The Dark Valley — Piers Brendon

Brendon's panoramic history of the 1930s covers the entire world — the United States, Europe, Japan, China, the Soviet Union — through the lens of the decade's political and economic crises. The book is written with unusual vividness and is particularly strong on the social and cultural texture of the period: on how ordinary people experienced the Depression, fascism, and the approach of war. One of the most ambitious works of popular history about the twentieth century — a decade in which liberal democracy came within reach of extinction, told with the detail and the gravity that scale demands.

'A magnificent and disturbing panorama of the 1930s. Brendon has written one of the great works of popular history.' — Sunday Times. 'Authoritative, lucid, and deeply sobering.' — The Guardian