D-day (Penguin Books)

This is reissued, with a new foreword, for the 70th Anniversary. Antony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy is the closest you will ever get to war - the taste, the smell, the noise and the fear.

The Normandy Landings that took place on D-Day involved by far the largest invasion fleet ever known. The scale of the undertaking was simply awesome. What followed them was some of the most cunning and ferocious fighting of the war, at times as savage as anything seen on the Eastern Front.

As casualties mounted, so too did the tensions between the principal commanders on both sides. Meanwhile, French civilians caught in the middle of these battlefields or under Allied bombing endured terrible suffering.

Even the joys of Liberation had their darker side. "Antony Beevor's gripping narrative conveys the true experience of war. As near as possible to experiencing what it was like to be there...It is almost impossible for a reader not to get caught up in the excitement".

(Giles Foden, Guardian). "No writer can surpass Beevor in making sense of a crowded battlefield and in balancing the explanation of tactical manoeuvres with poignant flashes of human detail".(Christopher Silvester, Daily Express).

Antony Beevor is the renowned author of Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, and Berlin, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees' Award.

His books have sold nearly four million copies.