Showing titles in Biographical Fiction

The first novel written about the enigmatic literary legend Australia, 1901. Miles Franklin, the young daughter of poor bush farmers, manages to publish her first novel against all odds. A work of remarkable boldness and passion, it becomes an immense success in the English-speaking world. While...

La vida de una figura legendaria, y la historia de una democracia confiscada: la de Estados Unidos. «Sin duda, lo mejor que he leído sobre este legendario joven forajido.» Yannick Haenel, Charlie Hebdo «Un anti-western que ilumina admirablemente los excesos y la violencia de Estados Unidos...

Nach einer schmerzhaften Trennung kehrt Sue in die Villa ihrer Familie am Gardasee zurück. Sie sucht Abstand, Klarheit und den Mut, endlich herauszufinden, wer sie wirklich ist. Da ist Michele, der im Hotel ihrer Schwester Jule wohnt und sie gleichermaßen anzieht, wie ihr Kopfschmerzen bereitet. Und Luca, der Pizzabäcker mit süditalienischen Wurzeln, der mit seiner Leidenschaft für Kulinarik etwas in ihr berührt, das sie nicht erwartet hätte. Als ihr Vater Christoph sie schließlich mit einer schockierenden Wahrheit konfrontiert, beginnt Sue ihre Pläne neu zu überdenken.

Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive comedy of blending, identity, and politics.

Another action-packed mystery by Maurice LeBlanc! This story has to do with the final Will of a man named Mornington, who, in the year 1900, left behind the sum of $400 million francs. Of that, three-fourths went to his adopted country - which left $100 million francs to be distributed to his heirs. The executor of the estate was Mornington's friend, Don Luis Perenna (AKA Arsene Lupin). The problem, however, was that no one knew where (or even who) some of the heirs were. If no heirs were to be found within 3 months, the entire $100 million francs would go to Perenna.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of History of Violence by Edouard Louis, read by Joseph Kloska. The radical and urgent new novel from the author of The End of Eddy I met Reda on Christmas Eve 2012. I was going home after a meal with friends, at around four in the morning. He...

Hvor mange ved, at den franske impressionismes vugge var dansk og stod på Sankt Thomas i Dansk Vestindien? Maleren Camille Pissarro begyndte livet som Jacobo Pizzarro i en dansk-jødisk familie, der havde søgt tilflugt for jødeforfølgelserne på Sankt Thomas. Her bliver hans mor, Rachel, som...

Can one rash decision prove the difference between a life well lived and a life destroyed? When the Marquess of Queensberry 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 most celebrated playwright...

A satori, in Kerouac’s own words, is “the Japanese word for ‘sudden illumination,’ ‘sudden awakening,’ or simply ‘kick in the eye.’” This is a story of philosophy, identity, and the powerful grip of travel, written by an iconic American author at the height of his fame, after...

Sono rimasto solo, la mia vita ovattata si è dissolta. Resta la confusione nella testa e una cartelletta con delle carte ripiegate, sgualcite, incomprensibili. Cosa vogliono dire? Perché sono state conservate? Chi sono io? Mi affanno nella ricerca della comprensione di sconosciute connessioni che hanno governato la mia vita, indipendenti da me, assolutamente estranee a me. Scavo dentro il mio essere, nel mio profondo, nella accettazione e nella ripulsa della percezione che la vita di ognuno di noi sia indelebilmente intrecciata a scelte e decisioni di altri.

En La última hermana María, una mujer de origen chileno sofisticada, alegre y superficial, asiste atónita a la ocupación alemana de París, que trunca para siempre su vida hasta entonces despreocupada e intranscendente. El azar la lleva a conocer la persecución a la que someten los nazis al...

From the most famous of the Beat writers and the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s intoxicating love story of two young bohemians Written over the course of three days and three nights, The Subterraneans was generated out of the same kind of ecstatic flash of inspiration...

Written in 1967 from the vantage point of the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man. This book presents the formative years in the life of Jack Duluoz—Kerouac’s alter ego—beginning with his high school experiences as a sporting jock in...

The first book in Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend, a novella detailing the writer’s early life as refracted through the prism of the untimely loss of his brother Unique among Jack Kerouac’s novels, Visions of Gerard captures the scenes and sensations of earliest childhood, the first four years in...

Originally published in 1965, this autobiographical novel covers a key year in Jack Kerouac’s life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade...

A tour de force in the tradition of Hawksmoor and Chatterton, Peter Ackroyd’s new novel of deceit and betrayal is a witty reimagining of a great nineteenth-century Shakespeare forgery. Charles and Mary Lamb, who will achieve lasting fame as the authors of Tales from Shakespeare for children...

This literary thriller set at Oxford University puts talented mathematics student G at the center of a murder mystery sparked by the discovery of hidden secrets in the life of famed author Lewis Carroll. Mathematics student G is trying to resurrect his studies, which is proving difficult as he...

Paleontologist Howard Beamish is flying to Nairobi on a professional mission when his plane is forced to land in the imaginary country of Callimbia. Journalist Lucy Faulkner, on assignment to write a travel piece for a Sunday magazine, is on the same flight. What happens to Howard and Lucy in...

From renowned translators Richard Pevear and Lindsay Volokhonsky comes a new translation—certain to become the definitive version—of the first great prison memoir, a fictionalized account of Fyodor Dostoevsky's life-changing penal servitude in Siberia. Sentenced to death for advocating...

Charles Dickens' classic novel David Copperfield is loosely based on the life of the author. It tells the story of David Copperfield’s life from childhood to adulthood with all of the hardships, changes, and good fortune that David encounters on his life journey. It focuses on the relationships he develops with a huge cast of characters who he meets as he travels from rags to riches and back again.