Intelligent, ambitious and a rising star in the French artillery, Captain Alfred Dreyfus appeared to have everything: family, money, and the prospect of a post on the General Staff. But his rapid rise had also made him enemies - many of them aristocratic officers in the army's High Command who resented him because he was middle-class, meritocratic and a Jew. In October 1894, the torn fragments of an unsigned memo containing military secrets were retrieved by a cleaning lady from the waste paper basket of Colonel Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen of the German embassy in Paris. When French intelligence discovered they harboured a spy in their midst, Captain Dreyfus, on slender evidence, was charged with selling military secrets to the Germans, found guilty of treason by unanimous verdict and sentenced to life imprisonment on the notorious Devil's Island. The fight to free the wrongfully convicted Dreyfus - over twelve long years, through many trials - is a story rife with heroes and villains, courage and cowardice, dissimulation and deceit. One of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in history, the Dreyfus affair divided France, stunned the world and unleashed violent hatreds and anti-Semitic passions which offered a foretaste of what was to play out in the long, bloody twentieth century to come. Today, amid charged debates over national and religious identity across the globe, its lessons throw into sharp relief the conflicts of the present. In the hands of historian, biographer and prize-winning novelist Piers Paul Read, this masterful epic of the struggle between a minority seeking justice and a military establishment determined to save face comes dramatically alive for a new generation.

On October 12, 1972, an Uruguayan Air Force plane carrying a team of rugby players crashed in the remote snowy peaks of the Andes. Ten weeks later, only sixteen of the forty-five passengers were found alive. This is the story of those ten weeks spent in the shelter of the plane's fuselage without food and with scarcely any hope of a rescue. The survivors protected and helped one another, and came to the difficult conclusion that to live meant doing the unimaginable. Confronting nature at its most furious, two brave young men risked their lives to hike through the mountains looking for help -- and ultimately found it.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Man is a delicate mechanism... he can easily be set off course. It is the late 18th century and a young Sicilian nobleman, Vitellio Scarpia, finds himself penniless and in disgrace on the streets of Rome. After leaving his home to pursue a military career, his impulsive and undisciplined nature has led to his expulsion from Spanish royal guard, and he must now seek his fortune in Italy; a fortune inseparably bound up with the ruler of the Eternal City, the Pope. Scarpia enrols in the Papal army and becomes the lover of an alluring countess who introduces him into Roman society with its blend of religiosity, sophistication and intrigue. Half-enthralled, half-appalled, Scarpia enjoys the life of the decadent city, learning in due course that as an unsophisticated provincial he is no match for the worldliness of Rome. Patronized by a powerful Cardinal, Scarpia is sent on a mission to Venice, where he encounters the beautiful, exquisitely gifted singer, Floria Tosca. As the armies of revolutionary France invade Italy, and war and revolution engulf the whole peninsula, the lives of the two become fatefully entwined. Piers Paul Read brilliantly reimagines the infamous villain of Puccini's opera, Tosca, telling a story that shines a light into the dusty corridors of history and the dark corners of the human soul.

On October 12, 1972, an Uruguayan Air Force plane carrying a team of rugby players crashed in the remote snowy peaks of the Andes. Ten weeks later, only sixteen of the forty-five passengers were found alive. This is the story of those ten weeks spent in the shelter of the plane's fuselage without food and with scarcely any hope of a rescue. The survivors protected and helped one another, and came to the difficult conclusion that to live meant doing the unimaginable. Confronting nature at its most furious, two brave young men risked their lives to hike through the mountains looking for help -- and ultimately found it.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

The Knights of the Temple of Solomon were a military and religious order founded in Jerusalem by two French Knights after the First Crusade. Its original purpose was to protect pilgrims from infidel attack as they journeyed to the Holy Land. The Templars soon became an expert military force and a powerful, wealthy order.Piers Paul Read tells their story in the context of the Middle Ages, a period of history in which high idealism and religious fervour were mixed with unusual cruelty, greed and ambition.

'A remarkable novel. Witty, even cynical, observation leads to a conclusion profoundly moving.' - Graham Greene
'Read is undoubtedly one of the most talented novelists of our generation.' - Francis King
' A] profoundly serious contemporary writer whose merits . . . are consistently underrated.' - D. J. Taylor
'All dark velvet and dry ice . . . If you are caught up by it, as I was, you will devour it at a single sitting and savor its resonances.' - "New York Times"
'Rare immaculately constructed work . . . so pleasurable you wish it would never end.' - "Evening Standard"
As a boy, Edward Dawson is sent to an exclusive Catholic boarding school, where at a young age he develops an ambition to do good in the world. Believing he has a religious vocation, Dawson takes his monastic vows and enters the Church, first teaching and later working as a parish priest. But when he finds himself increasingly questioning the value of religious work in an irreligious world and doubting his own belief in God, Dawson leaves behind the only life he has ever known and goes to London. There he is taken up by a rich young widow and becomes her lover, entering her circle of decadent, fashionable friends and following a precipitous path towards debauchery and disillusion . . .
Piers Paul Read's third novel, "Monk Dawson" (1969), was a tremendous critical success, winning both the Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize and confirming his reputation as one of the outstanding novelists of his generation. This edition, the first in more than 25 years, features a new introduction by the author.

Sir Alec Guiness was one of the greatest actors of the twentieth centuries. With a talent recognised by discerning critics from his very first appearance on the stage, he gained a world-wide reputation.

After his death in August 2000, his widow Merula asked the author Piers Paul Read, who had been a friend of her husband, to write his biography. Given full co-operation by the Guinness family and free access to Sir Alec's papers, including his private and unpublished diaries, Read has produced the definitive portrait: a highly entertaining and penetrating account of an intriguing and complex man.