Showing titles in Biographical Fiction

Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion, and prisoners eat, work, and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket, or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes.

Occupied France, 1942: Psychiatrist Dr. Adélaïde Hautval is arrested for defending a Jewish family. When she’s deported to Auschwitz and assigned to the women’s infirmary, she’s ordered to assist with sterilization experiments under SS doctors—including the infamous Josef Mengele. As the line between healing and harm blurs, Adélaïde makes a choice that could cost her everything. London, 1964: Two decades later, one of the Nazi doctors is on trial—and Adélaïde is the key to exposing the truth.

Lee Krasner was determined to be an artist. With single-minded passion she pursued her dream. By her twenties she was Hans Hofmann's best student, and a vanguard of America's first art movement, along with de Kooning, Kline and Pollock. But for most of the twentieth century, art was a man's world, and even her peers failed her. Another obstacle for Lee was her marriage to Jackson Pollock, whose star shone so brightly, it cast a shadow over everything around it, eventually self-destructing.

May Sarton's parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her "real" life - not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude - both an exhilarating and terrifying state.

Inspired by a true story, this is a moving reimagining of loss, legacy and the fragile truth between memory and myth… She was never meant to be a symbol, but the world made her one In 1912, fourteen-year-old Helen ‘Melville’ Smith loses her father, Captain Edward J. Smith of the Titanic...

** THE INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON ** 'There are many laughs in this book but it's so much more than just a comedy. It's a story about how friendship, selflessness and dignity lie at the heart of the human experience. When I'm an old man, I want to be Hendrik Groen' John Boyne, author of...

Celia Imrie and Toby Jones star in this BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Gerald Durrell's much-loved comic gem. My Family and Other Animals is the classic tale of naturalist Gerald Durrell's magical 1930s childhood on pre-war Corfu. His descriptions of his eccentric family and his encounters with...

From a young age, Cäcilie Bertha Ringer is fascinated by her father's work as a master builder in Pforzheim, Germany. But those five words, which he wrote next to her name in the family Bible, haunt Bertha. Years later, Bertha meets Carl Benz and falls in love—with him and his extraordinary dream of building a horseless carriage. Bertha has such faith in him that she invests her dowry in his plans, a dicey move since they alone believe in the machine. When Carl's partners threaten to withdraw their support, he's ready to cut ties. Bertha knows the decision would ruin everything.

AD 58. Rome is in turmoil once more. Emperor Nero has surrounded himself with sycophants, and together they rampage by night through the city. Meanwhile, Nero's extravagance has reached new heights. The Emperor's spending is becoming profligate at the same time as the demands of keeping the provinces subdued have become increasingly unaffordable. Could Nero withdraw from Britannia, and at what price for the Empire?

L'ultimo romanzo di Pirandello, il romanzo "più amaro di tutti, profondamente umoristico, di scomposizione della vita" come affermò lo stesso autore.

Brought to you by Penguin. Charles Highway is every mother's worst nightmare. Precociously intelligent, mercilessly manipulative and highly sexed, Charles devotes the last of his teenage years to bedding girls and evading the half-arsed overtures of his distant parents. That is, until, he meets...

At the time of her death in 1815, twenty-nine-year-old Ellen Hutchins had catalogued over a thousand species of seaweed and plants from her native Bantry Bay. Ireland’s first female botanist, Ellen was a major contributor to nineteenth-century scientific discovery. And yet, like so many brilliant women lost in history, it is her personal story that will resonate today. In her remarkable debut novel, Marianne Lee fuses fact with fiction to imagine Ellen’s rich but tormented inner life, repressed by the gender and class confines of her time.

"- Tu seras un héros, tu seras général, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Ambassadeur de France - tous ces voyous ne savent pas qui tu es ! Je crois que jamais un fils n'a haï sa mère autant que moi, à ce moment-là. Mais, alors que j'essayais de lui expliquer dans un murmure rageur qu'elle me compromettait irrémédiablement aux yeux de l'Armée de l'Air, et que je faisais un nouvel effort pour la pousser derrière le taxi, son visage prit une expression désemparée, ses lèvres se mirent à trembler, et j'entendis une fois de plus la formule intolérable, devenue depuis longtemps classique dans nos rapports : - Alors, tu as honte de ta vieille mère ?"

In confident Edwardian Britain, the Asquith family rose to the top of politics and society, only for their world to unravel in the killing fields of the Great War. Their story bears all the hallmarks of a 20th-century Shakespearean tragedy, with Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and his mercurial, charismatic wife, Margot, at its heart. Four children from his first marriage also play central roles in this sweeping family saga.

Judy Goodman and Beverly Caldwell have different reasons for putting continents and oceans between themselves and their disparate pasts, but they have the same desire—to earn a coveted position on an elite team of stewardesses for Pan American Airlines. For Judy, running away from an oppressive marriage in small-town Pennsylvania is a risk she must take. And for Beverly, leaving behind the gilded cage of New York society will allow her to pursue a future of her own making.

Based on the true story of a brave German nurse tasked with caring for Auschwitz’s youngest prisoners, Auschwitz Lullaby brings to life the story of Helene Hannemann—a woman who sacrificed everything for family and fought furiously for the children she hoped to save. On an otherwise ordinary...

Jewish refugee Felix Wolff believes he has found safety in England, but he is arrested and thrown into a British internment camp as a suspected Nazi spy. To clear his name and join the fight against Hitler, he must break free of a system that mistakes him for the very evil he fled. Fresh off his ruthless campaign in Poland, Sicherheitsdienst agent Karl Vogt is sent on a chilling mission: to devise a system for controlling the growing Jewish population within the Reich. His cold efficiency lays the groundwork for a coming horror the world has yet to comprehend.

Brought to you by Penguin. Can one rash decision prove the difference between a life well lived and a life destroyed? When the Marquis of Queensbury left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words: ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite’. The...

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was seven years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her. At nineteen, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather, and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.

Dracula. A name of horror, depravity and the darkest sensuality. Yet the real Dracula was just as alluring, just as terrifying, his story not of a monster but of a man - and a contradiction. For the one they called 'The Devil's Son' was both tyrant and lawgiver, crusader and mass slaughterer, torturer and hero, lover and murderer. His tale is told by those who knew him best. The only woman he ever loved, who he must sacrifice. His closest comrade and traitor.