New History Books for May 2024

Here is a selection of anticipated new history books that will be released over the month ahead.

Fallen: George Mallory: The Man, The Myth and the 1924 Everest Tragedy by Mick Conefrey

Allen & Unwin, 2 May, 2024

On a June day in 1924, the geologist and mountaineer Noel Odell gazed upwards towards the summit of Mount Everest. In the very distance, he could perceive the form of two human figures – George Mallory and Sandy Irvine – inching their way upwards. For a moment Odell could see the pair clearly, then they were gone, never to be seen alive again, and the greatest puzzle in the history of mountaineering began. Were they the first to reach the highest point on the planet?

Whether this question can ever be answered remains doubtful. Still, readers will be drawn back to a story that has a powerful emotional pull. The figure at the heart of it, of course, is George Mallory: charismatic, audacious, restless. In this biography, Mick Conefrey provides a new portrait of the mountaineer who became, like Robert Falcon Scott before him, a tragic hero of the British Empire.

The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War by Giles Milton

John Murray, 9 May, 2024

Giles Milton’s previous book, Checkmate Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World, began at Yalta in Crimea in 1945, with the tense coming-together of the much vaunted ‘Big Three’: Churchill, FDR and Stalin. The Stalin Affair can be seen as something of a prequel to that story, as it delves back into the early years of the war and the beginning stages of one of history’s most peculiar political alliances.

That alliance was between the Soviets and the Allies, who were brought together by their shared determination to defeat Nazi Germany. Milton’s story opens in 1941 when the British and Americans sent a team of ‘remarkable diplomats’ to Moscow ‘with the mission of keeping the Red Army in the war’. The result, as ever with Milton's books, is a high-wire story full of intrigue and peril.

Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World by Roger Crowley

Yale University Press, 14 May, 2024

In the years after Columbus's voyage to the Americas, Europe was aflame with the rage for travel and adventure. Many of those who set sail from ports like London or Lisbon dreamt of the terrific riches they would make. One of the chief ways they sought to do so was by seizing control of the lucrative trade in spices.

In this new book, Roger Crowley shows how a grand contest for the global spice trade, ‘propelled European maritime exploration and conquest across Asia and the Pacific’. The author of expansive early modern histories like Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, Crowley is perfectly qualified to confront this textured story. He takes as his starting point the year 1511 when the Portuguese landed on the spice islands of the Moluccas.

The D-Day Atlas: Anatomy of the Normandy Campaign by Charles Messenger and James Holland

Thames & Hudson, 16 May, 2024

Anniversaries drive much history publishing and rising over the horizon is a date of tremendous significance. 6 June 2024 will mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day when the Allied troops scrambled ashore in northern France and the liberation of Europe began.

For readers who want to immerse themselves in that story, there can be few better choices than The D-Day Atlas by the late Charles Messenger. Specially reissued for the anniversary by Thames & Hudson, the book sweeps through all the prominent moments of the campaign, from the Thunderclap Conference in May to the landings in June and the Normandy Campaign thereafter.

This book has a strong focus on visual history – the maps, letters and photographs – that frame the day-by-day developments. Those already familiar with this history may still be intrigued by the inclusion of the German point of view, a perspective informed by much new archival research.

Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka by Clare Mulley

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 16 May, 2024

By the time that the D-Day landings were taking place, the Polish resistance fighter, Elzbieta Zawacka, had already participated in a series of astonishingly heroic operations in Warsaw. ‘Agent Zo’s’ story is fascinating and in this biography by Clare Mulley, it is told for the first time. Having fled her homeland for Britain, Zawacka was trained in great secrecy in the English countryside. Once her preparation was complete, she was parachuted back into Poland where she became an active fighter against Nazi tyranny.

Mulley is well placed to unpick Zawacka's story, having previously written about the Polish-British agent Krystyna Skarbek. In Agent Zo, she promises to bring a ‘forgotten heroine back to life’.

The Army That Never Was: D-Day and the Great Deception by Taylor Downing

Icon Books, 23 May, 2024

Nineteen Eighty-Four is often considered among the most terrifying novels of the twentieth century, with its nightmarish projection of a society clad in ideological irons. For those who have read it, though, Taylor Downing’s 1983: The World at the Brink, is an equally unsettling text. Set at one of the most perilous moments of the Cold War, it showed how paranoia and incompetence very nearly brought the world to a blunt and bloody end.

Over the past years, Downing has established a name for himself as the author of pacy, crisply researched works of narrative non-fiction. This May brings a new book from him. In The Army That Never Was, he shows how the Allied command attempted to wrongfoot the Nazis as D-Day approached. This is a story filled with tales of ‘deceptions, hoaxes and misdirections’.

Operation Biting by Max Hastings

William Collins 23 May, 2024

The veteran journalist and author Max Hastings has been combing twentieth century political and military history for moments of great jeopardy in recent years, producing a string of bestselling books. In this, his latest, he returns to the Second World War and the dramatic story of the first victorious paratrooper operation by the British. This took place at occupied Bruneval, near Le Havre, in the early part of 1942. The story of 'Operation Biting' is well known (indeed, Taylor Downing has tackled it himself in Night Raid) but Hastings promises his readers ‘a wealth of previously unchronicled detail’.

The military operation gives this story its dynamic life, but the tale arises out of the rich context of the 'radar wars'. In the early part of the war, radar had established itself as a crucial new technology. Both the Germans and the British possessed it in different forms, but neither knew precisely how their enemy’s system worked or how to properly counter it. In Operation Biting the aim was to assault and capture the German machine. What transpired, at a bleak moment of the war, became, as Hastings reminds us, front page news.

The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It by Daisy Dunn

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 23 May, 2024

Among the military histories that dominate this early spring period, it is refreshing to find Daisy Dunn’s The Missing Thread. Centred on the ancient world instead of the modern one, and focussing on women instead of men, it is a book bristling with invigorating material. Among this are stories about Enheduanna, ‘the earliest named author,’ as well as the Greek poet Sappho and the valiant Telesilla of Argos ‘who defended her city from attack’.

Dunn is a superbly well-equipped guide to this subject. Known as a literary critic, a stylish translator of Latin poetry and a biographer of Roman figures like Pliny the Elder and Catullus, her knowledge is vast. In this book, she has 3,000 years to roam through and a fresh point of view from which she can tell this grand historical story.

Sarah Siddons: The First Celebrity Actress by Jo Willett

Pen & Sword, 30 May, 2024

If one were to trace a lineage backwards, from Emma Stone to Cate Blanchett, Audrey Hepburn to Bette Davis, the sequence would arguably extend to its very beginning with Sarah Siddons, ‘the first celebrity actress’. This is the claim of Jo Willett’s new biography of the Georgian theatre star who grew up poor, ‘foraging for turnips to eat’, before her steep rise to fame.

As with Dunn’s The Missing Thread, Willett’s biography places a woman right at the heart of the action. Siddons’s story is certainly compelling. In a peacock age, everyone wanted to see or meet or to paint her. However, while the historical period Siddons belonged to is distant, the challenges she faced remain familiar today. Her marriage, Willett explains, was marred by her celebrity profile and the battle to control her image was an endless one. Still, Siddons managed, as Willett puts it, to ‘redefine the world of theatre’.

This month's Previews were by Peter Moore.