Showing results by publisher "Picador" in War & Military

Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn't ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, Andreas' heart is broken. He leaves his valley just once more, to fight in WWII—where he is taken prisoner in the Caucasus—and returns to find that modernity has reached his remote haven....

Spanning the breadth of the 20th century and into the post-9/11 wars and their legacy, Correspondents is a powerful novel that centres on Rita Khoury, an Irish-Lebanese woman whose life and family history mirror the story of modern America. Both sides of Rita’s family came to the United States in the golden years of immigration, and in her home north of Boston Rita grows into a stubborn, perfectionist and relentlessly bright young woman.

19 October 1950. The war is not going to plan. In Paris, politicians gather to discuss what to do about Indochina. The conflict is unpopular back home in France: too expensive, and too far away for the public to care. Withdrawal is not an option – a global power cannot surrender to an army of peasants – but victory is impossible without more soldiers and more money. The soldiers can be sourced from the colonies, but the money is out of the question. A solution needs to be found.

About to make his last stand, a soldier facing certain death at the hands of the enemy writes home to his love to explain how he ended up there. The Officer in the story has no name nor is his nation specified. While out for a walk, he stumbles upon officers enjoying a military barbecue and is persuaded to join them. He enjoys the comradeship of the event and is quickly seduced by the smart, tailored military uniform he is later fitted with, by the power bestowed upon it, by the respect commanded by it.

Born to a Vietnamese family based in Melbourne, the narrator is haunted by the story of his grandfather whose ten-year imprisonment by the Communist government in Vietnam’s notorious Chi Hoa prison looms large over his own place in the world and his choice to become a human rights lawyer. As he oscillates between identities of his Australian upbringing and his Vietnamese heritage, it is the death of his grandfather in a Parisian suburb and the birth of his daughter that crystalise some of the strands that have shaped his life and thinking

As the city thrums with Blitz bombers, lonely A.R.P warden Ruby Thacker is drawn into the unfamiliar world of the India Forum. There, at the dishevelled townhouse in Bloomsbury, she meets Kitty, an ambitious barrister doing all she can to free her beloved India from British rule. But Ruby has secret motives for joining the Forum, and when the mysterious Satyajit appears with radical ideas about fighting for freedom, she finds herself torn between head and heart.