Showing results for "the liar" in Historical Fiction

When the Nazis invade Salonika, Greece, eleven-year-old Nico Crispi is offered a chance to save his family. He is instructed to convince his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading towards the east, where they are promised jobs and safety. He dutifully goes to the station platform every day and reassures the passengers that the journey is safe. Only after it is too late does Nico discover that the people he loved would never return.

In 1972 on Mudas Summers's 17th birthday, her beloved mama Ella is found hanging from the rafters of their home. Most people in Peckinpaw, Kentucky, assume that Ella's no-good husband did the deed. Others think Ella grew tired of his abuse and did it herself. Muddy is determined to find out for sure either way, especially once she finds strange papers hidden among her mama's possessions

Verity Hartley always tells the truth. Well, mostly. However, when her snooty neighbor returns to their small hamlet to brag about having a grand Season, a plethora of ballgowns, and so many suitors that she cannot possibly decide which one to marry, Verity tells a lie. She claims to be betrothed. To a duke. Who happens to be her family’s sworn enemy. But what are the odds that he would ever learn of this one, little, harmless falsehood?

Honoria Hartley enjoys flirting far too much to consider marrying. And besides, she’s been betrothed since birth to the long-lost Viscount Vandemere. But no one has actually ever met the viscount and, without an heir, the title will soon become extinct. So she’s willing to do anything to keep her viscount alive, even if she has to invent him herself.

What would you do if you saw a girl in a crowd whose face had the same, identical birthmark as your only child? A child who, nearly 10 years ago, you were told died? It's 1935, and housewife Emma glimpses a face in a crowd - a little girl with a very unique birthmark. Transfixed by the sight of a stranger; Emma becomes convinced that the girl is her long-lost daughter taken from her at birth. There is only one problem: Emma's daughter is dead. So who is the stranger?

Follow John and Alice as they are forced to leave the wilds of Labrador for an isolated future in Holyrood, Newfoundland, only to have their world turned upside down when they must face the consequences of the lives they lived. As the reality of their past unfolds with disastrous outcomes, will it mean they lose Beatrice forever to the mother who has longed for the child - a child born from a vicious assault and given away by a cruel stepmother - and is now eager to make her part of her new family?

Michael is branded a traitor as a child because of the murder of the king’s nine-year-old son, by his father David Kingman. Ten years later on Michael lives a hardscrabble life, with his sister Gwen, performing crimes with his friends against minor royals in a weak attempt at striking back at the world that rejects him and his family.

Young Gincy Tate's father is murdered before he can fulfill a contract to supply the Army with remounts. In order to pay his debts and save the ranch, she must make the sale in his place. Afraid the lien-holder, whom she suspects of being the murderer, will foreclose before June 7, 1883, she tells no one Morris Tate is dead. Instead, she says he is here, there, or elsewhere. Gincy hires two cowboys to help trail the herd to Fort Spokane.

When Nan Prunty's mother kept an alehouse in Portsmouth she renamed it The Duchess of Prunty, the title she claimed would have been hers had Lord Nelson lived. He was her lover. She saw him die at Trafalgar, or so she says. The details vary according to the amount of drink she's taken. Nan makes her own determined way in life, but always haunted by the wish to know the truth about her father. From the aging seamen at the Greenwich Hospital to the battlefields of the Crimea, Nan discovers the world is full of people with a story about Nelson.

Lochiel Ogle was born with a red-wine birthmark—and it put her life in jeopardy from the moment she entered the world. Mountain folks called it "the mark of the devil," and for all the evil that has plagued her nineteen-year existence, Lochiel is ready to believe that is true. And the evil surely took control of the mind of the boy who stole her as an infant, bringing her home for his mother to raise.

In these absorbing and exquisitely made novellas of relationships at home and abroad, both historical and contemporary, we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her final days as a transplant to New York City; a vulnerable American grad student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title novella, who gets more out of life than most of us; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high-school kid in America.

In 1926, musician Tom Hickey reads in a broadside about a lynching that the Los Angeles newspapers failed to report and discovers that the Negro victim was an old friend. When his neighbor, an LAPD detective, confirms that, officially, the lynching didn’t occur, Hickey decides to investigate the murder, earning himself beatings, gunfire meant to dissuade him, and warnings from a Klansman that he’s made some formidable enemies.

How true are the family histories that tell us who we are and where we come from? Who knows how much all the beautiful liars have embargoed or embellished the truth? During a long flight from Europe to Sydney to bury her mother, Australian expat Katrina Klain reviews the fading narrative of her family and her long quest to understand her true origins.