of the diplomats whose job it was to negotiate and explain Britain to the Afghans and Afghanistan to the Britons. Now, in Ever the Diplomat, Cowper-Coles takes us behind the doors of the Foreign Office to experience just what our diplomatic corps does to maintain and manage British interests around the world. From writing speeches for Thatcher to hiding an embarrassing bobble hat from Robin Cook, we are taken on a often humorous, always insightful journey through Whitehall and abroad, as the mandarins of the FCO respond to an ever shifting world.

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  The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia

  Price: £14.99    Add to Basket

  An imaginative, expansive and vivid tribute to an extraordinary locus of world civilisation. Abulafia takes on the Herculean task of charting Mediterranean history from 3500 BC to the present day, celebrating its linguistic, religious and ethnic diversity without ever losing sight of identifiable individuals.

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  Firestorm

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  A collection of historians contribute to a discussion on the bombing of Dresden, re-evaluating the evidence and discussing the ethical implications of an act that destroyed a city and killed thousands of citizens.

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  Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  A fascinating series of interviews turned into the epic television series, Ambrose spoke to the 147 members of Easy Company, a group of paratroopers in the Second World War. We follow these men from their gruelling training in Utah, to the D-day landings, liberation of a concentration camp and through to eventual victory. Ambrose succeeds in making history truly alive and representing all the horror, tragedy and camaraderie of the war for these men.

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  A Woman In Berlin by Anonymous

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  A remarkable and deeply affecting true account of life in Russian-occupied Berlin in the spring of 1945. Its anonymous author writes with astonishing poise, clarity and even humour of the horror closing in around her.

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  Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Von Arnim's first and most famous book is a simple, charming and soothing autobiographical piece, recording with a keen wit the leisurely passing of the seasons in her beloved garden to which she retreats from stifling domestic routine. A quiet 19th century classic.

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  The File by Timothy Garton Ash

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  Timothy Garton Ash returns to Berlin where he spent a number of years in the late seventies to uncover the files held on him by the Stasi. In this astonishing and incredibly revealing book, Garton Ash discovers a meticulous account of his life and those who informed on him.

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  The Ripening Sun by Patricia Atkinson

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  After her husband fell ill and recession struck, Atkinson was forced to make a success of the long-neglected vineyard surrounding their Bergerac home. With great wit and passion she tells of the challenges she faced, and the extraordinary support she found in local villagers.

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  Life in a Postcard: Escape to the French Pyrenees by Rosemary Bailey

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  Bailey is no Jan Morris. Nonetheless her account of moving into and restoring a Pyrenean monastery with her husband and young son is charming, wistful, and not without its moments of drama and wit.

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  How to Live by Sarah Bakewell

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  A compelling and intimate biography of Montaigne, using his essays and philosophical thinking as a basis for exploring his life. A brilliant equivalent to self-help for some New Year re-evaluation.