Historical Biographical Fiction

Washington City, 1864. One has to be careful with talk of secession, of Confederate whispers falling on Northern ears. Better to speak only when in the company of the trustworthy, like Mrs. Surratt. A widow who runs a small boardinghouse on H Street, Mary Surratt isn't half as committed to the cause as her son, Johnny. If he's not delivering messages or escorting veiled spies, he's inviting home men like John Wilkes Booth, an actor who is even more charming in person than he is on the stage.

No one could have been more surprised than our Provincial Lady to receive an invitation from her American agent to travel transatlantic and embark upon a programme of lectures and signings. She was particularly amazed because, having received an overture sometime before and feeling that she would rather stay in the English countryside, she requested that they meet quite a few ‘requirements’ before she would agree to go. They met every stipulation. ‘

Daughter of a god, wife of a king, prize of antiquity's bloodiest war, Helen of Troy has inspired artists for millennia. Now Margaret George, the highly acclaimed best-selling historical novelist, has turned her intelligent, perceptive eye to the myth that is Helen of Troy.

> The Chaperone is a captivating novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922, and the summer that would change them both. Only a few years before becoming a famous actress and an icon for her generation, a 15-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle is a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip.

In 1937 F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled, uncertain man whose literary success was long over. In poor health, with his wife consigned to a mental asylum and his finances in ruins, he struggled to make a new start as a screenwriter in Hollywood. By December of 1940, he would be dead of a heart attack. Those last three years of Fitzgerald's life, often obscured by the legend of his earlier Jazz Age glamour, are the focus of Stewart O'Nan's gorgeously and gracefully written novel.

Some people have dreams that are so magnificent that if they were to achieve them, their place in history would be guaranteed. People like Christopher Columbus, Isaac Newton, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Edison, Nancy Astor, Charles Lindbergh, Amy Johnson, Edmund Hilary and Neil Armstrong - their unparalleled success has made their stories into legend.But what if one man had such a dream, and once he'd achieved it, there was no proof that he had fulfilled his ambition?

When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger - these are some of the luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the listener, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence.

An “extraordinary” (New York Review of Books) novel based on the true story of how German war profiteer and factory director Oskar Schindler came to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during World War II. In this milestone of Holocaust literature, Thomas Keneally, author of The Book of Science and Antiquities and The Daughter of Mars, uses the actual testimony of the Schindlerjuden — Schindler’s Jews — to brilliantly portray the courage and cunning of a good man in the midst of unspeakable evil.

Margaret Cezair-Thompson's second novel is a hit with book clubs across the country. A moving tale of discovery and reconciliation, The Pirate's Daughter follows a mother and daughter struggling with a difficult legacy. Living in tropical Jamaica, adventurous Ida dreams of a place outside of her small island town. And her 26-year-old daughter May - the illegitimate offspring of legendary actor and notorious playboy Errol Flynn - searches for an identity of her own.

Barbara Chase-Riboud is an award-winning poet, novelist, scholar, and sculptor. Hottentot Venus, a 2004 BCALA Literary Award winner, focuses on Sarah Blaartman, an African tribewoman who, because of her prominent sexual characteristics, was paraded as a freak before audiences in England and Paris. This mesmerizing novel reflects the racism and cruelty of turn-of-the-century Eurocentric culture, but it also reveals Sarah's remarkable strength of spirit.

Paris, 1878: Following the death of their father from overwork, the three van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without their father’s wages, and with what little their mother earns as a laundress disappearing down the absinthe bottle, eviction from their single boarding room seems imminent. With few options for work available for a girl, bookish 14-year-old Marie and her younger sister Charlotte are dispatched to the Paris Opera, where for a scant seven francs a week, the girls will be trained to enter its famous ballet. Their older sister, stubborn and insolent 17-year-old Antoinette, finds herself launched into the orbit of Émile Zola....

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.

Dracula. A name of horror, depravity and the darkest sensuality. Yet the real Dracula was just as alluring, just as terrifying, his story not of a monster but of a man - and a contradiction. For the one they called 'The Devil's Son' was both tyrant and lawgiver, crusader and mass slaughterer, torturer and hero, lover and murderer. His tale is told by those who knew him best. The only woman he ever loved, who he must sacrifice. His closest comrade and traitor.

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.

Karen Harper tells the tale of Consuelo Vanderbilt, her “Wedding of the Century” to the duke of Marlborough, and her quest to find meaning behind “the glitter and the gold”.

In this novel about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wife, Lidian, Amy Belding Brown examines the emotional landscape of love and marriage. Living in the shadow of one of the most famous men of her time, Lidian becomes deeply disappointed by marriage, but consigned to public silence by social conventions and concern for her family’s reputation. Drawn to the erotic energy and intellect of close family friend Henry David Thoreau, she struggles to negotiate the confusing territory between love and friendship while maintaining her moral authority and inner strength.

At the height of the Middle Ages in the 14th century, King Edward III of England is determined to use any means necessary to expand his power and gain control of England's bitter rival, France. His own son, Edward, prince of Wales, is far from immune from his political plans. And when Joan of Kent, now free from exile, sees her chance for revenge, she takes it. A calculated plot to scandalize the royal family for revenge for her father's downfall and execution soon turns into the most surprising thing: love.

In the 1950s, Oscar Hammerstein is asked to write the lyrics to a musical based on the life of a woman named Maria von Trapp. He’s intrigued to learn that she was once a novice who hoped to live quietly as an Austrian nun before her abbey sent her away to teach a widowed baron’s sickly child. What should have been a ten-month assignment, however, unexpectedly turned into a marriage proposal. And when the family was forced to flee their home to escape the Nazis, it was Maria who instructed them on how to survive using nothing but the power of their voices.

Early 1900s: The world belongs to men, and the art world in Stockholm, Sweden, is no different, until Hilma af Klint brings together a mysterious group of female painters and writers—Anna, Cornelia, Sigrid, and Mathilda—to form their own emotional and artistic support system. The members of the Friday Night Club find themselves thrust into uncharted territory when Hilma and her best friend, Anna, begin dabbling in the occult, believing that through séances they can channel unseen spirits to help them achieve their potential as artists.

Carmen empaca el último de sus abrigos mientras su esposo, Manuel, se acomoda indiferente la corbata frente al espejo. En Veracruz la espera el barco que los llevará hacia Europa en un último intento de darle color a una vida y un matrimonio insatisfactorios. Es 1914 y Carmen arde en deseos de conocer el París de las luces y la bohemia, quiere ser pintora y rodearse de todos los grandes: Picasso, Matisse, Gris...No puede imaginarse que, en unos años, será amiga de Diego Rivera y Tina Modotti y que, bajo un nuevo nombre que la marcará para siempre....