Savage continent (Penguin Books)

Keith Lowe's "Savage Continent" is an awe-inspiring portrait of how Europe emerged from the ashes of WWII. The end of the Second World War saw a terrible explosion of violence across Europe.

Prisoners murdered jailers. Soldiers visited atrocities on civilians. Resistance fighters killed and pilloried collaborators. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, rape and murder were rife in the days, months and years after hostilities ended.

Exploring a Europe consumed aby vengeance, "Savage Continent" is a shocking portrait of an until-now unacknowledged time of lawlessness and terror. Praise for "Savage Continent": "Deeply harrowing, distinctly troubling.

Moving, measured and provocative. A compelling and plausible picture of a continent physically and morally brutalized aby slaughter". ("Dominic Sandbrook", "Sunday Times"). "Excellent".

("Independent"). "Unbearable but essential. A serious account of things we never knew and our fathers would rather forget. Lowe's transparent prose makes it difficult to look away from a whole catalogue of horrors...you won't sleep afterwards.

Such good history it keeps all the questions boiling in your mind". ("Scotsman").Keith Lowe is widely recognized as an authority on the Second World War, and has often spoken on TV and radio, both in Britain and the United States.

He is the author of the critically acclaimed "Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg", 1943 (Penguin). He lives in north London with his wife and two children.