Showing results for "Women" in Biographical Fiction

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in...

Told through the experiences of the four women who loved him, this imaginative account of Frank Lloyd Wright's raucous life blazes with Boyle's trademark wit and invention. Boyle's protean voice captures these very different women and, in doing so, creates a masterful ode to the creative life in all its complexity and grandeur.

Legendary fashion designer Coco Chanel is revered for her sophisticated style - the iconic little black dress - and famed for her intoxicating perfume Chanel No. 5. Yet behind the public persona is a complicated woman of intrigue, shadowed by mysterious rumors. The Queen of Paris, the new novel from award-winning author Pamela Binnings Ewen, vividly imagines the hidden life of Chanel during the four years of Nazi occupation in Paris in the midst of WWII - as discovered in recently unearthed wartime files.

1721, Spanish Town, Jamaica. Captured, convicted, and pregnant, 23-year-old Anne Bonny faces the gallows. When writer Captain Charles Johnson enters the garrison, she strikes a deal: she’ll tell this opportunistic fool her story if he sends a doctor to her friend, Mary Read, who’s battling prison fever. Prior to their arrest, life at sea had offered Anne and Mary freedom that few women knew. Anne, born into scandal in Ireland, seeks home and elusive safety in South Carolina. Discovering the opposite, she makes a bitter bargain for emergency passage to the Bahamas.

Her beauty almost certainly saved her from the rising Nazi party and led to marriage with an Austrian arms dealer. Underestimated in everything else, she overheard the Third Reich's plans while at her husband's side, understanding more than anyone would guess. She devised a plan to flee in disguise from their castle, and the whirlwind escape landed her in Hollywood. She became Hedy Lamarr, screen star.

In this novel about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wife, Lidian, Amy Belding Brown examines the emotional landscape of love and marriage. Living in the shadow of one of the most famous men of her time, Lidian becomes deeply disappointed by marriage, but consigned to public silence by social conventions and concern for her family’s reputation. Drawn to the erotic energy and intellect of close family friend Henry David Thoreau, she struggles to negotiate the confusing territory between love and friendship while maintaining her moral authority and inner strength.

Josephine's life story was as turbulent as the age, an era of revolution and social upheaval, of the guillotine and of frenzied hedonism. With telling psychological depth and compelling literary grace, Carolly Erickson brings the complex, charming, ever resilient Josephine to life in this memorable portrait, one that carries the reader from the sensual richness of her childhood in the tropics to her final lonely days at Malmaison.

Who was the real George Eliot? In Love with George Eliot is a glorious debut novel which tells the compelling story of England’s greatest woman novelist as you’ve never heard it before.

In 1782, during the final clashes of the Revolutionary War, one of our young nation’s most valiant and beloved soldiers was, secretly, a woman. When Deborah Sampson disguised herself as a man and joined the Continental Army, she wasn’t just fighting for America’s independence - she was fighting for her own. Revolutionary, Alex Myers’s richly imagined and meticulously researched debut novel, brings the true story of Deborah’s struggle against a rigid colonial society back to life.

Before she mastered the art of French cooking in midlife, Julia Child found herself working in the secrets trade in Asia during World War II. Single, six foot two, and thirty years old, Julia McWilliams took a job working for America's first espionage agency, years before cooking or Paris entered the picture. The Secret War of Julia Child traces Julia's transformation from ambitious Pasadena blue blood to Washington, DC file clerk, to head of General "Wild Bill" Donovan's secret File Registry as part of the Office of Strategic Services.

When Donaldina Cameron arrives at the Occidental Mission Home for Girls in 1895, she intends to teach sewing skills to young Chinese women immigrants, but, within days, she discovers that the job is much more complicated than perfect stitches and even hems. San Francisco has a dark side, one where a powerful underground organization - the criminal tong - brings Chinese young women to America to sell them as slaves. With the help of Chinese interpreters and the Chinatown police squad, Donaldina becomes a tireless social reformer to stop the abominable slave and prostitution trade.

Four-time Tony Award® winner Harvey Fierstein takes on New York City’s very own political firebrand, Bella Abzug, in his new raucous, heart-rending, and absurdly humorous solo show. Set in 1976, on the eve of her bid to become New York State’s first female senator, Bella Bella finds this larger-than-life, truth-slinging, groundbreaking, hat-wearing icon squirreled away in the bathroom of a midtown hotel awaiting that night’s election results while a coterie of family and celebs await her entrance. Directing is Kimberly Senior (The Niceties).

Nell's dream of traveling on a transatlantic steamship is about to come true. Although not in the way she expected. Life is hard, and with only three women working amongst a crew of eighty, there are challenges Nell had not foreseen. While she struggles to cope with the constant attention of her colleagues, not to mention their criticisms, there are some who will do whatever they can to support her.

"Huge applause... women have always been in science—despite those who would pretend otherwise.” --Bonnie Garmus, New York Times bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry She gave up everything — and changed the world. A riveting novel based on the true story of the woman who stopped a...

Over one million copies sold! The Instant New York Times Bestseller! A Good Morning America* Book Club Pick! Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR! Named a Notable Book of the Year by the Washington Post! “Historical fiction at its best!”* A remarkable novel about J. P. Morgan’s personal...

"AN HOMAGE TO FEMALE FRIENDSHIP AND AMBITION." --LA TIMES They were an unlikely pair—a blond bombshell and a photographer determined to be taken seriously—but Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold would make a deal that would change their lives in this dazzling new novel from the national...

In this novel authorized by the Little House estate, Sarah Miller vividly recreates the beauty, hardship, and joys of the frontier in a dazzling work of historical fiction, a captivating story that illuminates one courageous, resilient, and loving pioneer woman as never before—Caroline Ingalls...

The New York Times bestseller from Margaret George, author of Mary, Called Magdalene and Elizabeth I With her amazing ability to summon the voices of historical characters, Margaret George tells the story of the woman whose face "launched a thousand ships" in Helen of Troy. Laden with doom...

Young Marlene Tulloch was the third child of Anne and George Tulloch. She had two older sisters, Gloria and Sylvia. George desperately wanted an heir, a son to carry on his name. She was born after a difficult pregnancy, and her mother died ten days later from complications of childbirth. She was reared by her grandmother, Estrella, who was cruel to the young child. At the age of two, her father left. Thus, she knew neither parent. Due to kindness of friends and strangers, she survived. Despite obstacles, she became a teacher, got married, and had four boys.

She took on titans, battled generals, and changed the world as we know it… “Inspiring and essential reading.” –New York Times New York Times bestselling author Stephanie Dray returns with a captivating and dramatic novel about an American heroine Frances Perkins. Raised on tales of her...