Political Historical Fiction

Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of its monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable and beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys, Amir and Hassan, growing up in Kabul. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him.

A brilliant rendering of a scandalous historical figure, Kate Manning's My Notorious Life is an ambitious, thrilling novel introducing Axie Muldoon, a fiery heroine for the ages. Axie's story begins on the streets of 1860s New York. The impoverished child of Irish immigrants, she grows up to become one of the wealthiest and most controversial women of her day.

On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years. She lives off vegetables and pigeons, burns her furniture and books to stay alive, and keeps herself busy by writing her story on the walls of her home. As the country goes through various political upheavals from colony to socialist republic to civil war to peace and capitalism, the outside world slowly seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers, and a note attached to a bird’s foot.

Beautiful, educated Svetlana Petrova defied her stifling aristocratic family to join a revolution promising freedom. Now, released after years of imprisonment, she discovers her socialist party vying for power against the dictatorial Bolsheviks and her beloved uncle, a champion of her cause, was murdered by a mysterious assassin named Orlova. Her signature? Blinding her victims before she kills them. Svetlana resolves to avenge his death by destroying this vicious opponent, even as she longs to reunite with the daughter she has not seen in years.

In the autumn of 1938, Germany's reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler, is growing frustrated at the British using their regional power in India to block the passage of an SS expedition to Tibet. Determined to spite them, he plots to steal something the British hold dear and have failed for the seventh time that spring to achieve: a first summit of Mount Everest. Seventy years later, seasoned mountain guide Neil Quinn's ninth visit to the top of the world's highest mountain, this time in charge of the 16-year-old son of a Long Island billionaire, begins to unravel.

Having shot someone in the chaos of 1963 Berlin, Joe Wilderness finds himself locked up, with little chance of escape. But an official pardon through his father-in-law, Burne-Jones, a senior agent at MI6, means he is free to go. His newest operation will take him back to Berlin, now the dividing line between the West and the Soviets. When the Russians started building the Berlin Wall in 1961, two 'Unfortunate Englishmen' were trapped on opposite sides. In 1965 there is a plan to exchange the prisoners on Berlin’s bridge of spies.

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America - an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naiveté of their own time in a work that endures as a valuable social document and one of America's most important satirical novels.

After the events of The Revolution of Marina M., the young Marina Makarova finds herself on her own amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War - pregnant and adrift in the Russian countryside, forced onto her own resourcefulness to find a place to wait out the birth of her child. She finds new strength and self-reliance to fortify her in her sojourn, and to prepare her for the hardships and dilemmas still to come. She finally returns to Petrograd, the city almost unrecognizable after two years of revolution, the haunted, half-emptied, starving Capital of Once Had Been....

Ahead of the German Blitz during World War II, English parents from every social class sent their children to the countryside for safety, displacing more than three million young offspring. In The Secret Guests, the British royal family takes this evacuation a step further, secretly moving the princesses to the estate of the Duke of Edenmore in “neutral” Ireland.

An old flame has returned to Chief Inspector Frederick Troy's life: Kitty Stilton, wife of an American presidential hopeful. Private eye Joey Rork has been hired to make sure Kitty's amorous liaisons with a rat pack crooner don't ruin her husband's political career. But he also wants to know why Kitty has been spotted with Danny Ryan, whose twin brothers, in addition to owning one of London's hottest jazz clubs, are said to have inherited the crime empire of fallen mobster Alf Marx. Before Rork can find out, he meets a gruesome end.

Delhi, the near future: a former journalist goes in search of answers after she finds herself stripped of identity and citizenship and thrust into a vast conspiracy involving secret detention centers, government sanctioned murders, online rage, nationalist violence, and a figure of shifting identifies known as the “New Delhi Monkey Man.” Bhopal, 1984: an assassin hunts a whistleblower through a central Indian city that will shortly be the site of the worst industrial disaster in history. Calcutta, 1947: a veterinary student’s life and work connect him to an ancient Vedic aircraft.

The long-awaited sequel to Exit Unicorns opens in the autumn of 1969. Casey and Pamela Riordan have fled the erupting violence of Belfast, Northern Ireland, only to find themselves tangled in the web of political corruption that permeates South Boston. Here, a man's life can hang upon the whim of another, and neighborhood politics and organized crime are one and the same.

In 1975, Gary Ruckler attends classes at Moscow State University as part of the first American Fulbright program in the USSR. Here he befriends Anna, her boyfriend Zaza, and their enigmatic friend Aslan. When Aslan mysteriously disappears into the mountains of Kazbegi, Georgia, Gary is swept up in events beyond his understanding and control. Fifteen years later, Tamar and Giorgi struggle through the “lost” decade of the 1990s in Tbilisi. Through three civil wars, a refugee crisis, and near-total societal collapse, the pair come of age in the underground arts scene.

This long-anticipated sequel to the national best seller Lionheart is a vivid and heart-wrenching story of the last event-filled years in the life of Richard, Coeur de Lion. Taken captive by the Holy Roman Emperor while en route home - in violation of the papal decree protecting all crusaders - he was to spend fifteen months imprisoned, much of it in the notorious fortress at Trefils, from which few men ever left alive, while Eleanor of Aquitaine moved heaven and earth to raise the exorbitant ransom.

La historia humana está plagada de individuos cuyos nombres perdurarán por siempre; hay otros tan icónicos que se los conoce solo por su nombre de pila. Pero existe otra categoría, la de aquellos que ni siquiera pueden ser nombrados y para quienes basta con una letra: a ella pertenece Benito Mussolini. Esta es la biografía novelada de un hombre y, a través de él, también la de una época entera, la del surgimiento del fascismo.

In this "ingenious" novel ( New York Times) by "one of Europe's most original and remarkable writers" ( Los Angeles Times), a proofreader's deliberate slip opens the door to romance-and confounds the facts of Portugal's past.

"Longtemps j'ai cru incarner une nation et mettre les puissants de ce monde à genoux. J'étais la légende faite homme. Les idoles et les poètes me mangeaient dans la main. Aujourd'hui, je n'ai à léguer à mes héritiers que ce livre qui relate les dernières heures de ma fabuleuse existence. Lequel, du visionnaire tyrannique ou du Bédouin indomptable, l'Histoire retiendra-t-elle ? Pour moi, la question ne se pose même pas puisque l'on n'est que ce que les autres voudraient que l'on soit."

He came. He saw. He conquered. Julius Caesar was a force to be reckoned with as a savvy politician, an impressive orator, and a brave soldier. Born in Rome in 100 BC, he quickly climbed the ladder of Roman politics, making allies - and enemies - along the way. His victories in battle awarded him the support of the people, but flush from power, he named himself dictator for life. The good times, however, would not last much longer. On the Ides of March, Caesar was brutally assassinated by a group of senators determined to end his tyranny, bringing his reign to an end.

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the first great revolution of the twentieth century began as working-class men and women occupied buildings throughout Dublin, Ireland, including the general post office on O’Connell Street. Among the commoners in the GPO was a young staff captain of the Irish Volunteers named Michael Collins. He was joined a day later by a fourteen-year-old messenger boy, Eoin Kavanagh.

In Fates and Traitors: A Novel of John Wilkes Booth, New York Times best-selling author Jennifer Chiaverini renders for the first time as fiction the compelling interplay between these pivotal actors - some willing, others unwitting - who made an indelible mark on the history of our nation.