Margalit Fox Book order
Originally trained as a linguist, this author masterfully combines her passion for language with the craft of compelling narrative nonfiction. Her works delve into the fascinating world of how language shapes our understanding of the mind and forgotten civilizations. With a deep grasp of linguistic principles and a talent for storytelling, she offers readers a unique perspective on history and the psychology of communication. Each book is an investigative journey, unraveling ancient mysteries and personal narratives with precision and passion.







- 2024
- 2022
The Confidence Men
How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History
- 352 pages
- 13 hours of reading
Set during World War I, this gripping narrative recounts the remarkable true story of two prisoners who orchestrated a daring escape from captivity. Highlighting their ingenuity and resilience, the book delves into the challenges they faced and the elaborate plans they devised to secure their freedom. With a blend of historical detail and thrilling adventure, it captures the spirit of survival against the odds during one of history's most tumultuous periods.
- 2021
Confidence Men
- 352 pages
- 13 hours of reading
"Imprisoned in a remote Turkish prison camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors"-- Provided by publisher
- 2021
The astonishing true story of two First World War prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time.
- 2018
Conan Doyle for the Defense
- 319 pages
- 12 hours of reading
"In this thrilling true-crime procedural, the creator of Sherlock Holmes uses his unparalleled detective skills to exonerate a German Jew wrongly convicted of murder. For all the scores of biographies of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the most famous detective in the world, there is no American book that tells this remarkable story--in which Conan Doyle becomes a real-life detective on an actual murder case. In Conan Doyle for the Defense, Margalit Fox takes us step-by-step inside Conan Doyle's investigative process and illuminates a murder mystery that is also a morality play for our time--a story of ethnic, religious, and anti-immigrant bias. In 1908, a wealthy woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow home. The police found a convenient suspect in Oscar Slater--an immigrant Jewish cardsharp--who, despite his innocence, was tried, convicted, and consigned to life at hard labor in a brutal Scottish prison. Conan Doyle, already world famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was outraged by this injustice and became obsessed with the case. Using the methods of his most famous character, he scoured trial transcripts, newspaper accounts, and eyewitness statements, meticulously noting myriad holes, inconsistencies, and outright fabrications by police and prosecutors. Finally, in 1927, his work won Slater's freedom. Margalit Fox, a celebrated longtime writer for The New York Times, has "a nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality" (Kathryn Schulz, New York). In Conan Doyle for the Defense, she immerses readers in the science of Edwardian crime detection and illuminates a watershed moment in the history of forensics, when reflexive prejudice began to be replaced by reason and the scientific method"-- Provided by publisher
- 2018
Conan Doyle for the Defence
- 368 pages
- 13 hours of reading
Arthur and George meets The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: how the creator of Sherlock Holmes overturned one of the great miscarriages of justice.
- 2014
The decoding of Linear B is one of the world's greatest stories: from the discovery of a cache of ancient tablets recording a lost prehistoric language to the dramatic solution of the riddle nearly seventy years later, it exerts a mesmerising pull on the imagination. But this captivating story is missing a crucial piece. Two men have dominated Linear B in popular history: Arthur Evans, the intrepid Victorian archaeologist who unearthed Linear B at Knossos and Michael Ventris, the dashing young amateur who produced a solution. But there was a third figure: Alice Kober, without whose painstaking work, recorded on pieces of paper clipped from hymn-sheets and magazines and stored in cigarette boxes in her Brooklyn loft, Linear B might still remain a mystery. Drawing on Kober's own papers - only made available recently - Margalit Fox provides the final piece of the enigma, and along the way reveals how you decipher a language when you know neither its grammar nor its alphabet as well as the stories behind other ancient languages, like the dancing-man Rongorongo of Easter Island.