Category
Biographical Fiction / Autobiographical Fiction
The Beautiful People 2024
It’s 1961, and for Margo Hightower, everything is about to change. True, her engagement is off, her family has fallen in scandal, and she's completely broke. But she’s just been hired as assistant to photographer Slim Aarons—famous for his vibrant pictures of high society, royalty, and Hollywood...
Bedlam 2026
The strange and tortured mind of the Victorian artist and patricide Richard Dadd, a painter of fairies who spent most of his life in psychiatric hospitals, Jennifer Higgie presents a year in the life of Richard Dadd, infamous inmate of one of England’s most notorious sanitariums, London’s Bethlem...
Here is the story of Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student who decides to escape the world of postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of “real life” by writing a biography of a great biographer. In a series of adventures that are by turns intellectual and comic,...
The Books of Jacob 2022
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic...
December 1952. While the young Queen Elizabeth II finds her feet as the new monarch in this captivating piece of 1950s Christmas fiction, she must also find the right words to continue the tradition of her late father’s Christmas Day radio broadcast. But even traditions must evolve with the times,...
Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and...
The story of a writer’s singular journey – from one place to another, and from one state of mind to another. At the midpoint of the century, the narrator leaves the British colony of Trinidad and comes to the ancient countryside of England. And from within the story of this journey – of departure...
First Blood 2023
The Republic of the Congo, 1964. A young man faces a firing squad, preparing for his last moment on Earth. He is known as a complex and complicated man whose childhood left him hungry for affection and attention and who transformed his emotional wounds into a brilliant career as a diplomat and a...
A Good Hard Look 2012
Forced by illness to leave behind a successful life in New York, literary icon Flannery O'Connor has returned to her family farm in the small town of Milledgeville, Georgia. With her health and time both limited, all she wants is to be left alone to write.
But Flannery's plans are soon upended by...
A Happy Marriage 2010
A Happy Marriage, Yglesias’s return to fiction after a thirteen-year hiatus, was inspired by his relationship with his wife, who died in 2004. Both intimate and expansive, it is a stunningly candid novel that alternates between the romantic misadventures of the first weeks of the courtship of...
Hippie 2019
In Hippie, he tells the story of Paulo, a young, skinny Brazilian man with a goatee and long, flowing hair, who dreams of becoming a writer, and Karla, a Dutch woman in her twenties who has been waiting to find a companion to accompany her on the fabled hippie trail to Nepal.
After meeting each...
Joe Hill 2018
Blending fact with fiction, Wallace Stegner retells the story of Joe Hill--the Wobbly bard who became the stuff of legend when, in 1915, he was executed for the alleged murder of a Salt Lake City businessman. Organizer, agitator, "Labor's Songster"--a rebel from the skin inwards, with an absolute...
Libra 1991
In this powerful, unsettling novel, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald’s odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When “history” presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful...
Maggie-Now 2012
In Brooklyn's unforgiving urban jungle, Maggie Moore is torn between answering her own needs and catering to the desirous men who dominate her life. Confronted by her quarrelsome Irish immigrant father, the feckless lover who may become her husband, and others, Maggie must learn to navigate a cycle...
Making It Up 2006
In this fascinating piece of fiction, Penelope Lively takes moments from her own life and asks 'what if' she had made other choices: what if she hadn't escaped from Alexandria at the outbreak of WWII? What would her life have been like if she had become pregnant when she was 18? If she had married...
Memoirs of a Geisha 1997
Sayuri's story begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. Through her eyes, we see the decadent heart of Gion--the geisha district of Kyoto--with its marvelous teahouses...
The Netanyahus 2021
Set in a small American college town in the late 1950s, The Netanyahus is narrated by Ruben Blum, a mild-mannered history professor who finds his quiet academic life disrupted when he is assigned to host Benzion Netanyahu, a visiting Israeli scholar under consideration for a faculty position. Along...
The Noise of Time 2016
In 1936, Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, executed on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his...
Arctic Summer 2014
The year is 1912, and the SS Birmingham is approaching India. On board is Edward Morgan Forster, a reserved man taunted by writer's block, attempting to come to terms with his art and his homosexuality. During his travels, the novelist confronts his fraught childhood and falls in unrequited love...
Arthur & George 2007
As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later—one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world’s most famous...
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...
It’s the 1970s, and from hippie London to Warhol’s Factory in New York, reluctant aristocrat Loulou de la Falaise is desperately seeking adventure. Having escaped an early, unhappy marriage, she arrives on a whim in Paris—the champagne-soaked heart of the fashion world, where the rigid old world of...
True At First Light 2000
A blend of autobiography and fiction, the book opens on the day his close friend Pop, a celebrated hunter, leaves Ernest in charge of the safari camp and news arrives of a potential attack from a hostile tribe. Drama continues to build as his wife, Mary, pursues the great black-maned lion that has...
When Nietzsche Wept 2011
A renowned physician, Josef Breuer, is drawn into an unusual and urgent request when a mysterious woman asks him to help a brilliant but deeply troubled philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. What begins as an attempt to treat a patient who refuses conventional help quickly turns into something far more...
As a promising young actress, Sun Weishi made the critical decision to pursue her studies in Moscow—with the blessing of her influential adoptive father, Zhou Enlai, and Mao himself. The valuable insights she gained there during World War II, most notably the significance of characters' inner lives,...
When Nietzsche Wept 2011
A renowned physician, Josef Breuer, is drawn into an unusual and urgent request when a mysterious woman asks him to help a brilliant but deeply troubled philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. What begins as an attempt to treat a patient who refuses conventional help quickly turns into something far more...
Bedlam July 14, 2026
The strange and tortured mind of the Victorian artist and patricide Richard Dadd, a painter of fairies who spent most of his life in psychiatric hospitals, Jennifer Higgie presents a year in the life of Richard Dadd, infamous inmate of one of England’s most notorious sanitariums, London’s Bethlem...
The Saint Laurent Muse March 18, 2025
It’s the 1970s, and from hippie London to Warhol’s Factory in New York, reluctant aristocrat Loulou de la Falaise is desperately seeking adventure. Having escaped an early, unhappy marriage, she arrives on a whim in Paris—the champagne-soaked heart of the fashion world, where the rigid old world of...
Christmas With the Queen November 19, 2024
December 1952. While the young Queen Elizabeth II finds her feet as the new monarch in this captivating piece of 1950s Christmas fiction, she must also find the right words to continue the tradition of her late father’s Christmas Day radio broadcast. But even traditions must evolve with the times,...
The Beautiful People April 16, 2024
It’s 1961, and for Margo Hightower, everything is about to change. True, her engagement is off, her family has fallen in scandal, and she's completely broke. But she’s just been hired as assistant to photographer Slim Aarons—famous for his vibrant pictures of high society, royalty, and Hollywood...
The Woman Back From Moscow November 28, 2023
As a promising young actress, Sun Weishi made the critical decision to pursue her studies in Moscow—with the blessing of her influential adoptive father, Zhou Enlai, and Mao himself. The valuable insights she gained there during World War II, most notably the significance of characters' inner lives,...
First Blood May 2, 2023
The Republic of the Congo, 1964. A young man faces a firing squad, preparing for his last moment on Earth. He is known as a complex and complicated man whose childhood left him hungry for affection and attention and who transformed his emotional wounds into a brilliant career as a diplomat and a...
The Books of Jacob February 1, 2022
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic...
The Netanyahus June 22, 2021
Set in a small American college town in the late 1950s, The Netanyahus is narrated by Ruben Blum, a mild-mannered history professor who finds his quiet academic life disrupted when he is assigned to host Benzion Netanyahu, a visiting Israeli scholar under consideration for a faculty position. Along...
Hippie July 30, 2019
In Hippie, he tells the story of Paulo, a young, skinny Brazilian man with a goatee and long, flowing hair, who dreams of becoming a writer, and Karla, a Dutch woman in her twenties who has been waiting to find a companion to accompany her on the fabled hippie trail to Nepal.
After meeting each...
Joe Hill January 16, 2018
Blending fact with fiction, Wallace Stegner retells the story of Joe Hill--the Wobbly bard who became the stuff of legend when, in 1915, he was executed for the alleged murder of a Salt Lake City businessman. Organizer, agitator, "Labor's Songster"--a rebel from the skin inwards, with an absolute...
The Noise of Time May 10, 2016
In 1936, Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, executed on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his...
Arctic Summer September 2, 2014
The year is 1912, and the SS Birmingham is approaching India. On board is Edward Morgan Forster, a reserved man taunted by writer's block, attempting to come to terms with his art and his homosexuality. During his travels, the novelist confronts his fraught childhood and falls in unrequited love...
A Good Hard Look June 26, 2012
Forced by illness to leave behind a successful life in New York, literary icon Flannery O'Connor has returned to her family farm in the small town of Milledgeville, Georgia. With her health and time both limited, all she wants is to be left alone to write.
But Flannery's plans are soon upended by...
Maggie-Now January 24, 2012
In Brooklyn's unforgiving urban jungle, Maggie Moore is torn between answering her own needs and catering to the desirous men who dominate her life. Confronted by her quarrelsome Irish immigrant father, the feckless lover who may become her husband, and others, Maggie must learn to navigate a cycle...
When Nietzsche Wept March 22, 2011
A renowned physician, Josef Breuer, is drawn into an unusual and urgent request when a mysterious woman asks him to help a brilliant but deeply troubled philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. What begins as an attempt to treat a patient who refuses conventional help quickly turns into something far more...
A Happy Marriage August 10, 2010
A Happy Marriage, Yglesias’s return to fiction after a thirteen-year hiatus, was inspired by his relationship with his wife, who died in 2004. Both intimate and expansive, it is a stunningly candid novel that alternates between the romantic misadventures of the first weeks of the courtship of...
Arthur & George January 9, 2007
As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later—one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world’s most famous...
Making It Up September 26, 2006
In this fascinating piece of fiction, Penelope Lively takes moments from her own life and asks 'what if' she had made other choices: what if she hadn't escaped from Alexandria at the outbreak of WWII? What would her life have been like if she had become pregnant when she was 18? If she had married...
The Biographer's Tale December 4, 2001
Here is the story of Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student who decides to escape the world of postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of “real life” by writing a biography of a great biographer. In a series of adventures that are by turns intellectual and comic,...
True At First Light July 6, 2000
A blend of autobiography and fiction, the book opens on the day his close friend Pop, a celebrated hunter, leaves Ernest in charge of the safari camp and news arrives of a potential attack from a hostile tribe. Drama continues to build as his wife, Mary, pursues the great black-maned lion that has...
Memoirs of a Geisha September 23, 1997
Sayuri's story begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. Through her eyes, we see the decadent heart of Gion--the geisha district of Kyoto--with its marvelous teahouses...
Coming Through Slaughter March 19, 1996
Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and...
Libra May 1, 1991
In this powerful, unsettling novel, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald’s odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When “history” presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful...
The Enigma of Arrival April 12, 1988
The story of a writer’s singular journey – from one place to another, and from one state of mind to another. At the midpoint of the century, the narrator leaves the British colony of Trinidad and comes to the ancient countryside of England. And from within the story of this journey – of departure...