Showing titles in Biographical Fiction

Tandis qu’au volant de sa voiture de location, il fait le tour de la France par les bords, Philippe Jaenada ne peut s’ôter de la tête l’image de cette jeune femme qui, à l’aube du 28 novembre 1953, s’est écrasée sur le trottoir de la rue Cels, derrière le cimetière du Montparnasse. Elle s’appelait Jacqueline Harispe, elle avait vingt ans, on la surnommait Kaki. Elle passait son existence Chez Moineau, un café de la rue du Four où quelques très jeunes gens, serrés les uns contre les autres, jouissaient de l’instant sans l’ombre d’un projet d’avenir.

Jerome. K. Jerome allows us to laugh, with and at, both himself and ourselves, in his writing. As we peruse his “Idle Thoughts” on subjects ranging from babies to ambition, from dogs to poverty, we find that the dust of over a hundred years have not dimmed the mirror in which we look. Jerome, as in his other comic works, presents a seeming stream of consciousness that can shift in a moment from the ridiculous to the sublime, from self-deprecation to intense longing.

It’s 1961, and for Margo Hightower, everything is about to change. True, her engagement is off, her family has fallen in scandal, and she's completely broke. But she’s just been hired as assistant to photographer Slim Aarons—famous for his vibrant pictures of high society, royalty, and Hollywood stars—and she knows this opportunity is her ticket to something better.

"Ich schreibe am eigenen Leben entlang, ein anderes Schreiben kenne ich nicht." Eine Kindheit in unkonventionellen Verhältnissen, das geteilte Berlin, Familienbande und Wahlverwandtschaften, lange, glückliche Sommer am Meer. Judith Hermann spricht über ihr Schreiben und ihr Leben, über das, was Schreiben und Leben zusammenhält und miteinander verbindet. Wahrheit, Erfindung und Geheimnis – wo beginnt eine Geschichte und wo hört sie auf? Wie verlässlich ist unsere Erinnerung, wie nah sind unsere Träume an der Wirklichkeit.

In 1942, Cork-born Kay Summersby’s life is changed forever when she is tasked with driving General Eisenhower on his fact-finding visit to wartime London. The pair takes an immediate liking to one another, and so begins a tumultuous relationship against all military regulations. Kay becomes known as 'Ike’s shadow', but that does not stop him from using his influence to grant Kay US citizenship. When the US authorities discover Eisenhower’s plans, Kay is forced to take desperate measures to hold on to the man she loves....

Frances Walsingham is the only surviving child of Queen Elizabeth’s ‘spymaster’ Sir Francis Walsingham. Better educated than most men, her father arranges her marriage to warrior poet Sir Philip Sidney. After Philip Sidney is killed in battle, Frances becomes Countess of Essex, and is banished from court after her husband Sir Robert Devereaux’s rebellion against the queen.

The Velveteen Daughter reveals for the first time the true story of two remarkable women: Margery Williams Bianco, the author of one of the most beloved children's books of all time, The Velveteen Rabbit, and her daughter Pamela, a world-renowned child prodigy artist whose fame at one time greatly eclipses her mother's. But celebrity at such an early age exacts a great toll. Pamela's dreams elude her as she struggles with severe depressions, an overbearing father, an obsessive love affair, and a spectacularly misguided marriage. Throughout, her life raft is her mother.

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.

Throughout David Copperfield, Dickens masterfully sustains the action through a series of dramatic contrasts. As the story unfolds, David’s happiest moments are often followed by those of extreme misery and the author weaves the more humorous elements of the story between the times of great tragedy and sorrow.

"The others form the human being, I depict him; and here I present an individual who is quite poorly formed and whom I would certainly make largely differently if I had to reshape him. But now that's the way he is." This phrase from the famous essays of Michel de Montaigne outlines the character of the author and his work. Montaigne wrote his essays not from a position of certainty but from an awareness of his inadequacy. He thus reveals a level of critical self-reflection that, before his time, was rarely put on paper.

The story of a writer's singular journey - from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another - is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.

Handsome, charismatic, and a champion jouster, Sir Charles Brandon is the epitome of a Tudor knight. A favorite of King Henry VIII, Brandon has a secret. He has fallen in love with Henry’s sister, Mary Tudor, the beautiful, widowed Queen of France, and risks everything to marry her without the King’s consent. Brandon becomes Duke of Suffolk, but his loyalty is tested fighting Henry’s wars in France. Mary’s public support for Queen Catherine of Aragon brings Brandon into dangerous conflict with the ambitious Boleyn family and the king’s new right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell.

Barney Panofsky - Canadian expat, wily lover of women, writer, television producer, raconteur - is finally putting pen to paper so he can rebut the charges about him made in his rival’s autobiography. Whether it’s ranting about his bohemian misadventures during the 1950s in Paris, his tumultuous three marriages, or his successful trashy TV company, Totally Unnecessary Productions, he quickly proves that his memory may be slipping, but his bile isn’t.

Patrick Melrose, cleaned-up and world-weary, is a reluctant guest at a glittering party deep in the English countryside. Amid a crowd of flitting social dragonflies, he finds his search for redemption and capacity for forgiveness challenged by his observation of the cruelties around him. Armed with his biting wit and a newly fashioned openness, can Patrick, who has been to the furthest limits of experience and back again, find release from the savageries of his childhood?

The Great Plague has London in its grip. As the summer heat rises, red crosses mark the doors, wealthy citizens flee, and only the poor remain to face the march of death. Ambitious and attractive, Bess Bagwell is determined her carpenter husband, Will, should make a name for himself and schemes to meet Samuel Pepys, diarist, friend of the King and an important man in the Navy shipyards. But Pepys has his own motive for cultivating Bess, and it’s certainly not to benefit her husband. With pestilence rife in the city, all trade ceases.

To the world, she was Princess Victoria, daughter of a queen, wife of an emperor, and mother of Kaiser Wilhelm. Her family just called her Vicky...smart, pretty, and self-assured, she changed the course of the world. January 1858: Princess Victoria glides down the aisle of St. James Chapel to the waiting arms of her beloved, Fritz, Prince Frederick, heir to the powerful kingdom of Prussia.

Josephine's life story was as turbulent as the age, an era of revolution and social upheaval, of the guillotine and of frenzied hedonism. With telling psychological depth and compelling literary grace, Carolly Erickson brings the complex, charming, ever resilient Josephine to life in this memorable portrait, one that carries the reader from the sensual richness of her childhood in the tropics to her final lonely days at Malmaison.

S'innamorano di una sagoma di cartone o di un pretoriano in miniatura, odiano i bambini pur portandoseli in grembo, lasciano una donna ma ne restano imprigionati, vomitano amore e rabbia, si tagliano, tradiscono, si ammalano. Sono alcuni dei personaggi del nuovo, strabiliante libro di Michela Murgia, un romanzo fatto di storie che si incastrano e in cui i protagonisti stanno attraversando un cambiamento radicale che costringe ciascuno di loro a forme inedite di sopravvivenza emotiva. "Una sera ti metti a tavola e la vita che conoscevi è finita."

Mientras su madre muere de cáncer en una ciudad del norte, la narradora hace el amor con una mujer en un hotel de Barcelona. Tiene un vuelo para visitar a su madre la mañana siguiente, pero ya llegará tarde. Poco después, su amante desaparece de forma brusca y definitiva. Cuando su pareja vuelve de Londres para instalarse con ella en un pequeño apartamento junto al mar, esta intenta ser la calma que sostenga la angustia de un cuerpo que llora a una madre y anhela a una amante.

Jackie: when her first marriage ends in tragedy, Jackie Kennedy fears she’ll never love again. But all that changes when she encounters...Ari: successful and charming, Ari Onassis is a man who promises her the world. Yet soon after they marry, Jackie learns that his heart also belongs to another. Maria: a beautiful, famed singer, Maria Callas is in love with Jackie’s new husband - and she isn’t going to give up.