Whether your passion is The Ancient Greeks, The Wars of The Roses or The Russian Revolution, you'll find stories of life during these eras and every other, often using factual accounts to build a fictional narrative.
Historical Fiction Books
Alfred A. Knopf Stella Maris
Book SynopsisNEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The second volume of The Passenger series, from The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road • An intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. The richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…An achievement greater than Blood Meridian…or…The Road.” —The Atlantic1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.
£19.50
Random House USA Inc The Count of Monte Cristo
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£28.50
Random House USA Inc How to be both
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£14.45
Random House USA Inc Memorias de una geisha Memoirs of a Geisha
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£16.96
Random House USA Inc Measuring the World
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£13.12
Random House USA Inc Changing Light
Book SynopsisNora Gallagher’s elegant debut novel is a love story set in Los Alamos in 1945, in the shadow of the creation of the first atomic bomb.During the last summer of World War II, in the beautiful high desert of New Mexico, a young painter, Eleanor Garrigue, discovers a delirious man lying by the river. She takes him in and cares for him, not knowing that he is Leo Kavan, a physicist who has fled Los Alamos after a deadly radiation accident. Eleanor herself has left New York to escape a stifling marriage and to renew her painting in the pure desert light. As the two reveal themselves to each other, their pasts and the present unfold in tandem, taking us from the heady New York art world to Einstein’s Berlin, from English bomb labs to the hidden city of Los Alamos. As their enemies close in, they find temporary solace together, connected and changed in unexpected ways by the brutal radiance of the war and their fierce love.
£12.56
Random House USA Inc The Lowland Vintage Contemporaries
Book SynopsisNATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Namesake comes an extraordinary novel, set in India and America, that tells the story of two brothers bound by tragedy, a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past, a country torn by revolution, and a love that lasts long past death.Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan—charismatic and impulsive—finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty; he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother’s political passion; he leaves home to pursu
£15.30
Random House USA Inc Lady Macbeth
Book SynopsisFrom towering crags to misted moors and formidable fortresses, Lady Macbeth transports readers to the heart of eleventh-century Scotland, painting a bold, vivid portrait of a woman much maligned by history. Lady Gruadh—Rue—is the last female descendant of Scotland’s most royal line. Married to a powerful northern lord, she is widowed while still carrying his child and forced to marry her husband’s murderer: a rising warlord named Macbeth. As she encounters danger from Vikings, Saxons, and treacherous Scottish lords, Rue begins to respect the man she once despised. When she learns that Macbeth’s complex ambitions extend beyond the borders of the vast northern region, she realizes that only Macbeth can unite Scotland. But his wife’s royal blood is the key to his ultimate success. Determined to protect her son and a proud legacy of warrior kings and strong women, Rue invokes the ancient wisdom
£11.39
Vintage Canada The Table of Less Valued Knights
Book SynopsisFrom Marie Phillips, author of the #1 national and international bestseller Gods Behaving Badly, comes a charming, funny story about a down-on-his-luck knight of Camelot, his eccentric band of misfits and their madcap quest to restore order to their lives, and the realm. Sir Humphrey du Val has had enough. Relegated to the Table of Less Valued Knights--Camelot's least prestigious spot, boringly rectangular in shape and with one leg shorter than the other so that it has to be propped up with a folded napkin to stop it from rocking--he has been banned by King Arthur from going on quests, and hasn't left the castle in 15 years. After a chance meeting with Elaine, a young maiden in search of her kidnapped fiancé, Sir Humphrey, along with his squire Conrad (an undersized giant) and Jemima (Conrad's elephant), sets off on a journey to find the distressed damsel's betrothed, hoping to restore himself to a place of honour at the Round T
£14.41
Random House USA Inc Nefertiti
Book SynopsisFast-paced and historically accurate, Nefertiti is the dramatic story of two unforgettable women living through a remarkable period in history.Nefertiti and her younger sister, Mutnodjmet, have been raised in a powerful family that has provided wives to the rulers of Egypt for centuries. Ambitious, charismatic, and beautiful, Nefertiti is destined to marry Amunhotep, an unstable young pharaoh. It is hoped that her strong personality will temper the young ruler’s heretical desire to forsake Egypt’s ancient gods.From the moment of her arrival in Thebes, Nefertiti is beloved by the people but fails to see that powerful priests are plotting against her husband’s rule. The only person brave enough to warn the queen is her younger sister, Mutnodjmet.Observant and contemplative, Mutnodjmet has never shared her sister’s desire for power. She yearns for a quiet existence away from family duty and the intrigues of court. But rem
£16.15
Random House USA Inc The Heretic Queen
Book SynopsisIn this stunning novel of passion, power, and redemption, a forgotten princess in ancient Egypt must overcome her family’s past and remake history—from the internationally bestselling author of Nefertiti and Maria.“Moran’s careful attention to detail and her artful storytelling bring these people to vivid life, imbuing ancient history with suspense and urgency.”—The Boston Globe The winds of change are blowing through Thebes. A devastating palace fire has killed the Eighteenth Dynasty’s royal family—with the exception of Nefertari, the niece of the reviled former queen, Nefertiti. The girl’s deceased family has been branded as heretical, and no one in Egypt will speak their names. But this changes when she is taken under the wing of the Pharoah’s aunt, then brought to the temple of Hathor, where she is educated in a manner befitting a future queen. Soon Nefertari catches the eye of the Crown Prince, and despite her family’s history, they fall in love and wish to marry. Yet all of Egypt opposes this union between the rising star of a new dynasty and the fading star of an old, heretical one. While political adversity sets the country on edge, Nefertari becomes the wife of Ramses the Great. Destined to be the most powerful Pharoah in Egypt, he is also the man who must confront the most famous exodus in history.
£15.30
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group The Passages of H.M.
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£14.41
Random House USA Inc Tobys Room 2 Life Class Trilogy
Book SynopsisA masterfully written World War I-era novel about the secrets between a brother and sister, from the Booker Prize-winning author of the Regeneration Trilogy. It is 1917, and Elinor Brooke, a young painter, is studying art in London while her beloved brother Toby serves on the front as a medical officer. When Toby goes missing and is presumed dead, the devastated Elinor refuses to accept it. Then she finds a letter hidden among his belongings; it reveals that Toby knew he wasn’t coming back and implies that his friend, medic Kit Neville, knows why. But Kit has been horribly disfigured and is reeling from shell shock. While Elinor tries to piece together the mystery of what happened to her brother, she uses her drawing skills to aid in the surgical reconstruction of those who have suffered unspeakable losses—of their faces, their memories, their very minds.
£13.56
Random House USA Inc Doctor Zhivago Vintage International
Book SynopsisFirst published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's love for the tender and beautiful Lara, the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times. Pevear and Volokhonsky masterfully restore the spirit of Pasternak's original—his style, rhythms, voicings, and tone—in this beautiful translation of a classic of world literature.
£17.00
Random House USA Inc Cleopatras Daughter
Book SynopsisFrom the internationally bestselling author of Nefertiti comes the tumultuous story of Antony and Celopatra's daughter, Selene. The marriage of Marc Antony and Cleopatra is one of the greatest love stories of all time, a tale of unbridled passion with earth-shaking political consequences. When the lovers choose to die by their own hands, their three orphaned children are taken in chains to Rome; only two—the ten-year-old twins Selene and Alexander—survive the journey. Delivered to the household of Octavian’s sister, the siblings cling to each other and to the hope that they will return one day to their rightful place on the throne of Egypt. Recounted in Selene’s youthful and engaging voice, Moran introduces a compelling cast of historical characters: Octavia, the emperor Octavian’s kind and compassionate sister, abandoned by Marc Antony for Cleopatra; Livia, Octavian's bitter and jealous wife; Marcellus, Octavian’
£14.45
Broadway Books (A Division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc) Queen Hereafter A Novel of Margaret of Scotland
Book SynopsisRefugee. Queen. Saint. Based on the lives of Saint Margaret of Scotland and her husband, King Malcolm III, in eleventh-century Scotland, a young woman strives to fulfill her destiny despite the risks... Shipwrecked on the Scottish coast, a young Saxon princess and her family—including the outlawed Edgar of England—ask sanctuary of the warrior-king Malcolm Canmore, who shrewdly sees the political advantage. He promises to aid Edgar and the Saxon cause in return for the hand of Edgar’s sister, Margaret, in marriage.A foreign queen in a strange land, Margaret adapts to life among the barbarian Scots, bears princes, and shapes the fierce warrior Malcolm into a sophisticated ruler. Yet even as the king and queen build a passionate and tempestuous partnership, the Scots distrust her. When her husband brings Eva, a Celtic bard, to court as a hostage for the good behavior of the formidable Lady Macbeth, Margaret expects trouble. Instead, an unlikel
£11.99
Random House USA Inc Cave Dwellers
Book SynopsisIn late 1937, a young German lieutenant, Oskar Langweil, is recruited to help overthrow Adolf Hitler. An exiled childhood friend introduces him to Lena, another expat and an avowed Socialist, and they contrive to pose as husband and wife to cross the Atlantic aboard a cruise ship crowded with Nazis. But once at sea they become entangled with the feckless son of a U.S. senator, as well as the mysterious SS officer assigned to watch over him, and after docking in Bremerhaven their luck lurches from bad to worse. Now, along with these unexpected companions, they become prey in a manhunt that drives them through the Third Reich—Oskar cut off from his circle of resistance and constantly re-evaluating whom he can trust. From the sordid cabarets of Berlin to glittering parties in Washington, D.C., from the slums of Kreuzberg to a remote Alpine lodge, Richard Grant populates a world on the brink of disappearing with a cast that also includes an evil genius of Nazism, a Whi
£14.45
Random House Canada Ghost on the Throne
Book SynopsisWhen Alexander the Great died at the age of thirty-two, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea in the west all the way to modern-day India in the east. In an unusual compromise, his two heirs—a mentally damaged half brother, Philip III, and an infant son, Alexander IV, born after his death—were jointly granted the kingship. But six of Alexander’s Macedonian generals, spurred by their own thirst for power and the legend that Alexander bequeathed his rule “to the strongest,” fought to gain supremacy. Perhaps their most fascinating and conniving adversary was Alexander’s former Greek secretary, Eumenes, now a general himself, who would be the determining factor in the precarious fortunes of the royal family. James Romm, professor of classics at Bard College, brings to life the cutthroat competition and the struggle for control of the Greek world’s greatest empire.
£16.15
Random House USA Inc The Invisible Mountain
Book SynopsisOn the first day of the year 1900, a small town deep in the Uruguayan countryside gathers to witness a miracle—the mysterious reappearance Pajarita, a lost infant who will grow up to begin a lineage of fiercely independent women. Her daughter, Eva, a stubborn beauty intent on becoming a poet, overcomes a shattering betrayal to embark on a most unconventional path. And Eva's daughter, Salomé, awakens to both her sensuality and political convictions amid the violent turmoil of the late 1960s. The Invisible Mountain is a stunning exploration of the search for love and a poignant celebration of the fierce connection between mothers and daughters.
£23.62
Random House USA Inc The Bakers Daughter
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£14.02
Random House USA Inc The Outer Banks House
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£13.50
Random House USA Inc Claire of the Sea Light
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£13.60
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Watergate A Novel
Book SynopsisA New York Times Notable BookA Washington Post Notable BookA St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of 2012A 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction FinalistFrom one of our most esteemed historical novelists, a remarkable retelling of the Watergate scandal, as seen through a kaleidoscope of its colorful perpetrators and investigators. For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generated—uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs—it falls at last to a novelist reconstruct some of the scandal’s greatest mysteries (who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape?) and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety. In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now. Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical int
£14.39
Random House USA Inc La isla bajo el mar The Island Beneath the Sea
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£16.16
Random House USA Inc The Chemistry of Tears
Book SynopsisA Seattle Times Best Book of 2012When Catherine Gehrig, a museum conservator in London, falls into grief after her lover’s sudden death, her boss gives her a special project. She will bring back to “life” a nineteenth-century mechanical bird. As she begins to piece the automaton together, Catherine also uncovers the diaries of Henry Brandling, who, more than a hundred years prior, had commissioned the bird for his very ill son. Catherine finds resonance and comfort in Henry’s story. But it is the mechanical creature itself, in its uncanny imitation of life, that will link these two people across a century. Through the clockwork bird, Henry and Catherine will confront the mysteries of creation, the power of human invention, and the body’s astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.
£12.75
Random House USA Inc My Name Is Red
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£22.50
Random House USA Inc Home
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£19.20
Random House USA Inc The English Patient
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£17.66
Random House USA Inc The Madonna on the Moon
Book SynopsisWinner of the European Book AwardNovember, 1957. The Soviets have just launched the Sputnik, and communism rules in Eastern Europe, but the village of Baia Luna, nestled in the Carpathian mountains, is a world unto itself, populated with gypsy-philosophers and mysterious priests. But for fifteen-year-old Pavel Botev, this world begins to come apart the day teacher asks him to hang a photo of the new party secretary, then whispers a startling directive into his ear. “Send this man straight to hell. Exterminate him.” The next morning, she has disappeared. Once a priest turns up murdered, Pavel sets out on a journey for answers—one that leads him into the frontiers of a new life. By turns grippingly realist and enchantingly surreal, The Madonna on the Moon announces the arrival of an important new voice in fiction.
£14.41
Random House USA Inc Home
Book SynopsisNATIONAL BESTSELLER ? A New York Times Notable Book ? From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: an emotional powerhouse of a novel about a modern Odysseus returning to a 1950s America mined with lethal pitfalls for an unwary Black manWhen Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war,he journeys to his native Georgia with a renewed sense of purposein search of his sister, but it becomes clear that their troubles began well before their wartime separation. Together, they return to their rural hometown of Lotus, where buried secrets are unearthed and where Frank learns at last what it means to be a man, what it takes to heal, and?above all?what it means to come home.
£9.90
Random House USA Inc Christ the Lord The Road to Cana
Book SynopsisNATIONAL BESTSELLER • The second novel in Anne Rice's hugely ambitious, moving, and masterful portrayal of the life of Christ, following Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. It’s a winter of no rain, endless dust, and talk of trouble in Judea. All who know and love Jesus find themselves waiting for some sign of the path he will eventually take. After his baptism, he is at last ready to confront his destiny. At the wedding at Cana, he takes water and transforms it into red wine. Thus, he’s recognized as the anointed one and called by God the Father to begin a ministry that will transform an unsuspecting world.
£14.45
Random House USA Inc The Sandcastle Girls
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£15.26
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group The Light in the Ruins
Book SynopsisNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant comes a spellbinding novel of love, despair, and revenge—set in war-ravaged Tuscany.1943: Tucked away in the idyllic hills of Tuscany, the Rosatis, an Italian family of noble lineage, believe that the walls of their ancient villa will keep them safe from the war raging across Europe. But when two soldiers—a German and an Italian—arrive at their doorstep asking to see an ancient Etruscan burial site, the Rosatis’ bucolic tranquility is shattered. 1955: Serafina Bettini, an investigator with the Florence Police Department, has successfully hidden her tragic scars from WWII, at least until she’s assigned to a gruesome new case—a serial killer who is targeting the remaining members of the Rosati family one by one. Soon, she will find herself digging into past secrets that will reveal a breathtaking story of moral para
£14.45
Random House USA Inc The Healing
Book SynopsisPlantation mistress Amanda Satterfield’s intense grief over losing her daughter crosses the line into madness when she takes a newborn slave child as her own and names her Granada. Troubled by his wife’s disturbing mental state and concerned about a mysterious plague that is sweeping through the plantation’s slave quarters, Master Satterfield purchases Polly Shine, a slave woman known as a healer who immediately senses a spark of the same gift in Granada. Soon, a domestic battle of wills begins, leading to a tragedy that weaves together three generations of strong Southern women.Rich in mood and atmosphere, The Healing is a powerful, warmhearted novel about unbreakable bonds and the power of story to heal.
£15.26
Random House USA Inc Silent House
Book SynopsisFrom the Nobel Prize winner and acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes an unforgettable novel about a Turkish family gathering in the shadow of an impending military coup that's “threaded through with ideas about history, religion, memory, class and politics” (The New York Times Book Review). In a crumbling mansion in a gentrified former fishing village on the Turkish coast, the widow Fatma awaits the annual visit of her grandchildren: Faruk, a dissipated historian; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgün; and Metin, a high schooler drawn to the fast life of the nouveaux riche. Bedridden, Fatma is attended by her faithful servant Recep, a dwarf—and her late husband’s illegitimate son. Mistress and servant share memories, and grievances, from the past. But the arrival of Recep’s cousin, Hasan, a fervent right-wing nationalist, threatens to draw the family into the political cataclysm arising from Turkey’s tum
£14.85
Random House USA Inc Perfidia
Book SynopsisNATIONAL BESTSELLER AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEARLos Angeles. December, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. War fever and racial hatred grip the city. The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. LAPD captain William H. Parker is superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up, and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith—Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay Lake is a twenty-one-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls—comrades, rivals, lovers, history’s pawns. Here, Ellroy gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America&rsqu
£15.26
Random House USA Inc This Storm
Book SynopsisJanuary '42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese residents are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city.A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They're wrong. It's an early-warning signal of Chaos.There's a murderous fire and a gold heist. There's Fifth Column treason on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, Commies, and race racketeers. It's populism ascendant. There's two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with history.Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He's a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, lashed by anti-Japanese rage. Dudley Smith is PD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He's gone rogue and gone all-the-way fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She's a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core.L.A. '42. Homefront madness. Wartime inferno--This Storm is James Ellroy's most audacious novel yet. It is by turns savage, tender, elegiac. It lays bare and celebrates crazed Americans of all stripes. It is a masterpiece.
£15.30
Random House USA Inc Palace Walk
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£12.41
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Palace of Desire
Book SynopsisPalace of Desire is the second novel in Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz’s magnificent Cairo Trilogy, an epic family saga of colonial Egypt that is considered his masterwork.The novels of the Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. In Palace of Desire, his rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s. Translated by William Maynard Hutchins, Lorne M. Kenny, and Olive E. Kenny.
£14.45
Random House USA Inc The Automobile Club of Egypt
Book SynopsisIn British-occupied Egypt, on the eve of the 1952 revolution, respected landowner Abd el-Aziz Gaafar has fallen on hard times. Bankrupt, he moves his family to Cairo and takes a menial job at the Automobile Club, a luxurious lodge for its European members, where Egyptians appear only as fearful servants. When Abd el-Aziz’s pride gets the better of him and he stands up for himself, he is subjected to a corporal punishment that ultimately kills him—leaving two of his sons obliged to work in the Club. As the nation teeters on the brink of change, both servants and masters are subsumed by social upheaval, and the Egyptians of the Automobile Club face a choice: to live safely but without dignity as servants, or to risk everything and fight for their rights. Exuberant and powerfully moving, The Automobile Club of Egypt is an essential work of social criticism from one of the Arab world’s greatest literary voices.
£12.44
Random House USA Inc The Aftermath
Book SynopsisSet in post-war Germany, the international bestseller The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook is a stunning emotional thriller about our fiercest loyalties and our deepest desires. In the bitter winter of 1946, Rachael Morgan arrives with her only remaining son Edmund in the ruins of Hamburg. Here she is reunited with her husband Lewis, a British colonel charged with rebuilding the shattered city. But as they set off for their new home, Rachael is stunned to discover that Lewis has made an extraordinary decision: they will be sharing the grand house with its previous owners, a German widower and his troubled daughter. In this charged atmosphere, enmity and grief give way to passion and betrayal.
£13.60
Random House USA Inc History of a Pleasure Seeker
Book Synopsis“Just try to resist.... A Continental Downton Abbey plus sex, with a dash of Dangerous Liaisons tossed in.” —Seattle TimesPiet Barol has an instinctive appreciation for pleasure and a gift for finding it. When his mother dies, Piet applies for a job as tutor to the troubled son of Europe's leading hotelier—a child who refuses to leave his family’s mansion on one of Amsterdam’s grandest canals. As Piet enters this glittering world, he learns its secrets and finds his life transformed. A brilliantly written portrait of the senses, History of a Pleasure Seeker is an opulent, romantic coming-of-age drama set at the height of Europe’s Belle Époque, written with a lightness of touch that is wholly modern and original.
£15.26
Random House USA Inc The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
Book SynopsisNATIONAL BESTSELLER • AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB 2.0 SELECTION • A remarkable page-turner of a novel. —Chicago Tribune In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd, swept up by the tides of the Great Migration, flees Georgia and heads north. This brutal, illuminating version of the twentieth century African-American experience belongs alongside those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston (Newsday).Full of hope, Hattie settles in Philadelphia to build a better life. Instead she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment, and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins are lost to an illness that a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children, whom she raises with grit, mettle, and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them to meet a world that will not be kind. Their lives, captured here i
£14.40
Random House USA Inc The Flight Portfolio
Book SynopsisFrom the bestselling, award-winning author of The Invisible Bridge comes a gripping tale of forbidden love, high-stakes adventure, and unimaginable courage filled with suspense and tragedy, unexpected twists and deliverance” (The Seattle Times). • THE INSPIRATION FOR THE NETFLIX SERIES TRANSATLANTIC MARSEILLE, 1940. Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated journalist and editor, arrives in France. Recognizing the darkness descending over Europe, he and a group of like-minded New Yorkers formed the Emergency Rescue Committee, helping artists and writers escape from the Nazis and immigrate to the United States. Amid the chaos of World War II, and in defiance of restrictive U.S. immigration policies, Fry must procure false passports, secure visas, seek out escape routes through the Pyrenees and by sea, and make impossible decisions about who should be saved, all while under profound pressure—and in a state of irrevocable personal change. In this dazzling work of historical fiction—one that illuminates previously unexplored elements of Fry’s story, and has, since its publication, brought us new insight into his life.
£15.26
Random House USA Inc Saints for All Occasions Vintage Contemporaries
Book SynopsisNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A sweeping, unforgettable novel from The New York Times best-selling author of Maine, about the hope, sacrifice, and love between two sisters and the secret that drives them apart.This year’s best book about family. —Ron Charles, The Washington PostNora and Theresa Flynn are twenty-one and seventeen when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. Nora is the responsible sister; she's shy and serious and engaged to a man she isn't sure that she loves. Theresa is gregarious; she is thrilled by their new life in Boston and besotted with the fashionable dresses and dance halls on Dudley Street. But when Theresa ends up pregnant, Nora is forced to come up with a plan—a decision with repercussions they are both far too young to understand. Fifty years later, Nora is the matriarch of a big Catholic family with four grown children: John, a successful, if oppor
£14.45
Crown The Borgias
Book SynopsisFor the first time in one volume, Jean Plaidy’s duet of Borgia novels brings to life the infamous, reckless, and passionate family in an unforgettable historical saga.Madonna of the Seven Hills: Fifteenth-century Rome: the Borgia family is on the rise. Lucrezia’s father is named Pope Alexander VI, and he places his daughter and her brothers Cesare, Giovanni, and Goffredo in the jeweled splendor—and scandal—of his court. From the Pope’s affairs with adolescent girls, to Cesare’s dangerous jealousy of anyone who inspires Lucrezia’s affections, to the ominous birth of a child conceived in secret, no Borgia can elude infamy.Light on Lucrezia: Some said she was an elegant seductress. Others swore she was an incestuous murderess. She was the most dangerous and sought after woman in all of Rome. Lucrezia Borgia’s young life has been colored by violence and betrayal. Now, married for the second time at just eighteen she hopes for happiness with her handsome husband Alfonso. But faced with brutal murder, she's soon torn between her love for her husband and her devotion to her brother Cesare… And in the days when the Borgias ruled Italy, no one was safe from the long arm of their power. Not even Lucrezia.
£15.30
Random House USA Inc The Siege of Krishnapur Troubles
Book SynopsisTwo stunning, Booker Prize-winning historical novels that vividly chronicle the crumbling edges of the British Empire in India and Ireland--in one Contemporary Classics hardcover. Inspired by historical events, The Siege of Krishnapur is the mesmerizing tale of a British outpost, under siege during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, whose residents find their smug assumptions of moral and military superiority and their rigid class barriers under fire—literally and figuratively. The hero of Troubles, having survived the battles of World War I, makes his way to Ireland in 1919, in search of his once-wealthy fiancée. What he finds is her family's enormous seaside hotel in a spectacular state of decline, overgrown and overrun by herds of cats and pigs and the few remaining guests. From this strange perch, moving from room to room as the hotel falls down around him, he witnesses the distant tottering of the Empire in the East and the rise of the violent Troubles in Ireland.
£24.00
HarperCollins Publishers Inc The Swords of Silence the
Book Synopsis''AN INTELLIGENTLY PRESENTED HISTORICAL FANTASY THAT PROVOKES THOUGHT FROM THE START'' THE BRITISH FANTASY SOCIETYWhere once new ideas and beliefs were accepted, now the country''s military dictator, the Shogun is shutting his country down to any outside influences.Father Joaquim Martinez who left Portugal to make Hizen Province, Japan his home, has been quietly tending to the lives of his villagers, but everything is about to be thrown into turmoil, as the Shogun has outlawed Martinez''s beliefs. Those who won''t recant or accept banishment, face a death sentence.With the threat of a massacre looming, and the Shogun''s Samurai closing in, Father Martinez must decide, if he is willing to risk everything, to save those he has sworn to protect.
£11.69
