History is not destiny. It is choice, chance, and catastrophe.

In this uncompromising alternate history, Alexander Warrick – novelist, historian, and chronicler of lost worlds – asks the most dangerous question of the twentieth century: what if the Central Powers had won the First World War?

From the mud of Amiens to the oilfields of Mesopotamia, from the hunger strikes of Calcutta to the shipyards of Yokohama, Warrick follows the “Shadow Century” that might have been:

• A Germany triumphant yet brittle, ruling Mitteleuropa by tariffs and bayonets.
• A Britain forced into technocracy, holding its empire together with statistics and dominion blood.
• A fractured America, torn between communism, anarchy, and fading constitutionalism.
• A Japan ascendant in the Pacific, discovering empire is trap as much as triumph.
• And a Soviet Union wielding the first nuclear weapon, toppling the Kaiserreich not by invasion, but by fire.

Blending meticulous research with ruthless imagination, Paths Not Taken traces every thread: economics, politics, culture, colonial resistance, and the psychology of power. It is a portrait not of inevitability, but of fragility: how empires, even in victory, are already haunted by their defeats.

For readers of alternate history, political philosophy, and global history alike, this is not comfort, but clarity.