German South West Africa 1906, Australian horse trader Cyril Blake is executed in cold blood by the Kaiser’s soldiers.

Sydney, the present day. Blake’s great-great nephew, recently widowed Nick Eatwell, is approached by South African journalist Susan Vidler who is investigating his ancestor’s mysterious demise.

Intrigued and looking for distraction, Nick discovers a long-lost manuscript which tells how Blake stayed in South Africa after serving in the Anglo Boer War and joined the Nama people in their rebellion against the Germans in South West Africa, modern-day Namibia.

In Munich, historian Anja Berghoff, researching the origin of the wild ‘ghost’ horses of Namibia, stumbles across intriguing letters from Irish-German spy Claire Martin, with whom Blake had an affair.

As Nick and Anja’s paths cross, they find themselves racing through southern Africa and time on the trail of a legend.

But they’re not alone. Someone else is chasing these ghosts of the past, looking for clues to a hidden treasure worth killing for.

Ghosts of the Past is based on a true story.

In January 1991, when civil war came to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, two-thirds of the city's population fled.

Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother murdered by a militiaman, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swept into the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the world.

Serially betrayed by the people who promised to care for him, Asad lived his childhood at a sceptical remove from the adult world, his relation to others wary and tactical.

By the time he had reached the cusp of adulthood, Asad had honed an array of wily talents. At the age of seventeen, in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, he made good as a street hustler. He also courted the famously beautiful Foosiya and, to the astonishment of his peers, married her.

Buoyed by success in work and in love, Asad put $1 200 into his pocket and made his way down the length of the African continent to Johannesburg, South Africa. And so began a shocking adventure in a country richer and more violent than he could possibly have imagined.

A Man of Good Hope is the story of a person shorn of the things we have come to believe make us human - personal possessions, parents, siblings. And yet Asad's is an intensely human life, one suffused with dreams and desires and a need to leave something of permanence on this earth.

WINNER OF THE WINDHAM-CAMPBELL LITERATURE PRIZE 2013

WASHINGTON POST BOOK OF THE YEAR

At the end of a steep gravel road in one of the remotest corners of South Africa's Eastern Cape lies the village of Ithanga. Home to a few hundred villagers, the majority of them unemployed, it is inconceivably poor. It is to here that award-winning author Jonny Steinberg travels to explore the lives of a community caught up in a battle to survive the ravages of the greatest plague of our times, the African AIDS epidemic.

He befriends Sizwe, a young local man who refuses to be tested for AIDS despite the existence of a well-run testing and anti-retroviral programme. It is Sizwe's deep ambivalence, rooted in his deep sense of the cultural divide, that becomes the key to understanding the dynamics that thread their way through a terrified community.

As Steinberg grapples to get closer to finding answers that remain just out of reach, he realizes that he must look within himself to unlock the paradoxes at the heart of his country.

Even among the Mob, the Westies were feared. Out of a partnership between two sadistic thugs - James Coonan and Mickey Featherstone - the gang dominated the decaying slice of New York City's West Side known as Hell's Kitchen in the 1970s and '80s. Excelling in extortion, numbers running, loansharking and drug-peddling, they became the most notorious gang in the history of organized crime. The then prosecutor Rudolf Giuliani called them 'the most savage organisation in the long history of New York street gangs'. Upping the ante on brutality and depravity, their speciality when it came to punishment and killings was dismemberment. Their reign lasted almost twenty - their end would come as their own violent natures got the best of them and precipitated a downfall as infamous as their rise. This revised and updated edition, brings the story of the Westies up to date with 'where are they now' snapshots of the men - and women - of the Westies.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. ***A Waterstones Best Books of 2022 pick*** A Financial Times, The Times and The Economist Book of the Year 'Gripping... A startling tale of fraud and impunity. ' The Economist 'I read it in one sitting, and I know it'll stay with me for a long time.' Oliver Bullough, Sunday Times bestselling author of Moneyland Inside the corrupt and secret business of global shipping, the explosive true story of a notorious international fraud and murder In July 2011, the oil tanker Brillante Virtuoso was drifting through the treacherous Gulf of Aden when a crew of pirates attacked and set her ablaze in a devastating explosion. But when David Mockett, a maritime surveyor working for Lloyd's of London, inspected the damaged vessel, he was left with more questions than answers. Soon after his inspection, he was murdered. Dead in the Water is a shocking expose of the criminal inner-workings of international shipping, an old-world industry at the backbone of our global economy. Through first-hand accounts of those who lived the hijacking - from members of the ship's crew and witnesses to the attacks, to the ex-London detectives turned private investigators seeking to solve Mockett's murder - award-winning reporters Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel piece together the astounding truth behind one of the most brazen financial frauds in history.

Raised in a South Boston housing project, James "Whitey" Bulger became the most wanted fugitive of his generation. In this riveting story, rich with family ties and intrigue, award-winning Boston Globe reporters Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy follow Whitey s extraordinary criminal career from teenage thievery to bank robberies to the building of his underworld empire and a string of brutal murders.

It was after a nine-year stint in Alcatraz and other prisons that Whitey reunited with his brother William "Billy" Bulger, who was soon to become one of Massachusetts s most powerful politicians. He also became reacquainted with John Connolly, who had grown up around the corner from the Bulgers and was now with Billy s help a rising star at the FBI. Once Whitey emerged triumphant from the bloody Boston gang wars, Connolly recruited him as an informant against the Mafia. Their clandestine relationship made Whitey untouchable; the FBI overlooked gambling, drugs, and even homicide to protect their source. Among the close-knit Irish community in South Boston, nothing was more important than honor and loyalty, and nothing was worse than being a rat. Whitey is charged with the deaths of nineteen people killed over turf, for business, and even for being informants; yet to this day he denies he ever gave up his friends or landed anyone in jail.

Based on exclusive access and previously undisclosed documents, Cullen and Murphy explore the truth of the Whitey Bulger story. They reveal for the first time the extent of his two parallel family lives with different women, as well as his lifelong paranoia stemming in part from his experience in the CIA s MKULTRA program. They describe his support of the IRA and his hitherto-unknown role in the Boston busing crisis, and they show a keen understanding of his mindset while on the lam and behind bars. The result is the first full portrait of this legendary criminal figure a gripping story of wiseguys and cops, horrendous government malfeasance, and a sixteen-year manhunt that climaxed in Whitey s dramatic capture in Santa Monica in June 2011. With a new afterword covering the trial, this book promises to become a true-crime classic."