Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Biographical Fiction

A tour-de-force of historical imagination, this is the story of three young men at the dawn of the French Revolution. Georges-Jacques Danton: zealous, energetic, debt-ridden. Maximilien Robespierre: small, diligent, terrified of violence. And Camille Desmoulins: a genius of rhetoric, charming...

Valentino Achak Deng is just a boy when conflict separates him from his family and forces him to leave his small Sudanese village, joining thousands of other orphans on their long, long walk to Ethiopia, where they find safety for a time. Along the way Valentino encounters enemy soldiers...

Childhood is exhilarating and terrifying. For the young Karl Ove, new houses, classes and friends are met with manic excitement and creeping dread. Adults occupy godlike positions of power, benevolent in the case of his doting mother, tyrannical in the case of his cruel father.Knausgaard...

Lady Jane Grey was born into the most dangerous of times. Child of a scheming father and a ruthless mother for whom she is a pawn in a dynastic game with the highest stakes, she lived a life in thrall to political machinations and lethal religious fervour. Growing up with the future Queen...

The towering capricious figure of Henry VIII dominates Elizabeth's childhood, but others play powerful roles: Mary, first a loving sister, then as queen a lethal threat; Edward, the rigid and sad little King; Thomas Seymour, the Lord High Admiral, whose ambitions, both political and sexual, are...

1926: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley travel to a villa in the south of France. They swim, play bridge and drink gin. But wherever they go they are accompanied by the glamorous Fife. Fife is Hadley’s best friend. She is also Ernest’s lover. Over the ensuing decades, Ernest’s literary...

Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and unpredictable father and his bewilderment and grief on his father’s death. When Karl Ove becomes a father himself...

From Irish PEN award-winning author Joseph O’Connor, Shadowplay explores the characters whose loves and lives inspired Dracula. 1878. The Lyceum Theatre, London. Three extraordinary people begin their life together. Henry Irving, the Chief, is the volcanic leading man and impresario; Ellen...

Nottingham, 1827. Mary Reddish, a young housemaid unjustly committed after defying her employer’s advances, must navigate the brutal treatments of the county asylum while trying to prove her sanity. Meanwhile, Ann and Thomas Morris, the asylum’s matron and director, struggle to uphold humane...

NATHAN TREEVES is dead, murdered by the Master of Mordew, his remains used to create the powerful occult weapon known as the Tinderbox. His companions, scattered, are making for Malarkoi - the city of the Mistress, the Master’s most powerful enemy. Hoping to find welcome there, or at least...

1236. Beautiful Ailenor of Provence, cultured and intelligent, is only thirteen when she marries Henry III. Aware of the desperate importance of providing heirs to secure the throne from those who would snatch it away, she is ruthless in her dealings with Henry's barons. As conflict escalates...

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE! A thrilling exploration of the nature of power through the inner workings of Putin's regime. Known as the "Wizard of the Kremlin," the enigmatic Vadim Baranov was a TV producer before becoming a political advisor to Putin, aka "The Czar." After his resignation from...

He became a bestselling novelist while still in college, immediately famous and wealthy. He watched his insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box. He was lost in a haze of booze, drugs and vilification. Then he was given a second chance. This is the life of Bret...

WINNER OF THE WALTER SCOTT HISTORICAL PRIZE FOR FICTION, 2020 WINNER OF THE DALKEY LITERARY AWARD FOR NOVEL OF THE YEAR, 2020 SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS, 2019 An Irish Independent and Irish Times Book of the Year, 2019 From the author of Tatty, the Dublin: One City One Book 2020...

This book is about fresh starts, about love, about friendship. It is also about the earth-shattering experience of becoming a father, the mundane struggles of family life, ridiculously unsuccessful holidays, the emotional strains of children’s’ birthday parties and pushing a pram around...

July 1540: the shock news of Cromwell's fall reaches the court of Margaret of Navarre, sister of Francis I of France and arguably the most cultured woman north of the Alps. She sends her courtier and poet, Nicolas Bourbon, an avid reformer with many friends in English court circles, to find out...

Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick", as she's known to her friends and admirers, is not...

Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers – one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets. Yet even though they want nothing more...

Kit Marlowe: playwright, poet, lover. In the plague-stricken streets of Elizabethan England, Kit flirts with danger, leaving a trail of enemies and old flames in his wake. His plays are a roaring success; he seems destined for greatness. But the queen's eyes are everywhere and the air is laced...

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...