Showing titles in Biographical Fiction

Rosalind Franklin has always been an outsider - brilliant, but different. Whether working at the laboratory she adored in Paris or toiling at a university in London, she feels closest to the science, those unchanging laws of physics and chemistry that guide her experiments. When she is assigned to work on DNA, she believes she can unearth its secrets. Rosalind knows if she just takes one more X-ray picture - one more after thousands - she can unlock the building blocks of life.

Del Wensley, wife of the most celebrated preacher in Harlan County, tries to mind her place. Until her husband’s infidelity pushes an already strained marriage to a breaking point. Clinging to her last hope for self-respect, Del turns her back on the rigid life she’s known. A coal train is rolling through the valley. With her eyes wide open to the unfamiliar, and to the freedom she craves, Del takes to the rails.

1525. As Anne Boleyn's star rises at Henry VIII's court, Jane Parker's marriage to Anne's brother, George, brings her status and influence. But theirs is not a happy union and results in a bitter and bloody end. 1540. When Katheryn Howard, a young cousin of the Boleyns, becomes the King's fifth bride, Jane's past allegiance to the crown secures her senior rank in the new queen's household.

From afar Talitha's life seemed perfect. In her twenties, and already a famous model and actress, she moved from London to a palace in Marrakesh, with her husband Paul Getty, the famous oil heir. There she presided over a swirling ex-pat scene filled with music, art, free love and a counterculture taking root across the world.

I would like to make myself the heroine of this story and my character to be noble - an innocent victim led astray. But alas, sir, I would be lying.... Tully Truegood: orphan. Magician's apprentice. Whore. In prison, accused of murder, Tully begins to write her life story. A story that takes her from a young daughter-skivvy in the back streets of 18th-century London to her stepmother Queenie's fairy house - a place where decadent excess is a must....

Hoping to make a clean break from a fractured marriage, Agatha Christie boards the Orient Express in disguise. But unlike her famous detective Hercule Poirot, she can't neatly unravel the mysteries she encounters on this fateful journey. Her cabinmate Katharine Keeling's first marriage ended in tragedy, propelling her toward a second relationship mired in deceit. Nancy Nelson - newly married but carrying another man's child - is desperate to conceal the pregnancy and teeters on the brink of utter despair.

The year is 1853, and the Habsburgs are Europe's most powerful ruling family. With his empire stretching from Austria to Russia, from Germany to Italy, Emperor Franz Joseph is young, rich, and ready to marry.

England. 1535. Jane Seymour is 27 years old and increasingly desperate to marry and secure her place in the world. When the court visits Wolf Hall, the Seymour ancestral manor, Jane has the perfect opportunity to shine: her diligence, efficiency, and newfound poise are sure to finally attract a suitor. Meanwhile, King Henry VIII is 45 and increasingly desperate for an heir. He changed his country's religion to leave his first wife, a princess of Spain, for Anne Boleyn—but she, too, has failed to provide a son.

Three extraordinary people begin their life together. Henry Irving, the Chief, is the volcanic leading man and impresario; Ellen Terry is the most lauded and desired actress of her generation; and ever following along behind them in the shadows is the unremarkable theatre manager, Bram Stoker. Bram is wrestling with dark demons in a new city, in a new marriage, and with his own literary aspirations. As he walks the London streets at night, streets haunted by the Ripper and the gossip which swirls around his friend Oscar Wilde, he finds new inspiration.

My name is Nat Davy. Perhaps you’ve heard of me? There was a time when people up and down the land knew my name, though they only ever knew half the story. The year of 1625, it was, when a single shilling changed my life. That shilling got me taken off to London, where they hid me in a pie, of all things, so I could be given as a gift to the new queen of England. They called me the queen’s dwarf, but I was more than that. I was her friend, when she had no one else, and later on, when the people of England turned against their king, it was me who saved her life.

"Je suis la véritable trace, le plus solide des indices attestant de tout ce que nous avons vécu en dix ans en Algérie. Je cache l’histoire d’une guerre entière, inscrite sur ma peau depuis que je suis enfant." Aube est une jeune Algérienne qui doit se souvenir de la guerre d’indépendance, qu’elle n’a pas vécue, et oublier la guerre civile des années 1990, qu’elle a elle-même traversée. Sa tragédie est marquée sur son corps : une cicatrice au cou et des cordes vocales détruites. Muette, elle rêve de retrouver sa voix.

Carrie Soto is fierce, and her determination to win at any cost has not made her popular. By the time Carrie retires from tennis, she is the best player the world has ever seen. She has shattered every record and claimed 20 Slam titles. She sacrificed nearly everything to become the best, with her father as her coach. But six years after her retirement, Carrie finds herself watching her record be taken from her by a brutal, stunning, British player named Nicki Chan. At 37 years old, Carrie makes the monumental decision to come out of retirement in an attempt to reclaim her record.

"Dans "L'Amant", Marguerite Duras reprend sur le ton de la confidence les images et les thèmes qui hantent toute son œuvre. Ses lecteurs vont pouvoir ensuite descendre ce grand fleuve aux lenteurs asiatiques et suivre la romancière dans tous les méandres du delta, dans la moiteur des rizières, dans les secrets ombreux où elle a développé l'incantation répétitive et obsédante de ses livres, de ses films, de son théâtre."

Mary Tudor watches her elder brother become King of England and wonders what the future holds for her. Born into great privilege, Mary has beauty and intelligence beyond her years and is the most marriageable princess in Europe. Henry plans to use her marriage to build a powerful alliance against his enemies. Will she dare risk his anger by marrying for love? Meticulously researched and based on actual events, this 'sequel' follows Mary's story from book three of the Tudor Trilogy and is set during the reign of King Henry VIII.

A poet’s life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind. This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value – art, memory, poetry, music, care – are thrown into sharp relief.

Now a major Sky TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch. The once illustrious, once wealthy Melroses are in peril, and Patrick Melrose, now a husband and father, is trying to gather together the pieces of his life. Caught up in the turmoil of broken promises, assisted suicide, adultery and - most tender and terrifying of all - fatherhood, Patrick is still a long way from salvation, but even as the family struggles against the pull of its dark past, a new generation promises new light, new hope and - perhaps - the promise of a brighter future.

Inside the beleaguered city of Rome in 1944, the Contessa Giovanna Landini is a member of the band of Escape Line activists known as ‘The Choir’. Their mission is to smuggle refugees to safety and help Allied soldiers, all under the nose of Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann. During a ferocious morning air raid a mysterious parachutist lands in Rome and disappears into the backstreets. Is he an ally or an imposter? His fate will come to put the whole Escape Line at risk.

The Paris Wife meets PBS’s Victoria in this enthralling novel of the life and loves of one of history’s most remarkable women: Winston Churchill’s scandalous American mother, Jennie Jerome.

1918: As the Great War rages, Jessie Carson takes a leave of absence from the New York Public Library to work for the American Committee for Devastated France, a group of women determined to rebuild devastated French communities just miles from the front. Upon arrival, Jessie strives to establish something that the French have never seen - children's libraries. She turns ambulances into bookmobiles and trains the first French female librarians. Then she disappears.

Also known as Demons, The Possessed is a powerful socio-political novel about revolutionary ideas and the radicals behind them. It follows the career of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, a political terrorist who leads a group of nihilists on a demonic quest for societal breakdown. They are consumed by their desires and ideals, and have surrendered themselves fully to the darkness of their "demons". This possession leads them to engulf a quiet provincial town and subject it to a storm of violence.