Showing results for "cassandra" in Biographical Fiction

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.

Raised on tales of her revolutionary ancestors, Frances Perkins arrives in New York City at the turn of the century, armed with her trusty parasol and an unyielding determination to make a difference. When she’s not working with children in the crowded tenements in Hell’s Kitchen, Frances throws herself into the social scene in Greenwich Village, befriending an eclectic group of politicians, artists, and activists.

In a compelling, richly researched novel that draws from thousands of letters and original sources, best-selling authors Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie tell the fascinating, untold story of Thomas Jefferson's eldest daughter, Martha "Patsy" Jefferson Randolph - a woman who kept the secrets of our most enigmatic founding father and shaped an American legacy.

Cassandra attende davanti alla porta della fortezza di Micene che si compia il suo destino. Agamennone, che l'ha portata con sé come bottino di guerra, varca la soglia oltre la quale lo attende sua moglie Clitennestra per ucciderlo. Nel tempo che le resta, Cassandra ricorda gli eventi che hanno portato alla rovina di Troia, la sua città.

Poland, 1891. Marie Curie (then Marya Sklodowska) was engaged to a budding mathematician, Kazimierz Zorawski. But when his mother insisted Marya was not good enough, he broke off the engagement. A heartbroken Marya left Poland for Paris to study chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne. Marie would go on to change the course of science forever and become the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. But what if Marie had made a different choice?

Of all the glamorous stars of New York high society, none blazes brighter than Babe Paley. Her flawless face regularly graces the pages of Vogue, and she is celebrated and adored for her ineffable style and exquisite taste, especially among her friends - the alluring socialite Swans Slim Keith, C. Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness, and Pamela Churchill. By all appearances, Babe has it all. But beneath this elegantly composed exterior dwells a passionate woman - a woman desperately longing for true love and connection.

A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace but not yet, not quite, gone.

A train carrying exiled German prisoners from a labor camp arrives in southern France. Within moments, word spreads that Nazi capture is imminent, and the men flee for the woods, desperate to disappear across the Spanish border. One stays behind, determined to ride the train until he reaches home, to find a woman he refers to simply as “her.”

She was the small-town southern beauty transformed into a Hollywood love goddess. He was the legendary crooner whose voice transfixed the world. They were Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra. Separately they were irresistible; together they were an explosive combination. Ava’s star is rising just as Frank’s career—and public image as a family man—is taking a hit. Gone are the days of the screaming bobbysoxers and chart-topping hits. Ava, however, finds herself gracing the front page of every tabloid in America. Jealousy and cheating abound.

Rye, New York, 1893. Sadie Fremd’s dreams hinge on her family’s nursery, which has been the supplier of choice for respected landscape architects on the East Coast for decades. Now her small town is in a panic as the economy plummets into a depression, and Sadie’s father is pressuring her to secure her future by marrying a wealthy man among her peerage—but Sadie has never been one to play it safe. Besides, her heart is already spoken for.

Few of us can claim to be the authors of our fate. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy knows no other choice. With the eyes of the world watching, Jackie uses her effortless charm and keen intelligence to carve a place for herself among the men of history and weave a fairy tale for the American people, embodying a senator’s wife, a devoted mother, a First Lady - a queen in her own right. But all reigns must come to an end.

Stylish, outgoing, creative, May Alcott grows up longing to experience the wide world beyond Concord, Massachusetts. While her sister Louisa crafts stories, May herself is a talented and dedicated artist, taking lessons in Boston, turning down a marriage proposal from a well-off suitor, and facing scorn for entering what is very much a man's profession.

M. F. K. Fisher's first novel tells of a late-summer idyll at the Swiss farmhouse of Tim and Sara, where guests have gathered at ease on the terrace next to the burbling fountain in which baby lettuces are being washed, there to enjoy the food and wine served them by this stylish American couple. But all around these seemingly fortunate people, the forces of darkness are gathering: The year is 1939; World War II approaches.

She was a longtime lover of JFK. She was the ex-wife of a CIA chief. She was the sister-in-law of the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee. She believed in mind expansion and took LSD with Timothy Leary. She was a painter, a socialite, and a Bohemian in Georgetown during the Cold War. And she ended up dead in an unsolved murder a year after JFK’s assassination. The diary she kept was never found. Until now...

After the death of her beloved mother, Martha Jefferson spent five years abroad with her father, Thomas Jefferson, on his first diplomatic mission to France. Now, at 17, Jefferson's bright, handsome eldest daughter is returning to the lush hills of the family's beloved Virginia plantation, Monticello. While the large, beautiful estate is the same as she remembers, Martha has changed. The young girl who sailed to Europe is now a woman with a heart made heavy by a first love gone wrong.

She’d made it sound as though her husband would be joining them for dinner. She’d made it sound that way on purpose, and then she arrived alone. Los Angeles, 1934. Mary Frances is young, restlessly married, and returning from her first sojourn in France. She is hungry, and not just for food: She wants Tim, her husband Al’s charming friend, who encourages her writing and seems to understand her better than anyone. After a night’s transgression, it’s only a matter of time before Mary Frances claims what she truly desires.

This sleek, stylish novel set in 1940s New York, between the shock of Pearl Harbor and the landing of American troops in Europe, is a deft, romantic novel about a wartime love triangle involving a 22-year-old fashion designer poised to launch her career; the French expatriate writer and war pilot, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who’s left his Nazi-occupied country and come to Manhattan for a month, only to stay for two years; and his beautiful, estranged Salvadoran wife determined to winback her husband at all costs - and seductions.

In 1918, a fearless 22-year-old arrives in bohemian San Francisco from the Northeast, determined to make her own way. Renaming herself Dorothea Lange, she is soon the celebrated owner of the city’s most prestigious and stylish portrait studio. By the early 1930s, determined to expose the horrific conditions of the nation’s poor, she takes to the road with her camera, creating images that inspire, reform, and define the era. And when the US enters World War II, Dorothea chooses to confront another injustice - the incarceration of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans.