Showing results by publisher "Random House Audio" in Biographical Fiction

It is 1914, and 25-year-old Frances Marion has left her (second) husband and her Northern California home for the lure of Los Angeles, where she is determined to live independently as an artist. But the word on everyone's lips these days is "flickers" - the silent moving pictures enthralling theatergoers. Turn any corner in this burgeoning town and you'll find made-up actors running around, as a movie camera captures it all. In this fledgling industry, Frances finds her true calling: writing stories for this wondrous new medium.

At the age of thirty-five, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne has left her philandering husband in San Francisco to set sail for Belgium—with her three children and nanny in tow—to study art. It is a chance for this adventurous woman to start over, to make a better life for all of them, and to pursue her own desires....

In this novel of the glittering and gritty Jazz Age, a young aspiring photographer named Dorothea Lange arrives in San Francisco in 1918. As a newcomer - and naïve one at that - Dorothea is grateful for the fast friendship of Caroline Lee, a vivacious, straight-talking Chinese American with a complicated past, who introduces Dorothea to Monkey Block, an artists’ colony and the bohemian heart of the city. Dazzled by Caroline and her friends, Dorothea is catapulted into a heady new world of freedom, art, and politics.

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.

In searing, beautiful prose, Sam Shepard's extraordinary narrative tells in a brilliant braid of voices the story of an unnamed narrator who traces, before our rapt ears, his memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments for a condition that is rendering him more and more dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him. The narrator's memories and preoccupations often echo those of our current moment - for here are stories of immigration and community, inclusion and exclusion, suspicion and trust.

The further adventures of "Dr. Gonzo" as he defends the "cucarachas" - the Chicanos of East Los Angeles. Before his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1971, Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano lawyer and notorious as the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson's "Dr. Gonzo" a fat, pugnacious attorney with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs, and life on the edge.

Rocko Schamoni widmet sich dem großen Genie, das keiner kennt: Heino Jaeger. In den sechziger Jahren trifft Joska Pintschovius bei seiner Arbeit im Helms Museum auf den verschrobenen Heino Jaeger. Schon bald erkennt er in seinem neuen Freund den hochbegabten Künstler und Stimmenimitator. Er führt Heino Jaeger ein in die brodelnde Szene Hamburgs, verschafft ihm eine Radiosendung, protegiert ihn. Am Ende jedoch wird der von Eingeweihten als "Meister" kultisch Verehrte an seiner seelischen Durchlässigkeit verglühen.

Noah Klieger war 13, als er sich während der deutschen Besatzung Belgiens einer jüdischen Untergrundorganisation anschloss und half, jüdische Kinder in die Schweiz zu schmuggeln. Noah Klieger war 16, als er im Morgengrauen als Häftling in Auschwitz ankam, bei Minusgraden. Noah Klieger hatte noch nie geboxt, als am Tag seiner Ankunft im Konzentrationslager gefragt wurde, ob sich Boxer unter den Häftlingen befänden und seine Hand nach oben ging.

Anna und Armand haben den Zweiten Weltkrieg überlebt und ziehen gemeinsam nach Südfrankreich - doch fünf Jahre später packt Anna ihre Sachen und verlässt Armand. Nie wieder sprechen sie miteinander, nie offenbaren sie jemandem, was sie so unwiederbringlich entzweit hat.

In this brilliantly imagined novel, Amelia Earhart tells us what happened after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one glorious, windy day in 1937. And she tells us about herself.

In late-18th-century London, a young girl takes her first singing lessons with a mysterious castrato in exile. Her life is forever changed. Having learned everything he can teach her, Anna leaves behind all the security and familiarity of home and journeys to Naples and Venice to struggle and triumph in Italy’s greatest opera houses. Only 16, she finds herself in an intoxicating world of theaters, nobility, and vice, overwhelmed by her newfound freedom and fame.

Returning to her Midwest roots, award-winning author Jane Kirkpatrick draws a page from her grandmother's photo album to capture the interplay between shadow and light, temptation and faith that marks a woman's pursuit of her dreams. She took exquisite photographs, but her heart was the true image exposed. Fifteen-year-old Jessie Ann Gaebele loves nothing more than capturing a gorgeous Minnesota landscape when the sunlight casts its most mesmerizing shadows.

Did photography replace an absence in her life or expose the truth of her heart’s emptiness? While growing in confidence as a photographer, 18-year-old Jessie Ann Gaebele’s personal life is at a crossroads. Hoping she’s put an unfortunate romantic longing behind her as “water under the bridge”, she exiles herself to Milwaukee to operate photographic studios for those owners who have fallen ill with mercury poisoning. Jessie gains footing in her dream to one day operate her own studio and soon finds herself in other Midwest towns, pursuing her profession.

From Kathryn Harrison, one of America’s most admired literary voices, comes a gorgeously written, enthralling novel set in the final days of Russia’s Romanov Empire.

Als einziges überlebendes Kind seiner Eltern wächst Johannes Catt im Köln der Nachkriegszeit auf. Nach dem Verlust seiner vier Brüder ist die Mutter stumm geworden...