Showing results for "John Williams" in Historical Fiction

Brought to you by Penguin. By the author of Stoner, the surprise international bestseller After the brutal murder of his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, Octavian, a shy and scholarly youth of nineteen, suddenly finds himself heir to the vast power of Rome. He is destined, despite vicious power...

In the years following the death of Jesus Christ, John the Apostle, now a frail, blind old man, lives in forced exile on the desolate island of Patmos with a small group of his disciples. It is against this turbulent background and inspired by Jesus's radical message of love and forgiveness that John comes to dictate his Gospel.

"Stoner" - pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1965 - è stato per parecchio tempo uno dei grandi romanzi dimenticati della letteratura americana. John Williams racconta la vita di un uomo, Stoner appunto, che, nato in una famiglia di contadini poveri, finisce per scoprire dentro di sé una passione struggente per la letteratura e diventa professore. È la storia di un uomo che conduce una vita semplice al limite della frugalità. Una vita che lascia poche tracce.

The three novels that make up The Forsyte Saga chronicle the ebbing social power of the commercial upper-middle class Forsyte family through three generations, beginning in Victorian London during the 1880s and ending in the early 1920s. Galsworthy's masterly narrative examines not only their fortunes but also the wider developments within society, particularly the changing position of women.

Das neue Meisterwerk von John Williams. Verbündete, Gegner, Feinde – ein Herrscherleben in all seinen Facetten. Octavian ist neunzehn, sensibel, wissbegierig und will Gelehrter werden. Doch als Großneffe und Adoptivsohn Julius Cäsars fällt ihm nach dessen Ermordung ein gewaltiges Erbe zu: Ihm, der von schwächlicher Konstitution, aber enormer Willenskraft ist, wird es durch Glück, List, Intelligenz und Entschlossenheit gelingen, das riesige Römische Reich in eine Epoche des Wohlstands und Friedens zu führen.

An unlicensed promoter stumbles into the cockpit of a 1930’s seaplane and into an international air race, turning a sales stunt into a wild adventure, crossing the Australian outback, creating headlines, and near-death crashes. This is a rollicking aviation adventure based on a true story of a struggling 21-year-old ad guy and a 33-year-old seaplane spanning just 45 days as an unlicensed pilot in a daring attempt to participate in the 1969 London to Sydney Air Race. It begins with his abusive upbringing, starting at the bottom rung of the advertising world, leading to the start of his agency.

Devastated by the loss of his family, Gideon Markham has retreated to his ship and the life of the sea. Heir to a privateering tradition, he brings his schooner into the Gulf of Mexico to wage unremitting war on the British who threaten America’s freedom. But the puritanical Gideon finds the Gulf a strange and threatening place, and soon he must face Jean Laffite’s pirates, a mutiny, an attack by Red Stick Creeks, and a British invasion…none of which he finds as baffling and alarming as Maria-Anna de Suarez.

Mr. Saltz—known only as The Undertaker—runs a funeral parlor with secrets hidden beneath every floorboard. Emotionless, tasteless, and cold by nature, Saltz disposes of bodies for the city's most powerful crime boss, Manford Van Johnson. But when a relentless detective begins to connect the dots, and rival families move in to clean house, the quiet shadows start to stir.

In Lincoln's Bodyguard, an alternative version of American history, President Lincoln is saved from assassination. Though he prophesied his own death - the only way he believed the South would truly surrender - Lincoln never accounted for the heroics of his bodyguard, Joseph Foster. A biracial mix of white and Miami Indian, Joseph makes an enemy of the South by killing John Wilkes Booth and preventing the death of the president.

Born Black in the Jim Crow South of the early 1900s, John feels like the rabbits he hunts to feed himself, his mother, and his sisters...always running from White men. The Johnsons, owners of the largest peach farm and just about everything else in town, produce some strange and bitter fruit with their racism. So, when Carolyn Johnson sets her sights on John and his friends, they decide to escape before her vicious threats and well-practiced lies add them to her family’s crop, but things go horribly wrong.

Jon Zachery moves his wife and two small children to Meridian, Mississippi, in 1968 to begin US Navy flight training. He and his family wind up in the middle of a KKK resurgence. Jon must cope with the winnowing process that is Navy flight training while keeping his family safe. His wife Teresa discovers she is wed to the US Navy every bit as much as she is wed to Jon.