Showing titles in Biographical Fiction

Lever les yeux vers les étoiles. Aussi, à défaut de pouvoir les approcher, dans un monde où le métier d'astronaute est réservé aux hommes, elle est devenue astrophysicienne. Mais le jour où elle apprend que la NASA recrute des scientifiques, consciente des sacrifices qui s'annoncent, elle saisit sa chance. Ce matin de décembre 1984, quand Joan arrive au centre de contrôle à Houston, elle s'attend à vivre une journée comme les autres.

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 Paris Wife meets PBS’s Victoria in this enthralling novel of the life and loves of one of history’s most remarkable women: Winston Churchill’s scandalous American mother, Jennie Jerome. Wealthy, privileged, and fiercely independent New Yorker Jennie Jerome took Victorian England by...

Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel, and their five-year-old daughter, Regina, each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. Attorney Walter is resigned to working the farm as a caretaker; pampered Jettel resists adjustment at every turn; while the shy yet curious Regina immediately embraces the country - learning the local language and customs.

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...

From the author of Caroline, a revealing retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved Little Women, from the perspective of Margaret “Marmee” March, about the larger real-world challenges behind the cozy domestic concerns cherished by generations of readers. In 1861, war is raging in the South...

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...

Brought to you by Penguin. The heartbreaking Japanese classic telling the story of two orphans fighting for survival at the end of World War Two, published in English for the first time In the dying days of the War, Seita and Setsuko must fend for themselves. Firebombs have obliterated their...

With opportunities for black men limited in post-World War II London, Rick Braithwaite, a former Royal Air Force pilot and Cambridge-educated engineer, accepts a teaching position that puts him in charge of a class of angry, unmotivated, bigoted white teenagers whom the system has mostly abandoned. When his efforts to reach these troubled students are met with threats, suspicion, and derision, Braithwaite takes a radical new approach. He will treat his students as people poised to enter the adult world.

La nuit au cœur entrelace trois histoires de femmes victimes de la violence de leur compagnon. Sur le fil, entre force et humilité, Nathacha Appanah scrute l’énigme insupportable du féminicide conjugal, quand la nuit noire prend la place de l’amour. Un récit d'une grande puissance restitué par l'autrice elle-même.

Eine Freundschaft als Spiegel einer Stadt, einer Nation, einer ganzen Generation. Im Alter von 66 Jahren erfüllt sich Lila einen Traum: Sie verschwindet von einem Tag auf den anderen. Zurück bleibt ihre beste Freundin Elena und schreibt ihre gemeinsame Geschichte nieder: In den 1950er Jahren wachsen sie am Rande Neapels auf. Elena erzählt vom Alltag der kleinen Leute, vom Zugschaffner Donato, der Gedichte schreibt, vom tyrannischen Don Achille, von den Solara-Brüdern, die sonntags mit ihrem Auto den Corso abfahren.

An autobiographical short story about finding one’s place inside a Kyoto geisha house. After meeting a geisha she admires, a young woman enters a world shaped by hierarchy and unspoken rules. Quiet and minimalist, the story unfolds through small, everyday moments. She sits on the tatami floor. She serves her maiko and geiko seniors. She waits before touching her chopsticks, and is repeatedly corrected on something that seems small: greeting. Over time, she begins to understand what greeting asks of her.

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.

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...

In 1984, Detective Eric O'Malley investigated the bizarre deaths of a young couple, their bodies found naked by the side of a creek in Sydney's northern suburbs. Shortly before their demise, O'Malley learned, the pair had attended a swingers' party. The case was barely open before it was deemed an accident. But O'Malley knew it was murder. He just couldn't prove it. Thirty-five years later, O'Malley is found dead in his flat in what looks like a drug overdose. But his son James knows something's amiss. His dad was close to solving that case after all these years. And someone else knew it.

Britain, 1961. A beautiful blonde baby is born to Viscount Althorp, heir to the Spencer earldom. But Diana grows up amid the fallout of her parents’ messy divorce. She struggles at school. Her refuge throughout is romantic novels. She dreams of falling in love and being rescued by a handsome prince. In royal circles, there is concern about the Prince of Wales. Charles is nearing 30, and the right girl needs to be found fast. She must be young, aristocratic and completely free of past liaisons. Pure and innocent.

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India", Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

Joan of Kent may have been the daughter of a disgraced earl, but there's more than meets the eye about this high-spirited and savvy woman . . . who soon changes the course of history. At the height of the Middle Ages in the fourteenth century, King Edward III of England is determined to use any...

Who is the Secret Royal? Some say they’re a disgruntled courtier; others that it’s King Charles’ Head of Pens. Perhaps it’s just the Countess of Wessex (as you’ll see they do appear to be close to the late Queen). But then they do have the same cadence as Camilla... Whoever it is they’ve written a rip-roaring diary of 18 months behind the Palace walls, during one of the most tumultuous periods of The Firm’s existence.

Fourteenth-century Scotland suffers under the heel of England's King Edward, and James Douglas refuses to submit to the conqueror. As he wages a scorched-earth guerrilla war to drive out the invader and reclaim his birthright, Edward brings a vast army to crush the Scots. In the midst of the brutal war, even the woman James loves is threatened by his implacable duty.