Endgame, 1945 David Stafford (Little Brown, £20)

Peace often comes at a huge price, and the devastated landscape of the end of the Second World War saw a thousand tales of retribution and survival. As a microcosm of the war's terrible human suffering, Stafford offers a mosaic of nine lives caught up in the period from Hitler's birthday to the Potsdam Conference. The critical three months, far from saving Europe from Nazi tyranny, brought its own catalogue of horror, with the BBC depiction of Buchenwald as its gates opened to reveal the chilling nightmare of the emaciated and the doomed. Here were freedom fighters and British SOE agents lucky to be alive, but also children like "little old men with yellow faces and sunken cheeks". Fay von Hessel, daughter of one of the executed 1944 plotters, relentlessly searches for her lost children. And there was revenge against the SS - "take them out and shoot them". Death was always in the shadow of truce.

The Plot Against Pepys James Long and Ben Long (Faber, £17.99)

Samuel Pepys's diary of 17th-century society entertains to this day. Secretary to the Admiralty and a patron in James, Duke of York, a notable Catholic in Protestant England, he was put in the Tower on a treason charge as part of a witch-hunt against Popish plotters, falsely accused of selling naval secrets to the invasion-minded French. In a brilliant piece of detective work, the Longs, father and son, reveal how Pepys escaped the gallows through his own investigations into the deceitful life of his principal accuser, Colonel John Scott, a fraudster and seducer of women on an unbelievable scale. Anyone who has read Antonia Fraser's The Gunpowder Plot will be aware of the anti-Catholic hysteria that put innocent people such as Pepys on trial. One breathes a sigh of relief that one of the most popular figures in history escaped a terrible fate.

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad John Stape (Heinemann, £20)

This exploration of Conrad's life travels beyond literary appraisal. The master of sailing ships to the Far East and Africa, which introduced the public to the exoticism of far-flung lands, was a lonely writer who laboured over his work with concentration and sensitivity. Behind the merchant marine veteran was an aristocratic gloom born of Polish despair at autocratic Russia - he was exiled with his activist father at the age of four. Conrad's brilliance showed not only in his command of the oceans, but also of his third language, English. His abilities were recognised by some of the greatest authors of the day, but he also struggled financially. Stape's biography impresses with its portrayal of Conrad's own "heart of darkness", away from the atrocities of the Congo - a reflection of his constant battle with life. Despite it all, his beautiful, imaginative quest into different worlds will always remain a great magnet.