Historical Biographical Fiction

In 1573, Countess Erzsébet Báthory gives birth to an illegitimate child. Secretly taken to a peasant family living in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, the infant girl is raised as their own. Years later, a young woman called Boróka—ignorant of her true history—is sent to join the Countess’s household. Terrified of the Countess’s murderous reputation and the brutally cruel women who run the castle, Boróka struggles to find her place. Then plague breaches the castle’s walls, and a tentative bond unexpectedly forms between the girl and the Countess.

On the orders of his boyhood friend, now King Philip of Macedon, Aristotle postpones his dreams of succeeding Plato as leader of the Academy in Athens and reluctantly arrives in the Macedonian capital of Pella to tutor the king’s adolescent sons. An early illness has left one son with the intellect of a child; the other is destined for greatness but struggles between a keen mind that craves instruction and the pressures of a society that demands his prowess as a soldier.

Eugenie Bearhani (1760-1835) was born in Calcutta, raised in Haiti, and brought as a servant - a free woman of color - to America by an English officer on the eve of the American Revolution. Yet none of that prepared Eugenie for her next employer: Colonel Aaron Burr, who some whispered had made a pact with the devil. The lines between master and servant soon tangle and blur, and first attraction becomes dangerous obsession. Many historians deny she even existed, but she and the children she bore to Burr were very real - so was her little-known marriage to America's first true villain.

Inspired by the extraordinary true stories of World War II’s American Army nurses famously known as the Angels of Bataan and the unsung contributions of Filipinas of the resistance, this novel transports us to a remarkable era of hope, bravery, perseverance, and ultimately—victory.

In death, she would become infamous, yet in life passed often unseen. Jane Parker, daughter of the scholar Lord Morley, leaves her home at a tender age, embarking on a career in the dangerous Tudor Court. From the halls of her father's house to the palaces of London, from England to Calais and the Field of the Cloth of Gold Jane will travel, seeing much of this world, and others.

Java Island, 1941. Six-year-old Rita Vischer cowers in her family’s dug-out bomb shelter, listening to the sirens and waiting for a bomb to fall. Her charmed life on Java—living with other Dutch families—had always been peaceful, but when Holland declares war on Japan and the Japanese army invades Indonesia, Rita’s family is forced to relocate to a POW camp, and Rita must help care for her little brother, Georgie.

Even with her privileged life, Lady Hester Stanhope knows that claiming the adventurous life she truly wants will not be easy, thanks to her eccentric father's stifling grip. With the help of her renowned statesman uncle William Pitt the Younger, she takes on the glittering, treacherous heights of London Society. Her formidable intelligence, outspoken opinions, and headstrong determination gain the favor of the beau monde's leading taste-maker Beau Brummell—and she quickly learns to bend the rules of the ton to her own advantage.

The year is 1928, and after the death of a maid at a glamorous society party, fortune heir Bryan Guinness seizes life and proposes to 18-year-old Diana, the most beautiful of the six Mitford sisters. The maid's death is ruled an accident, and the newlyweds put it behind them to begin a whirlwind life. Accompanying Diana as her lady's maid is Louisa Cannon, as well as a coterie of friends, family and hangers on, from Nancy Mitford to Evelyn Waugh. When a second victim is found in Paris in 1931, Louisa begins to see links with the death of the maid two years previously.

When bookish young American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company on a quiet street in Paris in 1919, she has no idea that she and her new bookstore will change the course of literature itself. Shakespeare and Company is more than a bookstore and lending library: Many of the prominent writers of the Lost Generation, like Ernest Hemingway, consider it a second home.

Born in sixteenth-century Argentina, Francisco Maldonado da Silva is nine years old when he sees his father, Don Diego, arrested one harrowing afternoon because of his beliefs. Raised in a family practicing its Jewish faith in secret under the condemning eyes of the Spanish Inquisition, Francisco embarks on a personal quest that will challenge, enlighten, and forever change him.

An epic re-creation of the exhilarating and mysterious time when the Sun King ruled Egypt, Ramses, the Son of Light, has become the rage in France. With over two million copies sold, it is the greatest publishing phenomenon to hit the shelves there in 20 years. Rameses is only 14 when his father, the Pharaoh Seti, begins testing his true mettle. Being the younger of two sons, the proud Ramses has a problem with being relegated to second place.

A gripping, fact-based story of how Daniel Morgan and his courageous riflemen played a crucial role in George Washington's victory in the American Revolution.... They wore hunting shirts, deer-skin leggins and moccasins. Each had a tomahawk and a scalping knife in their belts and carried "long rifles" in their hands. Every rifleman was a Patriot volunteer, a tracker, and a hunter. And they could kill a redcoat from 250 yards.

A fictional recreation of the turbulence of the 1960s civil rights movement, narrated from alternating perspectives, chronicles the life and times of charismatic African-American leader John Calvin Marshall, from his rise to national prominence to his tragic assassination.

One of history's most complex and alluring women, Anne Boleyn was irresistible to kings and commoners alike. Daughter of an ambitious country lord, Anne was sent to France to marry well and raise the family's fortunes. She soon surpassed even their greatest expectations when King Henry VIII swore he would put aside his loyal queen to make Anne his wife.

In 1761, a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling....

In this brilliantly imagined novel, acclaimed author C. W. Gortner brings Catherine to life in her own voice, allowing us to enter the intimate world of a woman whose determination to protect her family’s throne and realm plunged her into a lethal struggle for power. From the fairy-tale chateaux of the Loire Valley to the battlefields of the wars of religion to the mob-filled streets of Paris, this is the extraordinary untold journey of one of the most maligned and misunderstood women ever to be queen.

When young Gilded Age society matron Daisy Harriman is refused a room at the Waldorf because they don’t cater to unaccompanied females, she takes matters into her own hands. She establishes the Colony Club, the first women’s club in Manhattan, where visiting women can stay overnight and dine with their friends; where they can discuss new ideas, take on social issues, and make their voices heard. She hires the most sought-after architect in New York, Stanford White, to design the clubhouse.

In 1825, in rural Pennsylvania, Emma Hale marries an itinerant treasure-digger, a man who has nothing but a peep-stone in his pocket and a conviction that he can speak directly to God. His name is Joseph Smith and in a few short years, he will found his own religion, gather zealous adherents by the tens of thousands, and fracture Emma’s life and faith.

This series features a real historical figure—the formidable Ela Longespée. The young Countess of Salisbury was chosen to marry King Henry II’s illegitimate son William. After her husband’s untimely death, Ela served as high sheriff of Wiltshire, castellan of Salisbury Castle, and ultimately founder and abbess of Lacock Abbey.

Adored by her parents and pampered by the court, the infant Princess Mary’s life changes suddenly and drastically when her father’s eye is taken by the enigmatic Anne Boleyn. Mary stands firm against her father’s determination to destroy both her mother’s reputation and the Catholic church. It is a battle that will last throughout both her father’s and her brother’s reign, until she is almost broken by persecution.