Showing titles in Biographical Fiction

1950: Margaret Devonshire (Megs) is a 17-year-old student of mathematics and physics at Oxford University. When her beloved eight-year-old brother asks Megs if Narnia is real, logical Megs tells him it’s just a book for children, and certainly not true. Homebound due to his illness, and remaining fixated on his favorite books, George presses her to ask the author of the recently released novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe a question: “Where did Narnia come from?”

England 1835. Eliza Acton is a poet who dreams of seeing her words in print. But when she takes her new manuscript to a publisher, she’s told that ‘poetry is not the business of a lady’. Instead, they want her to write a cookery book. That’s what readers really want from women. England is awash with exciting new ingredients, from spices to exotic fruits. But no one knows how to use them. Eliza leaves the offices appalled. But when her father is forced to flee the country for bankruptcy, she has no choice but to consider the proposal.

For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Soon the family’s world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labor, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father.

In the scorched city of Rome, the cobbled streets hum with gossip and sin. Costanza Piccolomini is a respectable young wife - until she meets Gianlorenzo Bernini, the famed sculptor and star of Roman society, whose jet-black gaze matches his dark temper. From the second they set eyes upon each other, a fatal attraction is born. Their secret love burns with a passion that consumes them. But with every stolen kiss and illicit tryst, Costanza's reputation is at stake. Meanwhile, Bernini has a dangerous desire: he wants to make Costanza immortal.

Salisbury 1226. When a child of village outcasts disappears from Salisbury, the odious new sheriff doesn’t seem to care. Ela Longespée is determined to help the girl’s desperate parents and her investigation leads her into the thick of a human-trafficking ring in London. There, she vows to find the lost child, arrest the perpetrators, and convince the king to make her high sheriff of Wiltshire.

The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.

One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.

Morgan Conner had it all—until the words cheating wife appeared spray-painted across her property, turning her world upside down. Suddenly, her picture-perfect life is in pieces, and the whispers of her community grow louder by the second. Caught in a storm of judgment and betrayal, Morgan must dig deep to fight for her truth and her survival. In a society where appearances often mean more than facts, can she rise above the scandal and find her own voice?

Giulia Tofana longs for more responsibility in her mother’s apothecary business, but Mamma has always been secretive and refuses to tell her the hidden keys to her success. But the day Mamma is arrested for the poisoning of the powerful Duke de Verdi, Giulia is shocked to uncover the darker side of her trade. Giulia must run for her life and escapes to Naples, under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, to the home of her aunt Isabetta, a famous courtesan.

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....

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.

En octubre de 2016, el director de cine colombiano Sergio Cabrera asiste en Barcelona a una retrospectiva de sus películas. Es un momento difícil: su padre, Fausto Cabrera, acaba de morir; su matrimonio está en crisis, y su país ha rechazado unos acuerdos de paz que le habrían permitido terminar con más de cincuenta años de guerra.

May Sarton's parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her "real" life - not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude - both an exhilarating and terrifying state.

It’s a day in the life of three friends beefing with their own city, Tamaki Makaurau. With gentrification closing in and racial tensions sweltering, the girls must cling to their friendship like a life raft, determined not to let their neighbourhood drift out to sea.

This stunning novel tells the true story of the woman behind one of the world’s greatest artists, Vincent Van Gogh. In 1890, Vincent Van Gogh dies penniless, unknown, a man tortured by his own mind. Eleven years later his work is exhibited in Paris and his unparalleled talent finally recognised. The tireless efforts of one woman gave the world one of its greatest creative minds. But twenty-eight-year-old Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger, Vincent’s sister-in-law and the keeper of his immense collection of paintings, sketches and letters, has, until now, been written out of history.

Mary Bligh is no shrinking violet. After an horrific six-month sea voyage from Britain, she proves to be as strong-willed as her father, the bloody-minded, newly appointed Governor William Bligh. The pair immediately scandalise Sydney with their personalities, his politics and her pantaloons. And when 300 armed soldiers of the Rum Rebellion march on Government House to depose him, the Governor is nowhere to be seen as Mary stands defiantly at the gates, fighting them back with just her parasol.

From her beginnings as the daughter of a courtesan to her extraordinary transformation into the most celebrated actress of her era, Sarah Bernhardt is brought to life by an internationally best-selling author praised for his historical novels featuring famous women.

Born a veritable great lion of God to a devout Jewish family, Saul of Tarsus is raised by his parents to embrace their love of humanity. Dogged by what he perceives as a lack of true faith, he embarks on a journey to save his people from sacrilege. But on the road to Damascus a vision of the resurrected Jesus changes the course of his life. Converting to Christianity, the newly christened Paul transforms from persecutor of blasphemers into apostle to the gentiles, becoming one of the supreme influences on the Catholic Church and the Western world.

Panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his many failings as a writer and a man, Dunne leaves his wife and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. There he plans to write an account of the city as he finds it; the book he ends up writing is "a fiction which recalls time both real and imagined."

Like the creation myths they supersede, the revelations of science are seared into our collective imagination through storytelling. From Archimedes' bath to Newton's apple, vivid accounts of scientific discovery help us understand the principles behind each theory, and add to the larger narrative of how the universe works, and how we came to be here. This anthology draws out and distils science's love of narrative from a wide range of scientific disciplines, weaving theory into very human stories.

My name is Elena and I used to be a human being. Now I am a sex slave. If you are reading this diary then I am either dead or I have managed to escape... Trafficked: The Diary of a Sex Slave is a gritty, gripping, and tear-jerking fictional audiobook, inspired by real victims' accounts and research into the sex trafficking underworld.