Real People, Fantastical Stories: Biographical Fiction

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • From the bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending comes an “extraordinary … first rate” novel (The New York Times Book Review) that follows the lives of two very different British men and explores the grand tapestry of late-Victorian Britain.

As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves...

A novel of Paris in the 1930s from the eyes of the Vietnamese cook employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, by the author of The Sweetest Fruits.

Viewing his famous mesdames and their entourage from the kitchen of their rue de Fleurus home, Binh observes their domestic entanglements while seeking his own place in the world. In a mesmerizing tale of yearning and betrayal, Monique Truong explores Paris from the salons

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A writer visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. His grandmother won't talk about it, but his grandfather reluctantly consents. The result is the captivating odyssey of two young men trying to survive against desperate odds.

An audiobook about heiress Mary Philipse's relationship with George Washington, based on historical accounts, letters, and personal journals by nine-time New York Emmy Award-winning journalist Mary Calvi.
"Love is said to be an involuntary passion, and it is, therefore, contended that it cannot be resisted." —George Washington
Did unrequited love spark a flame that ignited a cause that became the American

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“A fascinating novel, similar to Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha . . . A revisionist portrait of a beautiful and strong-willed woman” (Houston Chronicle).
 
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
 
From Anchee Min, a master of the historical novel, Empress Orchid sweeps readers into the heart of the Forbidden...

Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, and his children are at the center of the passions and intrigue that swirls around fifteenth-century Rome.

A true-life novel about Lily Casey Smith (the author's grandmother) who at age six helped her father break horses, at age fifteen left home to teach in a frontier town, and later as a wife and mother runs a vast ranch in Arizona where she survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy--but despite a life of hardscrabble drudgery still remains a woman of indomitable spirit.

A breathtaking historical novel that recreates the intimate milieu around Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm from 1907 through the 1930s, a period of great human suffering and destruction and also of enormous freedom and creativity, a time when the remnants and artifices of the old word still mattered, and yet when art and the social sciences were pirouetting with successive revolutions in thought and style. 
Set in a time when many men in the upper...

An incredible novel of the brilliant woman whose unsung influence helped shape two World Wars--Clementine Churchill.

"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Dovekeepers and The Museum of Extraordinary Things: a forbidden love story set on the tropical island of St. Thomas about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro the Father of Impressionism"-- "Growing up on idyllic St. Thomas in the early 1800s, Rachel dreams of life in faraway Paris. Rachel's mother, a pillar of their small refugee community of Jews who escaped the Inquisition,...