Historical Biographical Fiction

Flora Thompson is best known as the author of Lark Rise to Candleford, a semi-autobiographical, bestselling series exploring Oxfordshire country life in the late 19th century. Heatherley picks up the story a year after her central character, Laura, left Candleford Green, moving on to Grayshott on the Hampshire/Surrey border, and with it, finding a new world. Through Laura, the book explores Flora’s experience working in a post-office, where to her surprise her customers included the authors Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw.

The year is 1450. Peter Schoeffer, an ambitious young scribe, returns from Paris to Mainz, his home town on the Rhine, at the behest of his foster father, a forward-thinking merchant and bookseller. There he is unwillingly thrown into a workshop that his father has financed, a strange, dark place run by a driven, caustic master named Johann Gutenberg. Its purpose is the manufacture of books in a new - and according to some, blasphemous - way: with a secret invention known as a printing press.

England, 1422: Owen Tudor, a Welsh servant, waits in Windsor Castle to meet his new mistress, the beautiful and lonely Queen Catherine of Valois, widow of the warrior king, Henry V. Her infant son is crowned king of England and France, and while the country simmers on the brink of civil war, Owen becomes her protector. They fall in love, risking Owen's life and Queen Catherine's reputation, but how do they found the dynasty that changes British history - the Tudors?

San Francisco, 1915. As America teeters on the brink of world war, Charmian and her husband, famed novelist Jack London, wrestle with genius and desire, politics and marital competitiveness. Charmian longs to be viewed as an equal partner who put her own career on hold to support her husband, but Jack doesn't see it that way...until Charmian is pulled from the audience during a magic show by escape artist Harry Houdini, a man enmeshed in his own complicated marriage. Suddenly charmed, Charmian's eyes open to a world of possibilities.

Did photography replace an absence in her life or expose the truth of her heart’s emptiness? While growing in confidence as a photographer, 18-year-old Jessie Ann Gaebele’s personal life is at a crossroads. Hoping she’s put an unfortunate romantic longing behind her as “water under the bridge”, she exiles herself to Milwaukee to operate photographic studios for those owners who have fallen ill with mercury poisoning. Jessie gains footing in her dream to one day operate her own studio and soon finds herself in other Midwest towns, pursuing her profession.

Bosworth 1485: After victory against King Richard III, Henry Tudor becomes King of England. Rebels and pretenders plot to seize his throne. The barons resent his plans to curb their power and he wonders who he can trust. He hopes to unite Lancaster and York through marriage to the beautiful Elizabeth of York. With help from his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, he learns to keep a fragile peace. He chooses a Spanish Princess, Catherine of Aragon, as a wife for his son Prince Arthur.

Ever-loyal Maddalena, a diminutive, blue-eyed, black slave, has borne Cosimo de' Medici a son and seen him rise to the position of cardinal. Now, late in life, she finds herself committed to a convent, as part of a scheme to protect the Medici bank from ruin by Cosimo's sons, by hiding a fortune in gold for Cosimo's grandson Lorenzo to inherit. But as the months go by, and the gold does not appear, her faith in Cosimo begins to wane, and with it, her confidence in her own worth. Has she been duped?

L'insurgé, c'est l'histoire de la Commune de Paris que Jules Vallès a connue de l'intérieur.

Ten thousand feet in the sky, aviatrixes from London to Paris to New York - fueled by determination and courage - have their eyes on the century's biggest prize. The year is 1927, and Amelia Earhart has not yet made her record-breaking cross-Atlantic flight. Who will follow in Charles Lindbergh's footsteps and make her own history?

Cuando los nazis amenazan con tomar el control de París, una joven cierra para siempre el maravilloso departamento de su abuela, dejando tras sus puertas tesoros y bellezas inimaginables. Marthe de Florian, famosa cortesana durante su juventud, buscó llenar su existencia con arte y lujos, evadiendo los recuerdos de una infancia ensombrecida por la pobreza y los oscuros callejones de Montmartre. Mientras la guerra está a punto de desatarse en Europa, usa las preciadas posesiones que ha coleccionado durante una vida para compartirle su historia y secretos a su nieta Solange.

A seductive literary mystery and mutigenerational story inspired by true events, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. imaginatively brings into focus the period of promise and tragedy that marked the writing of Sylvia Plath’s modern classic The Bell Jar. Lee Kravetz uses a prismatic narrative formed from three distinct fictional perspectives to bring Plath to life—that of her psychiatrist, a rival poet, and years later, a curator of antiquities.

Alexander the Great's sudden and unexpected death has left the largest, most formidable empire the world has ever seen leaderless. As the fight to take control descends into ruthless scheming and bloody battles, no one is safe. As wars on land and sea are lost and won, and promises are made only to be broken, long-buried secrets come to light in the quest for the true circumstances surrounding Alexander's death.

A deeply divided nation. Vicious politics. A shamelessly partisan media. A president loathed by half the populace. Smuggling and gang warfare along the Mexican border. Armed citizens willing to stand their ground and take law into their own hands.... That was America in 1881. All those forces came to bear on the afternoon of October 26, when Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers faced off against the Clantons and the McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona. It should have been a simple misdemeanor arrest.

The cause of Alexander the Great's sudden death is no longer in doubt - it was murder. But by whom? As his former followers struggle for power, the bonds of family, friendship and political loyalties are tested to the limit. As is the strength of the formidable empire that Alexander had wrought. Never before has the Western world seen such turmoil, such a threat to civilisation. As battles rage, armies, cities and thousands of lives are destroyed by the ruthless scheming of those who would be king. Or queen.

From a working-class family, Scotsman Andrew Cunningham stewards for wealthy travelers aboard elegant cruise ships of the early 20th century, but he resents those who flaunt their inherited wealth. New Yorkers Florence and Bradley Cumings, first-class passengers traveling aboard Titanic, are the exception, and the three discover an ancestral connection. As the ship sinks on the fateful morning of April 15, 1912, Florence watches in horror from her lifeboat.

Born in a small town in the desolate reaches of Western Texas and shaped by her girlhood in an industrial wasteland on the outskirts of Dallas, Bonnie Parker was a natural performer and a star student. She dreamed of being a movie star or a singer or a poet. But her dramatic nature, contorted by her limited opportunities and her overwhelming love for Clyde Barrow, pushed her into a course from which there was no escape but death.

Paris, 1798. Hortense de Beauharnais is engrossed in her studies at a boarding school for aristocratic girls, most of whom suffered tragic losses during the tumultuous days of the French Revolution. She loves to play and compose music, read and paint, and daydream about Christophe, her brother's dashing fellow officer. But Hortense is not an ordinary girl. Her beautiful, charming mother, Josephine, has married Napoleon Bonaparte, soon to become the most powerful man in France, but viewed by Hortense as a coarse, unworthy successor to her elegant father.

“Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell.

May 1483: The Tower of London. When King Edward IV dies and Lady Elysabeth Scrope delivers her young godson, Edward V, into the Tower of London to prepare for his coronation, she is engulfed in political turmoil. Within months, the prince and his brother have disappeared, Richard III is declared king, and Elysabeth's sister Margaret Beaufort conspires with her son Henry Tudor to invade England and claim the throne. Desperate to protect her godson, Elysabeth battles the intrigue, betrayal and power of the last medieval court to keep Prince Edward safe.

Based on the true story of Mary Bryant, an iconic figure in the foundational lore of Australia as Great Britain's penal colony, Fled is a sweeping, heart-wrenching account of one woman's lifelong search for freedom.