Political Historical Fiction

Legendary fashion designer Coco Chanel is revered for her sophisticated style - the iconic little black dress - and famed for her intoxicating perfume Chanel No. 5. Yet behind the public persona is a complicated woman of intrigue, shadowed by mysterious rumors. The Queen of Paris, the new novel from award-winning author Pamela Binnings Ewen, vividly imagines the hidden life of Chanel during the four years of Nazi occupation in Paris in the midst of WWII - as discovered in recently unearthed wartime files.

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the first great revolution of the twentieth century began as working-class men and women occupied buildings throughout Dublin, Ireland, including the general post office on O’Connell Street. Among the commoners in the GPO was a young staff captain of the Irish Volunteers named Michael Collins. He was joined a day later by a fourteen-year-old messenger boy, Eoin Kavanagh.

The phone rings and the offer is made, leaving you only seconds to decide. Betray your country, or watch your family drop dead before your eyes. After the Iron Curtain's collapse, Russia appears to be finished as a superpower. But KGB general Vasily Karpov is secretly working to restore Russia's status by forcing Americans into traitorous acts of espionage and sabotage, with the aid of a new secret weapon.

Crispin the mosaicist wants to concentrate on his art. Rustem of Kerakek, a physician, is also on his own journey of self-discovery. But no man may withdraw from society that easily, and both men soon find themselves drawn into the deadly webs of Sarantium. Lord of Emperors is the sequel to Sailing to Sarantium.

Dermot McEvoy sweeps his listeners into the midst of one of the most heated political races in New York City history, where an unlikely player decides to make her presence known. First it hits the papers that the Virgin Mary has appeared to Jackie Swift, an affable G.O.P. congressman with a couple of nasty habits. She then appears in a dream to Wolfe Tone O'Rourke, a liberal political consultant who is still haunted by the ghost of Bobby Kennedy, whose death he feels responsible for.

Joseph Sherman first visits Saigon, the capital of French colonial Cochin-China, in 1925 on a hunting expedition with his father, a US senator. He is lured back again and again as a traveler, a soldier, and then as a reporter by his fascination for the exotic land and for Lan, a mandarin's daughter he cannot forget. Over five decades, Joseph's life becomes enmeshed with the political intrigues of two of Saigon's most influential families, the French colonist Devrauxs, and the native Trans - and inevitably with Vietnam's turbulent, war torn fate.

Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, is dismayed to find that many of the people he knows support presidential candidate Berzelius Windrip. The suspiciously fascist Windrip is offering to save the nation from sex, crime, welfare cheats, and a liberal press. But after Windrip wins the election, dissent soon becomes dangerous for Jessup. Windrip forcibly gains control of Congress and the Supreme Court and, with the aid of his personal paramilitary storm troopers, turns the United States into a totalitarian state.

Here is an extraordinary portrait of one of the most complicated - and misunderstood - figures among the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. But he is determined to tell his own story, and he chooses to confide in a young New York City journalist. Burr is the first novel in Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series.

After leaving the army and falling out with his family, the Honorable Catesby Burgoyne is drowning his sorrows when he comes across a woman being attacked by thugs. A fight is just what he needs, but little does he realize the lady he rescues will change his life. For Prudence Youlgrave is not just the victim of ruffians. Her life has been made a shambles by her selfish brother and brutish fiancé. But she has a bold and courageous spirit Catesby can't resist, and before he knows it, he finds he has rescued her again by marrying her himself.

From the author of The Frozen Lake comes an enthralling novel of love, betrayal, and idealism as three very different young women go up to Oxford in the years immediately before World War Two. Vee - the clergyman’s daughter. Boyish, alluring, she plans to use her time at Oxford to put right everything that went wrong in her loveless childhood.

Berlin, 1961. Rebecca Hoffmann erfährt durch Zufall, dass ihr Mann bei der Stasi arbeitet, und damit bricht ihre ganze Welt zusammen. Ihr Schicksal - und das eines ganzen Volkes - scheint besiegelt, als die Regierung eine Mauer erbauen lässt, die jede Flucht unmöglich machen soll. Doch weder Rebecca, noch ihre Kinder geben auf! Und sie bleiben nicht alleine...Boston, 1961. George Jake und Verena Marquand, zwei junge Schwarze, erfahren am eigenen Leib, was Rassendiskriminierung bedeutet - und wie falsch angebliche Freunde sein können. Wem kann man in einer von Misstrauen und Vorurteilen beherrschten Gesellschaft trauen, wem nicht.

From his birth in 106 BC in the hill town of Arpinum, Cicero, the educated son of a wealthy member of the equestrian order, is destined for greatness. From his tumultuous family life to his tenuous alliance with Julius Caesar to a fateful love affair with the Roman empress Livia and, finally, to the political role that will make him a target of powerful enemies, A Pillar of Iron is the story of Cicero's legacy as one the greatest influences on Western civilization.

In recent decades, ostensibly to combat the rising tide of criminality in Mumbai’s underworld, the Indian Police Service has carried out many hundreds of extrajudicial assassinations of suspects. Karan, an expert sharpshooter in an elite branch dispensed with dishing out this vigilante justice, has a difficult choice: Should he continue to blindly follow orders from his superiors, regardless of their moral standing, or take matters into his own hands and do what he believes to be right?

Alizée Benoit, an American painter working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), vanishes in New York City in 1940 amid personal and political turmoil. No one knows what happened to her. Not her Jewish family living in German-occupied France. Not her artistic patron and political compatriot, Eleanor Roosevelt. Not her close-knit group of friends, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner.

The year is 1939 and Europe is hurtling toward war. Paul Muller is an intelligence agent trying to fend off threats from Germany, but also from Britain and France. Secret agreements reveal unexpected danger and new menacing entanglements as Switzerland becomes a target in the impending conflict. Muller uncovers plots and schemes to gain advantage by ruse and ploy—and violence.

A fictional recreation of the turbulence of the 1960s civil rights movement, narrated from alternating perspectives, chronicles the life and times of charismatic African-American leader John Calvin Marshall, from his rise to national prominence to his tragic assassination.

García Márquez construyó, en El otoño del patriarca, una maquinaria narrativa perfecta que desgrana una historia universal -la agonía y muerte de un dictador- en forma cíclica, experimental y real al mismo tiempo, en seis bloques narrativos sin diálogos, sin puntos y aparte, repitiendo una anécdota siempre igual y siempre distinta, acumulando hechos y descripciones deslumbrantes.

Something has gone wrong. A group of American bombers armed with nuclear weapons is streaking past the fail-safe point, beyond recall, and no one knows why. Their destination - Moscow. In a bomb shelter beneath the White House, the calm young president turns to his Russian translator and says, "I think we are ready to talk to Premier Kruschchev." Not far away, in the War Room at the Pentagon, the secretary of defense and his aides watch with growing anxiety...

Under the Mediterranean sun, a drama begins in a café in Málaga. For Ian Ferrier, an employee of the United States Space Agency on holiday to visit his old friend Jeff Reid, it means the startling discovery that Reid is not just a wine exporter, but rather engaged in smuggling communist defectors to the West. Events take a turn for the worse when Ferrier, a stranger to the deadly world of espionage, must take sole charge of a high-ranking KGB agent. Alone in an frighteningly alien landscape, he can afford no mistakes when choosing whom to trust …

London 1671. The damage caused by the Great Fire still overshadows the capital. When a man’s brutally disfigured body is discovered in the ruins of an ancient almshouse, architect Cat Hakesby is ordered to stop restoration work. It is obvious he has been murdered, and Whitehall secretary James Marwood is ordered to investigate. It’s possible the victim could be one of two local men who have vanished – the first, a feckless French tutor connected to the almshouse’s owner; the second, a possibly treacherous employee of the Council of Foreign Plantations.