Showing results for "life-" in Biographical Fiction

1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier; Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and relive memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view.

Hendrik Groen is 83¼ years old, and he has decided that it is time to make something of his life. He may be rich in years, but he refuses to give in to all the trappings of old age just yet. Hendrik's hilarious and touching diary documents his life as an OAP living in a care home. When he recruits some similarly young-at-heart friends to join his Old but Not Dead Club, Hendrik proves that love can blossom, rules can be broken and fun is within reach, even at their age.

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?

Mrs. Post, the President and First Lady are here to see you. . . . So begins another average evening for Marjorie Merriweather Post. Presidents have come and gone, but she has hosted them all. Growing up in the modest farmlands of Battle Creek, Michigan, Marjorie was inspired by a few simple rules: always think for yourself, never take success for granted, and work hard—even when deemed American royalty, even while covered in imperial diamonds.

Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and unpredictable father and his bewilderment and grief on his father’s death. When Karl Ove becomes a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature. Knausgaard has created a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives.

Thomas Wolfe’s first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, is at once a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story and a dark novel depicting a cynical post-war world view. The book follows the life of Eugene Gant, a young man driven by passion, intellect, and a search for something greater than himself. His earliest years in rural North Carolina include a wonderful education in poetry and literature against the backdrop of a loving, but tumultuous family life.

In the 1950s, after the publication of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel reconsidering the life of one of the most well-known Biblical figures, Herod the Great, reimagining him in a very different light than his villainous portrayal in the New Testament. In Hurston’s retelling, Herod is a forerunner of Christ, a religious and philosophical man who enriched Jewish culture and lived a life of adventure.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes “ I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”

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.

Sunday Times and New York Times best-selling author Cathy Glass returns with her first novel. The Girl in the Mirror is a moving and gripping story of a young woman who tries to piece together her past and uncovers a dreadful family secret that has been buried and forgotten. When Mandy learns her much-loved Grandpa is dying, she is devastated and returns to the house where she spent so many wonderful summers as a child. But the childhood visits ended abruptly, and those happy days are now long gone.

Adored by her parents and pampered by the court, the infant Princess Mary’s life changes suddenly and drastically when her father’s eye is taken by the enigmatic Anne Boleyn. Mary stands firm against her father’s determination to destroy both her mother’s reputation and the Catholic church. It is a battle that will last throughout both her father’s and her brother’s reign, until she is almost broken by persecution.

Peter Rock's stunning autobiographical novel begins in the '90s on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin. The narrator, a recent college graduate, and a young widow, Mrs. Abel, swim together at night, making their way across miles of open water, navigating the currents and swells carried by the rise and fall of the lake. The nature of these night swims, and of his relationship to Mrs. Abel, becomes increasingly mysterious to the narrator as the summer passes, until the night that Mrs. Abel disappears.

Rising singer-songwriters Jane Quinn and Jesse Reid looked untouchable. Captivating crowds in festival meadows, lighting up turntables, intoxicating fans from coast to coast. It was a connection that inspired the greatest love songs. But nothing lasts forever. Beneath the hits that made them, a dark secret threatened to break them. Now it’s time to hear the whole story, finally revealed in Jane’s iconic album, Songs in Ursa Major....

How much would you sacrifice to be free? For Theobald Wolfe Tone the answer was simple: Everything. Rebel: A Soldier is Born is the conclusion to the story of Theobald Wolfe Tone's short life, taking you on a roller-coaster ride from the first minute. Flipping across continents we learn about a young passionate man who is prepared to go to any lengths to secure freedom and rights for his fellow Irishmen. Never before has a novel been written about the life and times of Wolfe Tone. While it tells the story of the man, it accurately follows the historical path his life took.

Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He meets the sherpa who first summited Everest. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States – whose perspective sheds its own light on his story.

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.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of On the Bright Side by Hendrik Groen, read by Patrick Ryecart. Everyone's favourite octogenarian is back and - together with the Old-But-Not-Dead Club - is more determined than ever to wreak havoc. After a year mourning the death of his beloved friend Eefje, Hendrik picks up his pen once again to chronicle the goings on both inside his care home and in the increasingly confusing world outside.

At just four years old, Evelyn Gundrum’s happy world is turned upside down. Abandoned by her mother and eventually shipped to an orphanage run by the terrifying Sister Honora, Evelyn grows up amidst hardship and heartbreak, plagued by unresolved emotions that pursue her into adulthood. Spanning the years leading up to Great Depression through World War II, Evelyn Evolving is the real-life story of a girl seeking answers amongst a sea of questions. Will a mysterious letter from her mother change her fate? Does she reunite with elder sister Viola, her only source of comfort?

Was bleibt von uns, wenn alles, was wir kannten, untergeht? Der große Roman über Verlust und Neuanfang. Die Wolken hängen schwer über der Geest, als Ingwer Feddersen, 49, in sein Heimatdorf zurückkehrt. Er hat hier noch etwas gutzumachen. Großmutter Ella ist dabei, ihren Verstand zu verlieren, Großvater Sönke hält in seinem alten Dorfkrug stur die Stellung. Er hat die besten Zeiten hinter sich, genau wie das ganze Dorf. Wann hat dieser Niedergang begonnen? In den 1970ern, als nach der Flurbereinigung erst die Hecken und dann die Vögel verschwanden?

He was the most wanted man in the world for decades. Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born terrorist, carried out a wave of attacks across Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. A ruthless self-proclaimed revolutionary and notorious womanizer, he claimed to fight for the Palestinian cause and communist ideology, but also worked as a mercenary for rogue regimes and organizations.