Showing titles in Biographical Fiction

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.

Patrick Melrose, cleaned-up and world-weary, is a reluctant guest at a glittering party deep in the English countryside. Amid a crowd of flitting social dragonflies, he finds his search for redemption and capacity for forgiveness challenged by his observation of the cruelties around him. Armed with his biting wit and a newly fashioned openness, can Patrick, who has been to the furthest limits of experience and back again, find release from the savageries of his childhood?

Frances Walsingham is the only surviving child of Queen Elizabeth’s ‘spymaster’ Sir Francis Walsingham. Better educated than most men, her father arranges her marriage to warrior poet Sir Philip Sidney. After Philip Sidney is killed in battle, Frances becomes Countess of Essex, and is banished from court after her husband Sir Robert Devereaux’s rebellion against the queen.

Waiter by day, man about Paris by night; the young and good looking Felix Krull has created for himself a personality to charm and deceive the world of wealth. When the Marquis de Venosta makes him a proposal that he can't refuse, the young Felix finds himself on the pathway that will elevate him into the world of riches.

For decades Hazie Coogan has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine “Miss Kathie” Kenton, veteran of multiple marriages, career comebacks, and cosmetic surgeries. But danger arrives with gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III, who worms his way into Miss Kathie’s heart - and boudoir. Soon, Hazie discovers that this bounder has already written a celebrity memoir foretelling Miss Kathie’s death in an upcoming musical extravaganza. As the body count mounts, Hazie must execute a plan to save Katherine Kenton for her fans and for posterity.

Jane Seymour has risen to become a lady in waiting to Queen Katherine, wife of King Henry VIII, but Jane has joined the household of the true Queen at a time most dangerous, as the King seeks to end his marriage to Katherine, and take Anne Boleyn as his Queen. Through years of struggle, Jane will watch as the England she knows, and the faith she honours are torn apart by the King's wish to take a new wife, and to break from the power of Rome. Devoted to her beloved mistress, Queen Katherine, Jane makes an oath to do all she can, to save England and its King.

Mientras su madre muere de cáncer en una ciudad del norte, la narradora hace el amor con una mujer en un hotel de Barcelona. Tiene un vuelo para visitar a su madre la mañana siguiente, pero ya llegará tarde. Poco después, su amante desaparece de forma brusca y definitiva. Cuando su pareja vuelve de Londres para instalarse con ella en un pequeño apartamento junto al mar, esta intenta ser la calma que sostenga la angustia de un cuerpo que llora a una madre y anhela a una amante.

The heartrending story of a British boy's four-year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Based on J. G. Ballard's own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy's life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai - a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.

Clara Kelley is not who they think she is. She's not the experienced Irish maid who was hired to work in one of Pittsburgh's grandest households. She's a poor farmer's daughter with nowhere to go and nothing in her pockets. But the other woman with the same name has vanished, and pretending to be her just might get Clara some money to send back home.

Matilda is the granddaughter of William the Conqueror but also descended, through her mother, from the ancient line of Anglo-Saxon kings. Betrothed to Emperor Henry of Germany at the age of eight, she is married at 12 and crowned Empress. By her early 20s she is a widow, and the only surviving legitimate heir to her father, Henry I of England. Forced into a second marriage to a boy 10 years younger, she gives birth to three sons, the male heirs her father longs for.

Mummy Where Are You? is the horrifying tale of one woman's attempt to protect her child from child abuse and the extraordinary lengths she goes to keep her child safe. When Charlotte's son tells her what Daddy is doing, a Kafkaesque nightmare begins as she leaves all she knows and loves in an instant, clutching her child's hand and crossing oceans.

Francis Cornish was always good at keeping secrets. From the well-hidden family secret of his childhood to his mysterious encounters with a small-town embalmer, an expert art restorer, a Bavarian countess, and various masters of espionage, the events in Francis' life were not always what they seemed. This wonderfully ingenious portrait of an art expert and collector of international renown is told in stylish, elegant prose and endowed with lavish portions of Davies' wit and wisdom.

A kiss, a touch. A smile and a beating heart. Love and sex and dreams, art and drugs and the madness of youth. Betrayal and heartbreak, regret and pain, the melancholy of age. Katerina, the explosive new novel by America's most controversial writer, is a sweeping love story alternating between 1992 Paris and Los Angeles in 2018. At its centre are a young writer and a young model on the verge of fame, both reckless, impulsive, addicted, and deeply in love.

"Mephisto" erzählt die Geschichte des Schauspielers Hendrik Höfgen, von seinen Anfängen im Hamburger Künstlertheater 1926 bis zum Jahr 1936, als es Höfgen (in manchen Zügen unverkennbar Gustaf Gründgens) zum gefeierten Star des neuen Reiches gebracht hat. Höfgen geht dafür jedoch einen Teufelspakt ein und verrät die humanen Werte, für die er einst eintrat. "Mephisto" ist ein zeitkritisches Panorama der Zustände im Dritten Reich - mit deutlich satirischen Elementen -, eine Geschichte von Anpassung und Widerstand.

Flora Thompson is best known as the author of Lark Rise to Candleford, a semi-autobiographical, bestselling series exploring Oxfordshire country life in the late 19th century. Heatherley picks up the story a year after her central character, Laura, left Candleford Green, moving on to Grayshott on the Hampshire/Surrey border, and with it, finding a new world. Through Laura, the book explores Flora’s experience working in a post-office, where to her surprise her customers included the authors Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw.

It’s 1954, and in Barbados, Ruby Haynes spots an advertisement for young women to train as nurses for the new National Health Service in Great Britain. Her sister, Connie, takes some persuading, but soon the sisters are on their way to a new country and a whole new world in terms of experiences. As they start their training in Hertfordshire, they discover England isn’t quite the promised land—for every door that’s opened to them, the sisters find many slammed in their faces.

It's a journey that most deem an insane impossibility. Yet on October 20th, 1811, Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt—daughter of one of the architects of the United States Capitol—fearlessly boards the steamship New Orleans in Pittsburgh. Eight months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, Lydia is fiercely independent despite her youth. She's also accustomed to defying convention. Against her father's wishes, she married his much older business colleague, inventor Nicholas Roosevelt—builder of the New Orleans—and spent her honeymoon on a primitive flatboat. But the stakes for this trip are higher.

For more than three decades, Yugoslavia's history played out in the life of one man. That man was Josip Broz Tito. The fictional autobiography of a regime insider, K. Balej's thoroughly researched novel provides a revealing insight into the emergence and functioning of the Yugoslav socialist system from the time of the Vienna Congress in 1815 to Tito's own death in 1980. It is an immersive exploration of the changing nature of Tito's power and the fascinating symbiosis of man and state that Tito represents.

It is 1191 and King Richard the Lionheart is on crusade to pitch battle against Saladin and liberate the city of Jerusalem and her lands. His mother, the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine and his promised bride, Princess Berengaria of Navarre, make a perilous journey over the Alps in midwinter. They are to rendezvous with Richard in the Sicilian port of Messina. There are hazards along the way - vicious assassins, marauding pirates, violent storms and a shipwreck. Berengaria is as feisty as her foes and, surviving it all, she and Richard marry in Cyprus and continue to the Holy Land.

In 1897, an on-field tragedy nearly killed the game of football in Georgia, until an unlikely heroine came to its defense. Inspired by historical events.