Search results for ""Author Linda Lafferty""

From the bestselling author of The Bloodletter’s Daughter comes a historical novel about a defiant seventeenth-century artist who dared to feed her passions and explore the limitless possibilities of art. Born in the bustling artist quarter of Rome, Artemisia, daughter of renowned painter Orazio Gentileschi, is unavoidably drawn into a profession unheard of for women. With an innate grasp of color, light, and composition, and inspired by the mercurial Caravaggio, the fiery Artemisia embraces her calling with a precocious brilliance. But as a young woman, she also finds herself oppressed by a powerful patriarchy, and she is forced to endure emotional and physical abuse at the hands of men. Until a shattering act of violence unleashes Artemisia’s righteous fury. Refusing to be silenced and resolved to best men at their own games, Artemisia does what no woman had dared to do before. She fights back. A bracing historical novel about a woman boldly at odds with her time, Fierce Dreamer explores the fearless determination that would fuel Artemisia Gentileschi’s most courageous works of art and make her independent voice a vital one for our own time.

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In a sweeping story straight out of Russian history, Tsar Alexander I and a courageous girl named Nadezhda Durova join forces against Napoleon. It’s 1803, and an adolescent Nadya is determined not to follow in her overbearing Ukrainian mother’s footsteps. She’s a horsewoman, not a housewife. When Tsar Paul is assassinated in St. Petersburg and a reluctant and naive Alexander is crowned emperor, Nadya runs away from home and joins the Russian cavalry in the war against Napoleon. Disguised as a boy and riding her spirited stallion, Alcides, Nadya rises in the ranks, even as her father begs the tsar to find his daughter and send her home. Both Nadya and Alexander defy expectations—she as a heroic fighter and he as a spiritual seeker—while the battles of Austerlitz, Friedland, Borodino, and Smolensk rage on. In a captivating tale that brings Durova’s memoirs to life, from bloody battlefields to glittering palaces, two rebels dare to break free of their expected roles and discover themselves in the process.

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The discovery of a lost Caravaggio painting yields centuries of deadly secrets in this pulse-pounding novel of historical intrigue and modern-day suspense? In seventeenth-century Rome, an arrogant and reckless artist named Caravaggio drinks and brawls his way through his violent, insatiable life, all while painting some of the world’s greatest religious works of art. But it is his bitter feud with Giovanni Roero, a brutal knight in the Maltese Order of St. John, that is his fatal error. Now, in the village of Monte Piccolo, a priest claims to have discovered a lost painting by the famed artist in the storage room of an orphanage. Retired professor A. R. Richman believes it’s a delusional dream. But Lucia, a visiting art student, convinces him otherwise and recruits her best friend, Moto, to join in the quest. They think The Judas Kiss is worth investigating. But tracing its provenance back four hundred years could prove to be just as treacherous as the master’s final days. Richman, Lucia, and Moto begin chasing the mystery, uncovering a blood feud hidden for years that has now spilled into the twenty-first century. As they follow where it leads—down a trail of murder, betrayal, and vengeance—they find a secret history that someone will kill to keep buried.

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