Big Chief Elizabeth: How England's Adventurers Gambled and Won the New World by Giles Milton (Sceptre, £6.99 in UK)

In this ripping, gripping, surprisingly entertaining adventure yarn, Giles Milton recounts the comedy, and tragedy, of errors which was the English attempt to "plant" settlers in the New World during the reign of the Virgin Queen. For more than 30 years, the visionary Sir Walter Raleigh (who helped to made the smoking of tobacco grown in the New World popular) poured much of his fortune into ships and supplies to send "gentlemen" colonisers, soldiers and tradesmen to settle in Virginia. After decades of facing immense obstacles, lack of maps, reckless (or crazy) leaders, shipwrecked supply ships, murderous pirates, violent storms, starvation, war with Indian tribes and war with Spain - the English, thanks to the Indian princess, Pocahontas (who saved them from annihilation), made peace with the tribes and managed to become self-sufficient. Using first-hand accounts and drawings, Milton's page-turner communicates the excitement and violence of the Elizabethan age and leaves the reader with a mystery: what happened to the group of colonisers who were abandoned there between 1587 and 1618?