Showing results by publisher "Highbridge Audio" in Biographical Fiction

A River Runs Through It is a universal story of family love and a lyrical masterpiece, as beautiful as the great trout rivers of western Montana upon which it is set. Its beauty is especially evident through the "near-perfect match" of reader Ivan Doig and author Norman MacLean.

On the set of Boom!, a big‑budget adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, Elizabeth Taylor is at the height of her fame. It's an exhilarating experience for everyone in her orbit. That includes Jean, her personal assistant, and Buddy, her semi-closeted best friend and costume designer. Yet Jean can see that for all Elizabeth’s verve, she's worried that her box-office potential is dimming. At thirty-five, she needs to stretch. She sets her sights on an unlikely role: the lead in the film version of Hello, Dolly!

Peter Rock's stunning autobiographical novel begins in the '90s on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin. The narrator, a recent college graduate, and a young widow, Mrs. Abel, swim together at night, making their way across miles of open water, navigating the currents and swells carried by the rise and fall of the lake. The nature of these night swims, and of his relationship to Mrs. Abel, becomes increasingly mysterious to the narrator as the summer passes, until the night that Mrs. Abel disappears.

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.

Sweeping yet intimate, Flight of the Wild Swan tells the story of Florence Nightingale, a brilliant, trailblazing woman whose humanity has been obscured beneath the iconic weight of legend. From adolescence, Nightingale was determined to fulfill her life's calling to serve the sick and suffering. Overcoming Victorian hierarchies, familial expectations, patriarchal resistance, and her own illness, she used her hard-won acclaim as a battlefield nurse to bring the profession out of its shadowy, disreputable status and elevate nursing to a skilled practice and compassionate art.

"Momma set me on the jukebox." So begins the personal story of Denise (Sweetie) Wooten, set between a post-civil rights era New York City and a growing but stale rural Alabama. We are thrust in the midst of a family longing for normalcy, but instead struggling with illness and all that comes with it - denial, anger, misunderstanding, and love. As cultures clash, we see the family through a child's eyes and walk with her as she makes sense of war fought far away, but with effects close to home, and a tragedy that changes her life forever.

The press dubs them "the Gold Dust twins." Born within a week of one another in Manhattan in 1912, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton both inherit unimaginable fortunes. By the time of their lavish coming-out balls, they are two of the richest women in the world. Barbara, heiress to the Woolworth millions, amasses seven husbands over her lifetime. Doris, meanwhile, has a sophistication and financial savvy that Barbara tries endlessly to emulate.

J. D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American World War II draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war - from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood.

After publishing many books, and after many failed TV opportunities, Bette Roseman finally signs a network contract for a TV series based on her novel The Viagra Diaries and dreams of a hit show. But when WC Network changes her protagonist's age from 60 to 20-something, Bette angrily confronts network CEO Joshua Bitterman. She demands that her protagonist maintain her original age, but he insists the public "wants young". After betrayal, intrigue, and bartering with the network, the impassioned Bette finds herself in the middle of a high-stakes Hollywood legal court battle.

In 1932, New York City, top reporter Lorena "Hick" Hickok starts each day with a front page byline - and finishes it swigging bourbon and planning her next big scoop. But an assignment to cover FDR's campaign - and write a feature on his wife, Eleanor - turns Hick's hard-won independent life on its ear. Soon, her work, and the secret entanglement with the new first lady, will take her from New York and Washington to Scotts Run, West Virginia, where impoverished coal miners' families wait in fear that the New Deal's promised hope will pass them by.

Franz Kafka scholars know Felice Bauer, his onetime fiancee, through his Letters to Felice, as little more than a woman with a raucous laugh and a taste for bourgeois comforts. Life After Kafka is her story. The novel begins in 1935 as Felice flees with her children from Hitler's Berlin, following her family and members of Kafka's entourage—including Grete Bloch, Max Brod, and Salman Schocken-as they try to escape the horrors of the Holocaust. Years later, a man claiming to be Kafka's son approaches Felice's son in Manhattan and the drama surrounding Kafka's letters to Felice begins.