Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Biographical Fiction

A family torn apart. A king with an iron fist. Will their faith be strong enough to survive persecution and reunite? Jeanne is the wife of a wealthy merchant, but now she risks losing everything. Louis XIV's soldiers will stop at nothing to forcibly convert the country's Protestants to the "true" faith. The men ransack Jeanne's belongings and threaten her children. If Jeanne and Jacob can't find a way to evade the soldiers' clutches, their family will face a fate far worse than poverty and imprisonment. They may never see each other again....

It begins with Thomas, the son of a Suffolk tradesman. A brilliant boy sent to study at Oxford at the tender age of eleven. It ends with a disgraced Cardinal, cast from the King's side and estranged from those he loves. In her groundbreaking new novel, Alison Weir draws out the inner man for the first time and tells his story. It is one of a scholar, a lover and a father, a rival, a politician and a priest. A man who built an empire in England while leading a secret second life, who paid the highest price for his success.

1814 Sydney When Mary Greenway, freshly arrived from the old country, steps into the maelstrom of Sydney Town with three children at her skirts, she has high hopes of a new beginning, despite having little money and a husband in irons. After all, the sudden death of her sadistic first husband has meant freedom from her gilded cage and Francis Greenway is an architect of some promise, under the protection of Admiral Phillip himself.

Waking in the small hours, Marcel Proust embarks on a retrospective journey, endeavouring to capture the elusive moments that shaped his life. A sip of tea and the taste of a madeleine prompt further recollections, and the floodgates of memory open, pouring forth a torrent of vivid reminiscences.

The haunting story of the mother of the Tudors, Elizabeth of York, wife to Henry VII. Beautiful eldest daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville - the White Queen - the young princess Elizabeth faces a conflict of loyalties between the red rose and the white. Forced into marriage with Henry VII, she must reconcile her slowly growing love for him with her loyalty to the House of York, and choose between her mother's rebellion and her husband's tyranny. Then she has to meet the Pretender, whose claim denies the House of Tudor itself.

Melbourne, 1927. The summer flowers smell like Christmas the night Zara Dickins meets Harry Holt. Zara is wearing a dress she has designed and made herself. White organdie over a short black slip, with black embroidery and a crimson taffeta sash. It is party season and the university crowd are celebrating end-of-year exams. Zara loves dancing with the boys and flirting with them, but it's a game to her. Nothing serious. Until Harry. He plans to be a politician once he finishes law. She, a fashion designer, if she can find a way to break out of the secretarial pool.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, who he made famous, can help him. And thus, almost through no fault of his own, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark.

Into this fevered forum, a child is born. His mother is Agrippina, granddaughter of Emperor Augustus. But their imperial blood is no protection. The closer you are to the heart of the empire, the closer you are to power, intrigue, and danger. She faces soldiers, senators, rivals, silver-tongued pretenders, each vying for position. One mistake risks exile, incarceration, execution. Or, worst of all, the loss of her infant son.

This is the whole story, right from the beginning: the sun-bleached streets, the grimy bars on the Sunset Strip, knowing Daisy’s moment was coming. Relive the euphoria of success and experience the terror that nothing will ever be as good again. Take the uppers so you can keep on believing, take the downers so you can sleep, eventually. Wonder who you are without the drugs or the music or the fans or the family that prop you up. Make decisions that will forever feel tough. Find beauty where you least expect it.

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.

Here are the excruciatingly funny adventures of Suzanne Vale — a young film star and drug addict — who survives a rehab clinic only to rejoin the equally harrowing world of Hollywood. Out there on the edge, despair flips into hilarity, and we're left laughing as Suzanne struggles to come to terms with her various fantasylands.

On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home? Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week.

One of history's most complex and alluring women, Anne Boleyn was irresistible to kings and commoners alike. Daughter of an ambitious country lord, Anne was sent to France to marry well and raise the family's fortunes. She soon surpassed even their greatest expectations when King Henry VIII swore he would put aside his loyal queen to make Anne his wife.

In Flora Thompson's semi-autobiographical series Lark Rise to Candleford, she explores the Oxfordshire country life of her protagonist Laura in the 1880s and 1890s. This collection includes all three works in the trilogy, Lark Rise, Over to Candleford, and Candleford Green.

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?”

The soldiers called her the Angel of Waterloo...Henrietta Bartlett, the esteemed surgeon's daughter who was born on a battlefield, lost her mother on a battlefield, and was widowed on the battlefield, where she worked alongside her father on that fateful day in June 1815. But after the carnage of war, Hen dreams of peace, and her own home, and a society that would allow a woman to practice medicine. The new and faraway colony of New South Wales seems a paradise, where even convicts have a chance of a good life.

January 2003. The Berest family receive a mysterious, unsigned postcard. On one side was an image of the Opéra Garnier; on the other, the names of their relatives who were killed in Auschwitz: Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacques. Years later, Anne sought to find the truth behind this postcard. She journeys 100 years into the past, tracing the lives of her ancestors from their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris, the war and its aftermath.

Meet Jim Carrey. Sure, he's an insanely successful and beloved movie star drowning in wealth and privilege — but he's also lonely. Maybe past his prime. Maybe even...getting fat? He's tried diets, gurus, and cuddling with his military-grade Israeli guard dogs, but nothing seems to lift the cloud of emptiness and ennui. Even the sage advice of his best friend, actor, and dinosaur skull collector Nicolas Cage isn't enough to pull Carrey out of his slump.

Anthony Opoka and Florence Okori are coming of age in Uganda in the 1990s. Outstanding students, they believe in being good humans before they are kidnapped and forced into the fanatical Lord’s Resistance Army. In a legion of young recruits, no one gets closer than Anthony to powerful messianic warlord Joseph Kony and his darkest secrets. To stay sane as he spirals through chaos, Anthony clings to his childhood lessons about being a good human. Florence’s upbringing grounds her, too, helping her keep her dreams alive even as she’s pulled deeper into the insanity of Kony’s war.

Caleb Cheeshateaumauk was the first native American to graduate from Harvard College back in 1665. Caleb's Crossing gives voice to his little known story. Caleb, a Wampanoag from the island of Martha's Vineyard, seven miles off the coast of Massachusetts, comes of age just as the first generation of Indians come into contact with English settlers, who have fled there, desperate to escape the brutal and doctrinaire Puritanism of the Massachusetts Bay colony.