Books like The road to Beersheba by Ethel Mannin

A collection of retold Greek and Roman myths from the Age of Fable by Thomas Bulfinch, drawing on classical literature and folklore for engaging retellings of ancient tales, including Venus and Adonis, Jupiter and Juno, and Daphne and Apollo.

Though it lasted for only six tense days in June, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war never really ended. Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada, is a direct consequence of those six days of fighting. Michael B. Oren’s magnificent *Six Days of War*, an internationally acclaimed bestseller, is the first comprehensive account of this epoch-making event. Writing with a novelist’s command of narrative and a historian’s grasp of fact and motive, Oren reconstructs both the lightning-fast action on the battlefields and the political shocks that electrified the world. Extraordinary personalities—Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin—rose and toppled from power as a result of this war; borders were redrawn; daring strategies brilliantly succeeded or disastrously failed in a matter of hours. And the balance of power changed—in the Middle East and in the world. A towering work of history and an enthralling human narrative, *Six Days of War* is the most important book on the Middle East conflict to appear in a generation.

Émile Zola’s historical novel, "The fortune of the Rougons," presents a panoramic view of French society, intertwining familial ambition and societal change against a backdrop of nineteenth‑century France.

Gertrude Bell’s 1905 journey through the Syrian Desert—from Jericho to Antioch—offers a vivid, first‑hand account of a distant land, its nomadic tribes, and the complex social fabric of early‑20th‑century Arabia.