Biographical Fiction

When Tiro, the confidential secretary of a Roman senator, opens the door to a terrified stranger on a cold November morning....

Junius is the patriarch, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a mesmerising talent and a man of terrifying instability....

Queenie is a 25-year-old Black woman living in south London, straddling Jamaican and British culture whilst slotting neatly into neither.... 

Rome, 63 BC. In a city on the brink of acquiring a vast empire, seven men are struggling for power....

Autumn 1192. With Jerusalem still in the Saracens' hands, and a peace treaty agreed with their leader Saladin, Richard the Lionheart is free at last to travel back to his strife-ridden kingdom....

In sensuous, resonant prose, Nuala O’Connor has conjured the definitive portrait of this strong, passionate and loyal Irishwoman. Nora is a tour de force, an earthy and authentic love letter to Irish literature’s greatest muse....

The classic samurai novel about the real exploits of the most famous swordsman. Miyamoto Musashi becomes a reluctant hero to a host of people whose lives he has touched and by whom he has been touched. Inevitably, he has to pit his skill against the naked blade of his greatest rival....

A naive young woman at the mercy of her ambitious family. At just 19, Katheryn Howard is quick to trust and fall in love....

Number one best-selling author Gill Sims is back with her eagerly awaited fourth and final Why Mummy novel....   

A tour-de-force of historical imagination....

Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He's a normal Italian teenager - obsessed with music, food, and girls....

1431 is a dangerous time for a woman to be defiant. Inside closed bedchambers and upon bloody battlefields, Cecily portrays war as women fight it....

Why Mummy Swears is the much anticipated new novel from Gill Sims, author of the hilarious Why Mummy Drinks and online sensation Peter and Jane....

Alison Weir, historian and author of the Sunday Times best-selling Six Tudor Queens series, recounts the story of Henry VIII's last wife - Katharine Parr, the queen who survived him....

1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters and girls sell dances for a shilling a time....

Family begins with a capital eff. Mummy dreams of a quirky rural cottage with roses around the door and chatty chickens in the garden. Life, as ever, is not going quite as she planned....

Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth and folklore and an exploration of the fluidity of time; vivid storytelling that brilliantly illuminates an introspective young mind trying to make sense of everything around him....

The 15th-anniversary edition of a brilliant, action-packed and gripping novel of Charles Darwin's voyage on the Beagle....

Jacquetta, daughter of the count of Luxembourg and kinswoman to half the royalty of Europe, was married to the great Englishman John, duke of Bedford, uncle to Henry VI....

Kateryn Parr, a 30-year-old widow in a secret affair with a new lover, has no choice when a man old enough to be her father, who has buried four wives, commands her to marry him....

The politics of empire-building and the hypocricies, back-stabbings and corruptions of Rome's first family come to light....

Here are the excruciatingly funny adventures of Suzanne Vale — a young film star and drug addict — who survives a rehab clinic only to rejoin the equally harrowing world of Hollywood....

Also known as Demons, The Possessed is a powerful socio-political novel about revolutionary ideas and the radicals behind them. It follows a political terrorist who leads a group of nihilists....

There was a time when Cicero held Caesar’s life in the palm of his hand. But now Caesar is the dominant figure, and Cicero’s life is in ruins....

Brooke Nolan is a battered child who makes an anonymous phone call about the escalating brutality in her home....

Chaddie McKail in the Canadian Northwest, enhancing the wonderful story of her first year as a new wife on the prairies. Gee Gee has fallen, in love that is. Witty, funny, intelligent. Gee Gee's letters to her friend tell the unscripted story of the adventures in her new life. A socialite world traveler, with not a care in the world, Gee Gee discovers in one telegram, that she lost her fortune, her fiancee, and possibly her place in proper society. No matter, Gee Gee is resourceful, intelligent, and brave. As luck would have it, she falls for Duncan, and now nothing else matters.

In London, early in the nineteenth century, five-year-old Mary Godwin, daughter of philosopher William Godwin, plays with her sister Fanny, mourns her deceased mother, and marvels as a hot-air balloon lands not far from the Thames River. Nearby, in Sussex, eleven-year-old Percy Shelley entertains his three sisters by telling them stories and performing tricks with chemicals and fire. A few years later, Mary and Percy meet and fall in love in the Godwin bookshop near Black Friar’s Bridge. 

As the United States wrestles with its besetting sin—slavery—abolitionist John Brown is growing tired of talk. He takes actions that will propel the nation toward civil war and thrust three courageous women into history: Wealthy Brown, married to John Brown's oldest son; Annie Brown, John Brown's daughter; Mary Brown, who never expected to be the wife of John Brown, much less the wife of a martyr. Spanning three decades, John Brown's Women is a tale of love and sacrifice, and of the ongoing struggle for America to achieve its promise of liberty and justice for all.

South China coast, 1801. Sold as a child to a floating brothel, twenty-six-year-old Yang has finally bought her freedom, only to be kidnapped by a brutal pirate gang and forced to marry their leader. Dragged through stormy seas and lawless bandit havens, Yang must stay scrappy to survive. She embeds herself in the dark business of piracy, carving out her role against the resistance of powerful pirate leaders and Cheung Po Tsai, her husband's flamboyant male concubine.

"The Mill on the Floss" is George Eliot’s second novel, and was published in 1860, only a year after her first, "Adam Bede". It centres on the lives of brother and sister Tom and Maggie Tulliver growing up on the river Floss near the town of St. Oggs (a fictionalised version of Gainsborough, in Lincolnshire, England) in the years following the Napoleonic Wars, with both as young adults eventually meeting a tragic end by the Mill which the family holds so dear.

Part diary, part scientific journal, part detective story, part love story: The Case of Emily V is thoroughly post-modern in its deliberate blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction, its cavalier blending of literary genres. But Oatley's first novel also resembles old 19th-century literature. His characters are dynamic, his storylines complex and suspenseful, his social commentary broad and integral to the plot.

Caribbean, 1720. Two extraordinary women are on the run—from their pasts, from the British Navy and the threat of execution and from the destiny that fate has written for them. Plantation owner's daughter, runaway wife, pirate—Anne Bonny has forged her own story in a man's world. But when she is involved in the capture of a British merchant ship, she is amazed to find another woman amongst the crew, with a history as unconventional as her own. Dressed as a boy from childhood, Mary Read has been a soldier, a sailor, a widow—but never a woman in charge of her own destiny.

The 1960s brought Seth and Payton all they'd fantasized about—perfect friendships, a successful four-man band, and most importantly, each other. Together they embarked on a tour that brought them stimulating highs and shattering lows, and they prospered and suffered in one another's arms. The two men carried each other and carried a group that created both a history and a future for rock. But, at some point, their music blurred with the news of their love, and the world was faced with the choice to embrace its heroes or revert back to its deep-rooted prejudices.

At the time of her death in 1815, twenty-nine-year-old Ellen Hutchins had catalogued over a thousand species of seaweed and plants from her native Bantry Bay. Ireland’s first female botanist, Ellen was a major contributor to nineteenth-century scientific discovery. And yet, like so many brilliant women lost in history, it is her personal story that will resonate today. In her remarkable debut novel, Marianne Lee fuses fact with fiction to imagine Ellen’s rich but tormented inner life, repressed by the gender and class confines of her time.

As the beautiful daughter of courtiers, Elizabeth "Bessie" Blount is overjoyed when she secures a position as maid of honor to Katherine of Aragon. But when she captures the attention of the king himself, there are whispers that the queen ought to be worried for her throne. When Bess gives birth to a healthy son the whispers become a roar. But soon the infamous Boleyn girls come to court and Henry's love for her begins to fade. 

Thomas John Maclean (TJ) is likely to have been one of the agents Ian Fleming had in mind when writing the James Bond series. The two men operated in MI6 concurrently, often in the same arenas. A dramatized account of TJ’s experiences during WWII, it is also the story of a generation. The children of that generation left to wonder why their parents argued and drank, drowning out the noise of war. All TJ wanted was the peace and time to love Liz, a fellow MI6 agent. Should they dare hope for a life together after the war? And even if they survived, could their love?

Based on the life of Mary Magdalene, Magdala beautifully pieces together the hidden remnants from the past and masterfully weaves them into a fascinating tale about faith, love, and our connection with the Divine. Magdala transports listeners 2,000 years into the past as it follows Mary Magdalene on her journey from innocence to cherished healer, sacred confidante, wife, and mother. 

With the age of voyages of discovery in the 15th century, the curtain of history slowly came down on the late Middle Ages. Portuguese and Spanish seafarers set out to remeasure the dimensions of the earth. Numerous spices and fruits, which we would hardly be able to do without today, found their way to Europe for the first time. Columbus discovered America in 1492 on his quest for India. Six years later, it was left to Vasco da Gama to travel through the sea route to India sought by Columbus on the eastern route around Africa.

Ukraine, 1940. When war rips their country apart, Julia is sent away by her tearful parents in the dead of night, clutching her mother’s necklace and longing for one last embrace. But soon she is captured by Nazi soldiers and forced into a German labor camp, where behind a tall fence topped with cruel barbed wire, she has never felt more alone. Just as she begins to give up on all hope, Julia meets Henry, a young man from her village who shares her heart full of dreams. 

In 1951, former debutante Jacqueline Bouvier is hard at work as the Inquiring Camera Girl for a Washington newspaper. Her mission in life is “not to be a housewife,” but when she meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy at a Georgetown party, her resolution begins to falter. Soon the two are flirting over secret phone calls, cocktails, and dinner dates, and as Jackie is drawn deeper into the Kennedy orbit, and as Jack himself grows increasingly elusive and absent, she begins to question what life at his side would mean.