Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Biographical Fiction

Fantasy, love and an exuberant celebration of English life and literature, Orlando is a uniquely entertaining story. Originally conceived by Virginia Woolf as a playful tribute to the family of her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, Orlando's central character, a fictional embodiment of Sackville-West, changes sex from a man to a woman and lives throughout the centuries, whilst meeting historical figures of English literature.

Her beauty almost certainly saved her from the rising Nazi party and led to marriage with an Austrian arms dealer. Underestimated in everything else, she overheard the Third Reich's plans while at her husband's side, understanding more than anyone would guess. She devised a plan to flee in disguise from their castle, and the whirlwind escape landed her in Hollywood. She became Hedy Lamarr, screen star.

Marion Crawford was 22 when she became governess to the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in 1933. A working-class girl with progressive ideas, she had intended to teach children in the Edinburgh slums. Instead, she had a ringside seat at some of the most seismic events of the 20th century. The castles and palaces housed a family frozen in time. But outside the royal gates, poverty and unemployment were breeding unrest in 1930s Britain. Hitler was on the rise in Europe. If royalty was to survive, it must draw closer to the people.

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India", Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

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.

The Duchess, the second novel in Wendy Holden's trilogy about royal outsiders, fictionalises the unknown London life of Wallis Simpson.

Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel, and their five-year-old daughter, Regina, each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. Attorney Walter is resigned to working the farm as a caretaker; pampered Jettel resists adjustment at every turn; while the shy yet curious Regina immediately embraces the country - learning the local language and customs.

Deutschland 1914: Die 15-jährige Anna beginnt im Spreewald ihre Schneiderlehre. Zur selben Zeit wird die Gutsherrentochter Charlotte von ihrer Tante und deren jüdischem Ehemann in die Leipziger Ballsaison eingeführt. Ohne es zu wissen, begegnen beide der Liebe ihres Lebens und treffen Entscheidungen, die sie bereuen werden. Doch zwei Weltkriege schreiben ihr eigenes Drehbuch und reißen ihre Familien immer wieder auseinander. Begegnen werden sich Anna und Charlotte erst 1953 in Berlin, zusammengeführt durch die Ehe ihrer Kinder - und verbunden durch denselben Schmerz, den sie erst einander wirklich offenbaren können.

Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late 20th century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between England and France yet a world away from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the story of those he has known.

Sous un ciel de plomb, des prisonniers défilent à l'entrée du camp d'Auschwitz. Bientôt, ils ne seront plus que des numéros tatoués sur le bras. C'est Lale, un déporté, qui est chargé de cette sinistre tâche. Il travaille le regard rivé au sol pour éviter de voir la douleur dans les yeux de ceux qu'il marque à jamais. Un jour, pourtant, il lève les yeux sur Gita et la jeune femme devient sa lumière dans ce monde d'une noirceur infinie. Ils savent d'emblée qu'ils sont faits l'un pour l'autre. Mais dans cette prison où l'on se bat pour un morceau de pain et pour sauver sa vie, il n'y a pas de place pour l'amour.

Rosalind Franklin has always been an outsider - brilliant, but different. Whether working at the laboratory she adored in Paris or toiling at a university in London, she feels closest to the science, those unchanging laws of physics and chemistry that guide her experiments. When she is assigned to work on DNA, she believes she can unearth its secrets. Rosalind knows if she just takes one more X-ray picture - one more after thousands - she can unlock the building blocks of life.

In 1909, Clementine steps off a train with her new husband, Winston. An angry woman emerges from the crowd to attack, shoving him in the direction of an oncoming train. Just before he stumbles, Clementine grabs him by his suit jacket. This will not be the last time Clementine Churchill will save her husband. Lady Clementine is the ferocious story of the ambitious woman beside Winston Churchill, the story of a partner who did not flinch through the sweeping darkness of war, and who would not surrender either to expectations or to enemies.

On a December night in 1938, a 10-year-old girl named Lore is put on the Kinder transport, a train carrying hundreds of Jewish children out of Austria to safety from Hitler's increasingly alarming oppression. Temporarily housed at the Dover Court Camp on England's east coast, Lore will find herself living in other people's houses for the next seven years: the Orthodox Levines, the Hoopers, the working-class Grimsleys, and the wealthy Miss Douglas and Mrs. Dillon.

In the cold spring of 1936, Arthor Crandle, down-on-his luck and desperate for work, accepts a position in Providence, Rhode Island, as a live-in assistant for an unnamed shut-in. He arrives at the gloomy colonial-style house to discover that his strange employer is an author of disturbing, bizarre fiction. Health issues have confined him to his bedroom, where he is never to be disturbed. But the writer, who Crandle knows only as "Ech-Pi", refuses to meet him, communicating only by letters left on a table outside his room.

Barney Panofsky - Canadian expat, wily lover of women, writer, television producer, raconteur - is finally putting pen to paper so he can rebut the charges about him made in his rival’s autobiography. Whether it’s ranting about his bohemian misadventures during the 1950s in Paris, his tumultuous three marriages, or his successful trashy TV company, Totally Unnecessary Productions, he quickly proves that his memory may be slipping, but his bile isn’t.

For some boys fitting in means standing out. Meet Frank - he isn't like other kids. Intrepid explorer, sartorial connoisseur; he's as strange as he is brilliant. But Frank discovers the hard way that people don't like brilliant, and they hate strange. What Frank longs for - aside from a father - is a friend.

Tantas páginas se han escrito sobre Carlota y Maximiliano que bastarían para tapizar cada muro del Castillo de Chapultepec. ¿Qué más queda entonces por decir? Esta novela no intenta revivir el Imperio mexicano con datos fehacientes ni héroes empolvados por la gloria. Lo que aquí se ofrece es otra cosa: un testimonio alucinante narrado por una cortesana que ha perdido la razón, y que desde ese margen turbio reconstruye la figura esquiva de la emperatriz Carlota. Una loca narrando a otra loca.

Lever les yeux vers les étoiles. Aussi, à défaut de pouvoir les approcher, dans un monde où le métier d'astronaute est réservé aux hommes, elle est devenue astrophysicienne. Mais le jour où elle apprend que la NASA recrute des scientifiques, consciente des sacrifices qui s'annoncent, elle saisit sa chance. Ce matin de décembre 1984, quand Joan arrive au centre de contrôle à Houston, elle s'attend à vivre une journée comme les autres.

The letter came in secret, with a pearl eardrop from an aunt long thought dead, resurrecting the forbidden past. Banished by her spiteful half sister, Queen Mary, to Hatfield House in the English countryside, 25-year-old Princess Elizabeth cannot refuse the summons. The Boleyns are in grave danger. And Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, is marked for death by a master poisoner whose reign of terror may have royal sanction.

García Márquez y Vargas Llosa se conocieron en el aeropuerto de Caracas, en agosto de 1967. Con apenas treinta y un años, Vargas Llosa era ya un escritor aclamado por la crítica. García Márquez, cuarenta años cumplidos, encontraba por fin el éxito editorial con Cien años de soledad, publicada ese año en Buenos Aires. Antes de confundirse en un abrazo en el aeropuerto de Caracas que dio inicio formal a la amistad, los dos genios de la literatura se habían escrito cartas y leído mutuamente con admiración.