5) Casino Royale by Ian Fleming the debut of James Bond as he embarks on his first assignment since reaching his 00 status. I had read this years ago, but ended up drawn back to rereading it after watching Daniel Craig’s final movie in the role of the iconic super spy. Not my usual read, but I enjoy these for a break from the usually serious books I tend to read.
6) War Diaries of ‘Weary’ Dunlop: Java and the Burma-Thai Railway 1942-1945 by E. E. Dunlop have always wanted to find out more about the Thai-Burma Railway since watching ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ of course that was a movie and the reality of life as a POW was much more brutal. Sir Ernest Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop was an Australian surgeon who was captured by the Japanese during WWII and his published diaries provide unique insight into life inside one of these camps under the brutality of his Japanese captors.
7) Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Serhii Plokhy this was the book on the Cuban Missile Crisis that I had been waiting on. Most of what I have has been told from the American perspective, but this delivers new insight into just how close the world came to WWIII as the standoff over Soviet missile installations on Cuba. With recently available KGB records this provides the story of the crisis from the Soviet side as well as the political fallout for Khrushchev
