Showing titles in Biographical Fiction

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue and The Aviator’s Wife, a “rich exploration of two Hollywood friends who shaped the movies” (USA Today)—screenwriter Frances Marion and superstar Mary Pickford “Full of Old Hollywood glamour and true details...

En este audiolibro, la propia Rosa Montero nos habla de la superación del dolor, de las relaciones entre hombres y mujeres, del esplendor del sexo, de la buena muerte y de la bella vida, de la ciencia y de la ignorancia, de la fuerza salvadora de la literatura y de la sabiduría de quienes aprenden a disfrutar de la existencia con plenitud y con ligereza.

An American woman becomes entangled in the intense rivalry between iconic fashion designers Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli in this captivating novel from the acclaimed author of The Beautiful American. Paris, 1938. Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli are fighting for recognition as the most...

My name is Anna, and for some time now, I have been trying to account for certain events in my life—my adult life, that is—which, from this vantage point of forty-five years, I often find baffling. . . In 1985 Dublin, nineteen-year-old Anna Hughes is in thrall to Peter Gallagher, an older...

In Hitler’s Germany, loyalty is demanded and dissent is deadly. But for young Waltraud, nothing is more devastating than the day the Nazis steal away her father to fight in a war he didn't believe in. Even as their reign of terror spreads, she’s convinced war will never touch her quiet village. But when bombs start falling and innocent people disappear, she’s confronted with a stark reality…she might be next.

From the moment she first holds him, Gladys Presley loves her son Elvis ferociously. She will be his greatest influence, the love of his life. And he will love her back. But while he makes it big in Hollywood and achieves unimagined wealth and fame, there is another story - of drinking and diet pills, loneliness and loss. While the heat and music of the American South play in the background, a heartbreaking portrait of a mother’s love and a son’s devotion takes centre stage.

As the struggle between York and Lancaster continues, Margaret Beaufort fights for admittance to the court of the victorious Edward IV of York and his unpopular queen, Elizabeth Woodville. The old king and his heir are dead, leaving only Margaret's son, the exiled Henry Tudor, with a tenuous claim to the throne. The royal nursery is full, with two small princes securing York's continuing rule. But Edward and Elizabeth's magnificent court hides a dark secret, a deception that threatens the security of the English throne...and all who lust after it.

"God save the Queen! God save our good Queen Mary"! When these words rang out over England, Mary Tudor thought her troubles were over. She could put her painful past - the loss of her mother and mistreatment at the hands of her father - behind her. With her accession to the throne, Mary set out to restore Catholicism in England and find the love of a husband that she had long desired. But the tragedies in Mary's life were far from over. How did a gentle, pious woman become known as "Bloody Mary"?

May Sarton's parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her "real" life - not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude - both an exhilarating and terrifying state.

In this charming patchwork of fever dreams and memories, Pirkko Saisio transports us to the 1950s Finland of her youth, where she navigates life as an only child of communist parents. Convinced she will grow up to become a man, a young Pirkko keeps trying and failing to meet the expectations of the adults around her. But as she discovers that she can be the narrator of her own story, it is in language that she finds a refuge and a way to be seen at last.

The New York Times bestseller from Margaret George, author of Mary, Called Magdalene and Elizabeth I With her amazing ability to summon the voices of historical characters, Margaret George tells the story of the woman whose face "launched a thousand ships" in Helen of Troy. Laden with doom, yet...

With one impatient phone call, a young Christopher Isherwood is drawn into the film industry. On the other end of the line is the brilliant yet temperamental Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann. Christopher’s job is to rescue the script of a saccharine love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. Meanwhile, in the real Vienna of 1934, the Austrian right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught; his family is in danger in Vienna, while his prophecy of a coming war goes unheeded by his British colleagues.

In these short stories, collected and translated by Ralph McCarthy, we can see just how closely Dazai’s life mirrored his art, and vice versa, as the writer/narrator falls from grace, rises to fame, and falls again. Addiction, debt, shame, and despair dogged Dazai until his self-inflicted death, and yet despite all the lies and deception he resorted to in life, there is an almost fanatical honesty to his writing.

May 1536, London...a fallen queen sits waiting in the Tower of London, condemned to death by her husband. As death looms before her, Anne Boleyn, second queen of Henry VIII, looks back on her life...from the very beginning.

Standing by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, inside her house and wonders...is this it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life. Based on the intimate diaries Will Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent's interior life prior to his own existence.

In 1665, London was struck by the bubonic plague, an epidemic that was the last major instance of the bubonic plague in England. This instance of the plague killed 100,000 people over a year and a half, and was transmitted through rats that ran through the city. A Journal of the Plague Year was presented as an eyewitness account of the epidemic through the eyes of Londoners.

Panama, 1991. A broke 21-year-old throws a Hail Mary: the shortest Army contract possible, fleeing divorce and fatherhood. He ends up as MP Investigator "Eagle 12" in the sticky heat post-Operation Just Cause. One brutal weekend in Coco Solo barracks changes everything. Dawn anxiety, party highs, stripper nights, and self-deception collide with harsh reality—a neglected daughter, money demands, inescapable regret. Raw and inspired by true events, Eagle 12 captures the choking isolation of military life: jungle humidity vs. weak AC, fragile hope against relentless duty.

Brought to you by Penguin. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction Flaubert's Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad; with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and...

Doc Ebersole lives with the ghost of Hank Williams—not just in the figurative sense, not just because he was one of the last people to see him alive, and not just because he is rumored to have given Hank the final morphine dose that killed him.

This stunning novel tells the true story of the woman behind one of the world’s greatest artists, Vincent Van Gogh. In 1890, Vincent Van Gogh dies penniless, unknown, a man tortured by his own mind. Eleven years later his work is exhibited in Paris and his unparalleled talent finally recognised. The tireless efforts of one woman gave the world one of its greatest creative minds. But twenty-eight-year-old Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger, Vincent’s sister-in-law and the keeper of his immense collection of paintings, sketches and letters, has, until now, been written out of history.