100 books like Dominion

This is the first in Antonia Hodgson’s so-good-you-could-eat-it Thomas Hawkins series. It’s set in London in 1727 and the plot revolves around a likeable rake, Hawkins, whose dedication to dice, booze, and women leads him to ruin – but with the help of others. Finding himself in the notorious Marshalsea Prison – think Alcatraz but without the water and with leprosy and lice instead – and you have the makings of a wonderful prison-break type story. Hodgson’s characters – Hawkins, but also his love interest, Kitty Sparks – aren’t just alive but bring the past alive with them. It’s like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones with the vividness of the Sixties, but then, if you know anything about eighteenth-century London, you’ll know that it was pretty wild place. This, after all, was long before the Victorians came along with their rather puritan social mores.

The most recent publication on this list, this book hit me this year like a brick, and surprisingly, that is a good thing.

I picked this book at a time when I needed to escape the world, and it truly offered that escape. Inspired by the true events of trying to track down those responsible for the beheading of Charles I, this is a powerful tale that leaves you questioning who exactly you’re supporting. An adventure that takes place both in England and America in 1660, it is a slow burn.

So yes, we have a degree of setting up, but if you enjoy slow-build tension, then this is the book for you. It’s a heavy dose of historical detail that transports you, and the ending? Hold onto your hats!

This is a crime novel set in 1919 Calcutta. We follow Captain Sam Wyndham, who is a former Scotland Yard detective seeking a fresh start after the emotional wounds following WWI and the death of his wife.

When a senior official is murdered, he doesn't hold back during his search from British mansions to seedy opium dens with his new sidekick, Sergeant Banerjee. Rising tensions, the clash of societies, the heat, dirt, and crowding all contribute to bringing this colorful period to life.

This is the debut novel and the first in a remarkably well-told series so interesting I found it impossible to put down. 

Set in the aftermath of the English Civil War; this is the fourth in Andrew Taylor’s bestselling series involving a government agent named James Marwood and his friend, Cat Lovett, who happens to be Oliver Cromwell’s daughter. In The Last Protector 1668 and Marwood and Lovett are on the trail of a mystery that goes back to the days of the republic, one quite literally hidden away in the bowels of the past, but also one which involves a very credible danger to both them individually and society at large. It’s gripping and immersive, and offers delicious personal and political jeopardy right up to the end.

Will killing Hitler ever not be the time travel question du jour? Maybe not, but this book takes a different tack, as a group of 21st century elitists, dissatisfied with their utopia, decide that helping Hitler would lead to a world more suited to their tastes. So they send back weapons and advisors to prop up Nazi Germany. This means, of course, that their foes — our heroes! — have to chase their way into the past and prop up none other than Winston Churchill as a counter to the rise of Hitler. The result is both not what you expect and also exactly what you expect.

Knowing about Noor Inayat Khan’s life is crucial to understanding why people become spies; her story is utterly startling.

I learned about Noor (codename Madeleine) while doing research in London for my fifth book. One of the people I interviewed was well-informed about the women who were trained as spies in WWII for Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive (SOE).

During that trip, someone left a copy of her biography, Spy Princess (a 2006 British publication), for me at the hotel front desk; to this day, I don’t know who. I read it on the flight back to the U.S. and was immensely moved by Noor’s motivations and her shocking bravery, especially after she faced the Gestapo and was sent to a concentration camp. 

Even though this book is mainly about a group of Germans trying to kidnap Prime Minister Winston Churchill as he is on his way to the Tehran Conference in 1943, the backstory gave me a few ideas for my book. It has an unusual story of an English woman revered by the villagers, but only when the Germans take over the village, her real identity is revealed. She is actually a Boer and was a survivor of a Boer Concentration camp run by the British during the Second Anglo Boer in South Africa. Filled with vengeance against the British for what they did to the Boers and to her family, she changes her identity, moves to England, and works as a spy for the Germans to kidnap PM Churchill. 

I was riveted by this revisionist history of how America got into World War I and changed American society and politics. He shows how much of American collective memory about why WWI was fought, and the perception of Germany in America was fashioned, to a large extent, by British propaganda. He also shows why Germany had no choice but to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare, which eventually brought the United States into the war.

Had the British modified the naval blockade on Germany, which starved the German population in a horrific manner, the United States might never have become involved. But Great Britain was determined to make sure Germany would never again pose a threat to its colonial overseas empire. President Wilson at first understood that American neutrality was the means by which he could have brokered peace, but British and French recalcitrance, and eventually the deaths of relatively few… show more.

There’s an expression among investigative journalists: follow the money. That’s exactly what the historian Andrew Roberts has done in this highly original and brilliant history of World War 2, full of economic insights.

How about this, for instance? “Hitler’s anti-Semitism  .. did nothing to aid Germany’s chances of winning the war, and possibly a great deal to retard them. The Holocaust was a mistake, tying up railway stocks … but above all denuding Germany of millions of potentially productive workers and potential soldiers.”

In other words, if railway trucks heading east through Germany had been full of soldiers heading for the eastern front instead of hapless Jews heading for Auschwitz and death, then Hitler’s invasion of Russia might have stood a better chance of success.

So if following the money strikes you as an essential way of getting to the truth, even when the subject is the economics of war,… show more.

This is a gigantic book of 665 pages, and a reading task not for the faint-hearted. It has no index, but then, preparing one might have taken months and easily have added another 100 pages to the book.

It is a reference book which can aid anyone seriously interested in the SS security services, the SD. Much of it is based on the basic SS files seized after the War, and it summarises and reproduces those with meticulous and overwhelming thoroughness. But it must be pointed out that the higher-level secret files of the SS and SD have never been found.

The Heinrich Pfeifer book supplies a great deal of information which was unavailable to Tyas. The personnel files of the department heads of the SD have not been found, and the most detailed account of that level of the operations of the SD is to be found in Pfeifer’s… show more.