Showing results by publisher "Bloomsbury Publishing Plc" in Historical Fiction

The novel opens on a battlefield: trudging back from the front through a ravaged and icy wasteland, their horses dying around them, their own hunger rendering them almost savage, the Russian soldiers are exhausted, desperate for food and shelter. They find both, and then music and dance. And there, spinning unafraid among them, dancing for the soldiers and anyone else who'll watch him, is one small pale boy, Rudolf. Rudolf, a prodigy at six years old, who became the greatest dancer of the century, who redefined dance, rewrote his own life and died of AIDS before anyone knew he had it.

Early one morning in 1899, in a small town along the coast from Mombasa, Hassanali sets out for the mosque. But he never gets there, for out of the desert stumbles an ashen and exhausted Englishman who collapses at his feet. That man is Martin Pearce—writer, traveller and something of an Orientalist. After Pearce has recuperated, he visits Hassanali to thank him for his rescue and meets Hassanali's sister Rehana; he is immediately captivated.

Orlando King is a trilogy about a beautiful young man, raised in a remote and eccentric wilderness, arriving in 1930s London and setting the world of politics ablaze. In a time of bread riots and hunger marches, with the spectre of fascism casting an ever lengthening shadow over Europe, Orlando glidingly cuts a swathe through the thickets of business, the corridors of politics, the pleasure gardens of the Cliveden set, acquiring wealth, adulation, a beautiful wife and a seat in parliament.

Opening with the shooting of Lady Virginia 'Ginie' Courtauld in her tranquil garden in 1950s Rhodesia, The Dragon Lady, so called for the exotic tattoo snaking up her leg, tells Ginie's extraordinary story. From the glamorous Italian Riviera before the Great War to the Art Deco glory of Eltham Palace in the thirties, and from the secluded Scottish Highlands to segregated Rhodesia in the fifties, the narrative spans enormous cultural and social change.

Manchester, the summer of 1890. A city humming with industry and gleaming with affluence. But for Charles, cloistered in his middle-class parents' suburban villa on holiday from university, the city's vibrancy holds no charms. Bored and a little listless, he spends the summer in pursuit of his little sisters' governess, Hettie. Before the summer's end, both must face the consequences of their affair - consequences they will live with for the rest of their lives.

Life is never straightforward when you’re a full-time priest and part-time detective. So when a walk in a bluebell wood takes an unexpected turn, Archdeacon Sidney Chambers finds himself plunged into another murder investigation: who would want to kill a harmless old hippy - and why was the man foraging for poisonous plants? Sidney’s findings soon lead him into sunny Granchester’s dark underworld, where love is free and motives are shady.

1914. The old standards are going. There is bitterness in politics, talk of civil war in Ireland. But all this means little to Cynthia Weston, attractive wife of cabinet member Aylmer Weston and her nephew by marriage, Philip. They are caught up in the charmed, perilous toils of a mutual passion that will destroy all they hold most dear - while the shadow of war lengthens and darkens, ready to swallow their world whole.

Charlie’s experiences at the Battle of Kohima and the months he spent lost in the remote jungles of Nagaland during the Second World War are now history. Home and settled on a farm in Norfolk and newly married to Claire, he is one of the lucky survivors. Starting a family and working the land seem the best things a man can be doing. But a chasm exists between them. Memories flood Charlie’s mind; at night, on rain-slicked roads and misty mornings in the fields, the past can feel more real than the present.

Dawn, mist clearing over rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village and a young photographer takes the shot that might make his career. The image, of a staring soldier in the midst of mayhem, will become one of the great photographs of the war. But what Jonathan has seen in that village is more than he can bear. He flees to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo and to take different kinds of pictures: of streets and crowds and cherry blossom - and of a girl with whom he is no longer lost. Yet even here his history will catch up with him

Maya grows up in Germany knowing that her parents are different: from one another, and from the rest of the world. Her reserved, studious father is distant; and her beautiful, volatile mother is a whirlwind, with a penchant for lavish shopping sprees and a mesmerising power for spinning stories of the family’s former glory - of what was had, and what was lost.

Summer, 1914. Young Englishwoman Vivian Rose Spencer is in an ancient land, about to discover the Temple of Zeus, the call of adventure, and love. Thousands of miles away a twenty-year-old Pathan, Qayyum Gul, is learning about brotherhood and loyalty in the British Indian army. Summer, 1915. Viv has been separated from the man she loves; Qayyum has lost an eye at Ypres. They meet on a train, unaware that a connection is about to be forged between their lives – one that will reveal itself fifteen years later.

Colum McCann's first novel goes back to the years before the Spanish Civil War, following the adventures of a peripatetic Irish photographer from the war-strewn shores of Europe to the exotic plains of Mexico. The story is told in the words of the photographer's only son, a wanderer himself, who uses his father's unreliable memories and the fading remnants of his art to piece together his family history and explain the mystery surrounding his mother—a Mexican beauty brought back by his father to Ireland.

Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London and Chicago – and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship in the desolate military town where everything was a secret, including what their husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in barely finished houses with a P.O. Box for an address, in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all for the benefit of ‘the project’ that didn’t exist as far as the greater world was concerned.

It is the early months of the Arab Spring, 2011. But for three young men, two American and one Iraqi, their minds return again and again to 2006, to the bloodiest stretch of the Iraq War. Members of the same platoon, they were tasked with the often deadly job of repairing potholes in the roads of the Al Anbar Province: potholes that almost always concealed a home-made bomb. They have survived the war but now they must learn to live with themselves.