Love and terror in Hitler's Berlin

In The Garden of Beasts

The extraordinary true story of intrigue and emerging terror at the American embassy in Berlin during the tumultuous twelve months that witnessed Hitler's rise to ultimate power in Germany.

Larson's best and most enthralling work of novelistic history...rich with incident, populated by fascinating secondary characters, tinged with rising peril and pityingly persuasive...powerful, poignant...a transportingly true story.

Fascinating...using letters and diaries, Larson - a master at writing true tales as riveting as fiction - creates a nuanced, eyewitness account of a father and daughter whose eyes thankfully opened as the horrors closed in.

Reads like an elegant thriller...utterly compelling...an excellent and entertaining book that deserves to be a bestseller.

Compelling...the kind of book that brings history alive to readers and proves why Larson's Isaac's Storm and The Devil in the White City were such hits.

Larson has meticulously researched the Dodds' intimate witness to Hitler's ascendancy...has all the pleasures of a political thriller: innocents abroad, the gathering storm...a fresh picture of these terrible events.

Larson writes history like a novelist.  He presents a familiar story through fresh eyes, conveying quite wonderfully the electrically charged atmosphere of a whole society turning towards the stormy dark.

A compelling tale... a narrative that makes such a brave effort to see history as it evolves and not as it becomes.

Gives the subject matter a fresh perspective... Larson paints a vivid picture of 1930s Berlin, a city spiraling into disaster.  A master of mood, he manipulates the reader to the point that we  find ourselves gripping on to every shard of hope, even to the extent of expecting the march of history to miraculously change course before our very eyes

The rise of Hitler is told through the eyes of William E Dodd, a Chicago academic who was made the first ambassador to Nazi Germany, in this compelling narrative history, which brings to life the terrible changes wrought on Germany by Hitler and his circle as they tightened their grip on power...

Erik Larson is a prize-winning journalist and narrative historian. His books include Isaac's Storm, Thunderstruck and the number one bestseller, The Devil in the White City, which won an Edgar Award and was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Non-Fiction Award. He lives in Seattle.

'A compelling tale... a narrative that makes such a brave effort to see history as it evolves and not as it becomes.' SPECTATOR 
 
Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the times, and with brilliant portraits of Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Himmler amongst others, Erik Larson's new book sheds unique light on events as they unfold, resulting in an unforgettable, addictively readable work of narrative history. 
 
Berlin,1933. William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered academic from Chicago, has to his own and everyone else's surprise, become America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany, in a year that proves to be a turning point in history. 
 
Dodd and his family, notably his vivacious daughter, Martha, observe at first-hand the many changes - some subtle, some disturbing, and some horrifically violent - that signal Hitler's consolidation of power. 
 
Dodd has little choice but to associate with key figures in the Nazi party, his increasingly concerned cables make little impact on an indifferent U.S. State Department, while Martha is drawn to the Nazis and their vision of a 'New Germany' and has a succession of affairs with senior party players, including first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. 
 
But as the year darkens, Dodd and his daughter find their lives transformed and any last illusion they might have about Hitler are shattered by the violence of the 'Night of the Long Knives' in the summer of 1934 that established him as supreme dictator . . .

Thunderstruck

The New YorkTimes bestselling story of the notorious murderer, Dr Crippen, whose life (and eventual death) were inexorably interwoven with that of Marconi and his miraculous invention: the wireless.

Shines a vivid electric light on the birth of the modern age...Larson is a great master of narrative

Meticulously researched...a fascinating read

A big, bold approach to the writing of narrative non-fiction...it shows how tiny lives may occasionally become caught up in the wonders of the age

Larson has an exceptional mastery of historical detail and a real flair for suspense...carried off with effortless resonance

Compelling...Larson's research is meticulous and he presents a vivid picture of a world that was throwing off the shackles of Victorian restraint while barrelling downhill towards the horrors of the First World War

Larson has done it again...taken an unlikely historical subject and spun it into gold

A vivid picture of a society: rich, assiduously detailed, with two strongly drawn characters at its centre

A fascinating study in which two disparate stories are cleverly dovetailed into a compelling whole

Larson's gift for rendering an historical era with vibrant tactility and filling it with surprising personalities makes Thunderstruck an irresistible tale...he restores life to this fascinating, long-lost world.

Beautifully written...Thunderstruck triumphantly resurrects the spirit of another age, when one man's public genius linked the world, while another's private turmoil made him a symbol of the end of "the great hush" and the first victim of a new era when instant communication, now inescapable, conquered the world

Larson has a knack for creating genuine suspense in his writing, and his latest is thoroughly enthralling.

Erik Larson is a prize-winning journalist. His number one bestseller, The Devil in the White City, was an Edgar Award winner, a National Book Award finalist and was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award for Non-Fiction. He lives in Seattle with his family.

'A big, bold approach to the writing of narrative non-fiction . . . it shows how tiny lives may occasionally become caught up in the wonders of the age' GUARDIAN 
 
In 1910, Edwardian England was scandalized by a murder. 
 
Mild-mannered American Hawley Crippen had killed his wife, buried her remains in the cellar of their North London home and then gone on the run with his young mistress, his secretary Ethel Le Neve. 
 
A Scotland Yard inspector, already famous for his part in the Ripper investigation, discovered the murder and launched an international hunt for Crippen that climaxed in a trans-Atlantic chase between two ocean liners. 
 
The chase itself was novel, but what captured the imagination was the role played by a new and little understood technology: the wireless. Thanks to its inventor Marconi's obsessive fight to perfect his machine, the world was able to learn of events occurring in the middle of the Atlantic as they unfolded - something previously unthinkable. 
 
It was the Crippen case that helped convince the world of the potential of Marconi's miracle technology, so accelerating the revolution that eventually produced the modern means of communication we take for granted today . . .

The Devil In The White City

Chicago, 1893. One man built a heaven on earth. Another built hell beside it...

Fuses history and entertainment to give the dramatic effect of a novel...this truth really is stranger than fiction

Erik Larson tracks [H H Holmes] with practised journalistic skill...Highly readable

Captures the spirit of an America bursting with pioneering drive...a gripping book

An irresistible page-turner that reads like the most compelling, sleep defying fiction

Bursting with so much vitality you half expect it to jump right out of your hands

A story that flits effortlessly between the infernal and the inspired

Erik Larson is a prize-winning journalist and No.1 bestselling author of Isaac's Storm, The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck, In the Garden of Beasts and in 2015, Dead Wake - about the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. He lives in Seattle with his family.

'An irresistible page-turner that reads like the most compelling, sleep defying fiction' TIME OUT 
 
One was an architect. The other a serial killer. This is the incredible story of these two men and their realization of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and its amazing 'White City'; one of the wonders of the world. 
 
The architect was Daniel H. Burnham, the driving force behind the White City, the massive, visionary landscape of white buildings set in a wonderland of canals and gardens. 
 
The killer was H. H. Holmes, a handsome doctor with striking blue eyes. He used the attraction of the great fair - and his own devilish charms - to lure scores of young women to their deaths. 
 
While Burnham overcame politics, infighting, personality clashes and Chicago's infamous weather to transform the swamps of Jackson Park into the greatest show on Earth, Holmes built his own edifice just west of the fairground. He called it the World's Fair Hotel. 
 
In reality it was a torture palace, a gas chamber, a crematorium. 
 
These two disparate but driven men are brought to life in this mesmerizing, murderous tale of the legendary Fair that transformed America and set it on course for the twentieth century . . .

Erik Larson

Gripping, superbly well-researched...he ratchets up the tension as the doomed ship speeds towards the inevitable. Though you know it’s going to happen, you keep praying that it won’t, right up until the moment when the torpedo strikes. You feel this way because Larson makes you care...Thanks to Larson’s vivid narrative, you are there with those passengers in the thick of it. It may have happened 100 years ago, but this masterpiece made it feel like yesterday.

With practised skill Larson confronts the emotional pathos of wartime tragedy.

Larson's irresistibly pacey narrative moves between the various scenes of action, conjuring them up in vivid detail...the sources are remarkable...[his] detailed conversational endnotes are an added bonus.

A gripping piece of narrative history which moves almost with the same speed as Schwieger's torpedo.

Larson has an eye for haunting, unexploited detail...illuminating...suspenseful.

The master of popular non-fiction...a gripping account.

Larson's page turner brings the disaster to life.

Larson's approach to history resembles a novelist's... a rattling read.

Gripping...absorbing...however, it is when dealing with the aftermath of the tragedy, along with the attendant conspiracy theories, that Larson breaks new ground.  I found it very hard to put down.

Larson . . . writes non-fiction books that read like novels, real page-turners. This one is no exception . . . thoroughly engrossing

The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

1st May 1915: the luxury ocean liner Lusitania sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool. 
 
Her passengers were anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone and its submarines were bringing terror to the Atlantic. 
 
 But the Lusitania’s captain, William Thomas Turner, had faith in the gentlemanly terms of warfare that had, for a century, kept civilian ships safe from attack. 
 
He also knew that his ship was the fastest then in service and could outrun any threat. Germany was, however, intent on changing the rules, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. For this would be the ill-fated Lusitania’s final crossing . . .

Erik Larson

Praise for Dead Wake

Gripping, superbly well-researched...he ratchets up the tension as the doomed ship speeds towards the inevitable. Though you know it’s going to happen, you keep praying that it won’t, right up until the moment when ...

A fascinating, well-researched read.

With practised skill Larson confronts the emotional pathos of wartime tragedy.

Gripping, superbly well-researched...he ratchets up the tension as the doomed ship speeds towards the inevitable. Though you know it’s going to happen, you keep praying that it won’t, right up until the moment when ...

A fascinating, well-researched read.

With practised skill Larson confronts the emotional pathos of wartime tragedy.

Gripping, superbly well-researched...he ratchets up the tension as the doomed ship speeds towards the inevitable. Though you know it’s going to happen, you keep praying that it won’t, right up until the moment when ...

A fascinating, well-researched read.

With practised skill Larson confronts the emotional pathos of wartime tragedy.

Books by Erik Larson

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