579 results for "Historical Fiction"

Alan and Naomi

Myron Levoy
It's 1944 in New York City. Alan Silverman doesn't want to give up his stickball game for anyone-especially not for crazy-acting Naomi Kirshenbaum. But when he hears about her horrifying experience during the war in France, Alan changes his mind. Slowly, he struggles to befriend her, and one day-miraculously-she begins to trust him. Alan finds she is not only intelligent, but also fun to be with. But the scars of war are still very much with Naomi. ALA-Best of the Best for Children New York Times -Best Books for Children YALSA-Best of the Best List
iUniverse 2007-10 196 pages

Les Rois Maudits Roman Historique

Maurice Druon
Les Rois maudits, celebre fresque historique en sept volumes: 1. Le Roi de fer. 2. La Reine etranglee. 3. Les Poisons de la Couronne. 4. La Loi des males. 5. La Louve de France. 6. Le Lis et le Lion. 7. Quand un roi perd la France, font revivre le xive siecle, entre le proces des templiers et les debuts de la guerre de Cent Ans. Traduits dans le monde entier, Les Rois maudits ont remporte un succes exceptionnel et sont consideres comme un des modeles contemporains du roman historique. Les Poisons de la Couronne ressuscite, presque jour par jour, les conflits, les intrigues, les haines et les crimes du regne de Louis X le Hutin, qui ne dura que dix-huit mois, mais dont les consequences devaient etre capitales pour la monarchie francaise. Lorsqu'il meurt empoisonne, en juin 1316, c'est la premiere fois depuis plus de trois siecles qu'un roi de France decede sans laisser un heritier male.
Plon-Del Duca 1987

The Life of Benito Mussolini

Sarfatti, Margherita G.
The Life of Benito Mussolini is a comprehensive biography of the Italian fascist dictator written by Margherita G. Sarfatti. The book covers Mussolini's early life, his rise to power, and his eventual downfall. Sarfatti, who was a close friend and advisor to Mussolini, offers unique insights into his personality and political philosophy. The biography explores Mussolini's role in World War II, his alliance with Nazi Germany, and his ultimate defeat and execution. Sarfatti also delves into Mussolini's personal life, including his relationships with women and his family. The Life of Benito Mussolini is a detailed and informative account of one of the most controversial figures in modern history.1925. Translated by Frederic Whyte. A pro-Fascist biography of the life and, pre-WWII, pre-Hitler alliance, political career of Mussolini. Towards the end of the Preface, Mussolini writes: my life is to be found recorded-at least, such part of it as can be made known, ...it is no great affair-my life. There is nothing extraordinary in it to capture the imagination. No victorious wars, no out-of-the-way adventures. No creations of new systems of thought. It is a life full of movement, certainly, but it is a less interesting life, ...It is possible that the future may modify these proportions-it may reduce or increase them. But with this my biographers of tomorrow will have to do.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original wor
Kessinger Publishing, LLC 2010-09-10 368 pages

The Lemoine affair

Proust, Marcel
Their friend Marcel Proust had killed himself after the fall in diamond shares, a collapse that annihilated a part of his fortune. This is the first-ever translation into English of this startling tour-de-force by one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. The Lemoine Affair was inspired by the real-life French scandal involving Henri Lemoine, who claimed he could manufacture diamonds from coal and convinced numerous people—including officers of the De Beers diamond mine company and Proust himself—to invest in the scheme. In a series of pastiches—imitations written in the style of other writers—Proust tells the story of the embarrassment rippling across high society Paris in the wake of the scandal, poking fun at himself (in one story, a character declares that Marcel Proust is so embarrassed he’s suicidal) while lampooning some of France’s greatest writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, and Saint-Simon. Full of sophisticated wit and dazzling wordplay, and rife with allusions to his friend and fictional characters, many Proust scholars see the dead-on mimicry of The Lemoine Affair —written soon after Proust’s rejection of society life—as the work by which he honed his own unique, masterly voice. The Art of The Novella Series Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.
Melville House Pub 2008-02-01 94 pages

The Blindness of the Heart

Julia Franck
A story spanning two world wars and several generations in a German family. In the devastating opening scene, a woman named Helene stands with her seven-year-old son in a provincial German railway station in 1945, amid the chaos of civilians fleeing west. Having survived with him through the horror and deprivation of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns. The story quickly circles back to Helene's childhood with her sister Martha in rural Germany, which came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the First World War. Their father is sent to the eastern front, and their Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion. As we follow Helene into adulthood, we watch riveted as the costs of survival and ill-fated love turn her into a woman capable of the unforgivable.
Thorndike Press 2011 655 pages

The Journey Back

Johanna Reiss
How does it feel to leave the people you've grown to love -- and go back to a family you no longer know? Holland,1945 -- World War II has finally ended. For thirteen-year-old Annie de Leeuw and her sister Sini, Almost three years of hiding from the Germans in the upstairs room of a remote farmhouse have also ended. Saying good-bye to the courageous family who hid them is very difficult. And Annie finds that being home again isn't easy either. Her mother is dead; her father, distant and distracted. Sini is out dancing with the soldiers every night , trying to make up for lost time, and Annie's oldest sister, Rachel, has become a Christian. Soon Annie has another problem -- getting used to a new stepmother she cannot seem to please. Annie learns that though the fighting is over, some of the wounds of the war still remain. Her old home is gone. Now she must build a new life for herself.
HarperCollins 1987-09-25 224 pages

Mendelssohn is on the roof

Weil, Jiří
On the roof of Prague's concert hall, Julius Schlesinger, aspiring SS officer, is charged with the removal of the statue of the Jew Mendelssohn--but which one is he? Remembering his course on "racial science," Schlesinger instructs his men to pull down the statue with the biggest nose. Only as the statue topples does he recognize the face of Richard Wagner. This is just the beginning in Weil's novel, which traces the transformation of ordinary liveds in Nazi-occupied Prague.
Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1991-04-12 227 pages

Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell

Howard Engel
Howard Engel is the award winning writer whose Benny Cooperman mysteries garner rave international reviews-fans stretch from Canada to Japan, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and the United States. His latest, Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell, is a brilliant departure from the Cooperman series. The year is 1879 and in Edinburgh, Alan Lambert has been tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang for the murder of a dazzling opera star and her lover. But Lambert's brother believes he's innocent and pleads with Dr. Bell, a celebrated professor of anatomy, to uncover the truth. Bell agrees and sets out to crack the case with his keen powers of deduction and the help of his student, Arthur Conan Doyle.
Harry N. Abrams 2004-06-29 224 pages

The Novel of Ferrara

Giorgio Bassani
Giorgio Bassani’s six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be. Among the masters of twentieth-century literature, Giorgio Bassani and his Northern Italian hometown of Ferrara “are as inseparable as James Joyce and Dublin or Italo Svevo and Trieste” (from the Introduction). Now published in English for the first time as the unified masterwork Bassani intended, The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani’s six classics, fully revised by the author at the end of his life: Within the Walls , The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles , The Garden of the Finzi-Continis , Behind the Door , The Heron , and The Smell of Hay . Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, these interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters: the respected doctor whose homosexuality is tolerated until he is humiliatingly exposed by an exploitative youth; a survivor of the Nazi death camps whose neighbors’ celebration of his return gradually turns to ostracism; a young man discovering the ugly, treacherous price that people will pay for a sense of belonging; the Jewish aristocrat whose social position has been erased; the indomitable schoolteacher, Celia Trotti, whose Communist idealism disturbs and challenges a postwar generation. The Novel of Ferrara memorializes not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs. Suffused with new life by acclaimed translator and poet Jamie McKendrick, this seminal work seals Bassani’s reputation as “a quietly insistent chronicler of our age’s various menaces to liberty” (Jonathan Keates).
National Geographic Books 2020-12-01 800 pages

Sunday's Silence

Gina B. Nahai
How different is Iran from Appalachia? Iranian-born writer Nahai's first two novels, Cry of the Peacock and Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, were set in her native land, to great effect and rave reviews. Now, in a thoughtfully executed third novel, Nahai takes on Appalachia, illuminating another region whose people are united by a fundamentalist faith, their beliefs as exotic to, and misunderstood by, most Western readers as those of the people of Iran. Foreign correspondent Adam Watkins is stationed in Lebanon when he receives news that Little Sam Jenkins, the father he barely knew, has died of snakebite. A snake-handling preacher who had survived nine decades of hard living and 446 snakebites, Sam finally succumbed to the venom of a snake given to him by Blue, a gorgeous Kurdish woman born in Iraq, and herself a skilled snake-handler who never fit in with the Holy Rollers. Adam, having tried for 18 years to create a new life for himself, returns home looking for answers: What drove Sam? And was Blue merely testing Sam's faith, or did she intend to kill him? A strong sense of geography and religious history provides the backdrop as Nahai explores the enigma of charisma, opening a window on an insular world and rendering the "other" America explicable. Alternating with Adam's story is the first-person account of Blue, her voice charged with the mythic, seductive power of a Scheherazade. Faith versus fanaticism, fear as a motivating force for seeking salvation these themes are examined, as events both tragic and redemptive unfold. This multifaceted work expands Nahai's fictional universe in new and curiously fitting directions. Agent, Barbara Lowenstein. (Nov. 1)Forecast: Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith was a bestseller on the West Coast and has been translated into 16 languages. The Appalachia setting of Nahai's latest may startle her fans and lead to slow sales at first, but strong reviews should attract new readers.
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2015-02-24 320 pages

The Collaborator

Diane Armstrong
Is he a hero or a traitor? Based on astonishing true events set in the darkest days of World War II in Budapest, this is an enthralling story of heroism, vengeance, passion, and betrayal. It is also the story of three women linked by a secret that threatens to destroy their lives. For readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, All That I Am and Schindler's Ark (List). An act of heroism, the taint of collaboration, a doomed love affair, and an Australian woman who travels across the world to discover the truth... It is 1944 in Budapest and the Germans have invaded. Jewish journalist Miklos Nagy risks his life and confronts the dreaded Adolf Eichmann in an attempt to save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the death camps. But no one could have foreseen the consequences... It is 2005 in Sydney, and Annika Barnett sets out on a journey that takes her to Budapest and Tel Aviv to discover the truth about the mysterious man who rescued her grandmother in 1944. By the time her odyssey is over, history has been turned on its head, past and present collide, and the secret that has poisoned the lives of three generations is finally revealed in a shocking climax that holds the key to their redemption. PRAISE: 'Guaranteed to hook you with its powerful and emotive journey back into a turbulent history, The Collaborator is a superb and compelling novel that comes highly recommended' - Canberra Weekly
Harlequin Enterprises (Australia) Pty, Limited 2020-07-08 496 pages

The Last Flight of Poxl West

Daniel Torday
Poxl West fled the Nazis' onslaught in Czechoslovakia. He escaped their clutches again in Holland. He pulled Londoners from the Blitz's rubble. He wooed intoxicating, unconventional beauties. He rained fire on Germany from his RAF bomber. Poxl West is the epitome of manhood and something of an idol to his teenage nephew, Eli Goldstein, who reveres him as a brave, singular, Jewish war hero. Poxl fills Eli's head with electric accounts of his derring-do, adventures and romances, as he collects the best episodes from his storied life into a memoir. He publishes that memoir, Skylock, to great acclaim, and its success takes him on the road, and out of Eli's life. With his uncle gone, Eli throws himself into reading his opus and becomes fixated on all things Poxl. But as he delves deeper into Poxl's history, Eli begins to see that the life of the fearless superman he's adored has been much darker than he let on, and filled with unimaginable loss from which he may have not recovered. As the truth about Poxl emerges, it forces Eli to face irreconcilable facts about the war he's romanticized and the vision of the man he's held so dear. Daniel Torday's debut novel, "The Last Flight of Poxl West, " beautifully weaves together the two unforgettable voices of Eli Goldstein and Poxl West, exploring what it really means to be a hero, and to be a family, in the long shadow of war.
Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning 2015 421 pages

The Director A Novel

Daniel Kehlmann
A New York Times Notable Book • An NYPL Best Book of 2025 • A Washington Post Notable Book A Late Show with Stephen Colbert Book Club Pick “Nothing short of brilliant.” — The Wall Street Journal From “a surpassingly gifted storyteller” ( The New York Times ), a visionary novel inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to return to his homeland to create propaganda films for the German Reich. An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen. G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him. When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement. Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator.
S&S/Summit Books 2026-05-12 352 pages

No bed for bacon

Brahms, Caryl
First published in 1941, No Bed for Bacon is a comic classic. Out of print since 1985, but much-discussed in the press following the release of the Oscar-showered film Shakespeare in Love, the novel fizzes with wit, warmth and the occasional custard pie. It is a festive celebration of 'The Great Bard' par excellence. Five o'clock and all's well in Merrie England. But not for long. Good Queen Bess is stirring in her four-poster and is feeling neither happy nor glorious. Down at the Globe, Will Shakespeare is chewing the end of his quill: something's amiss with Love's Labours Wunne. And Walter Raleigh, boiling his new potato in the depths of the regal kitchens, is getting very hot under the collar of his latest cloak - will his spud achieve the perfect fluffiness for The Royal Tasting? Heads are sure to roll before the day is out.
Black Swan 2012-05 256 pages

P.K. Pinkerton and the Petrified Man

Caroline Lawrence
The second book in a rip-roaring adventure series set in the wild west! After escaping the ruthless desperados, P.K. finally feels safe in Virginia City and is ready to set up a new private eye business. But all the mysteries in town seem to be pranks—until the day P.K. meets a young maid named Martha. Martha’s employer has been found dead . . . and now the killer is after her. The mystery takes a grave turn when Martha disappears, so P.K. consults Poker Face Jace, an expert at people reading. With his help, P.K. inspects saloons and billiard rooms, and even tries sneaking into the coroner’s office. But time is quickly running out for P.K., and Martha’s life has never been in more danger.
Penguin Young Readers Group 2014-01-09 336 pages

The Cabala

Bernhard Pick
Kabbalah is a mystical and esoteric system of Jewish thought and spirituality, which dates back to ancient times and has continued to evolve throughout history. It involves the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and the quest for understanding the hidden meanings and secrets of the universe. In "The Cabala," Bernhard Pick explores the origins, history, and development of Kabbalah within Judaism. He also examines how Kabbalistic ideas and concepts have influenced Christian mysticism and esotericism over the centuries. The book delves into various aspects of Kabbalah, including its teachings on the nature of God, the Sephirot (emanations or attributes of the divine), the concept of Ein Sof (the infinite and unknowable divine essence), and the use of mystical symbols and diagrams. Bernhard Pick's work on the Cabala is considered significant in the study of Jewish mysticism and the transmission of Kabbalistic ideas beyond Jewish circles into Christian thought.
Zinc Read 2023-07-31 66 pages

No Pretty Pictures

Anita Lobel
The beloved Caldecott Honor artist now recounts a tale of vastly different kind -- her own achingly potent memoir of a childhood of flight, imprisonment, and uncommon bravery in Nazi-occupied Poland. Anita Lobel was barely five when the war began and sixteen by the time she came to America from Sweden, where she had been sent to recover at the end of the war. This haunting book, illustrated with the author's archival photographs, is the remarkable account of her life during those years. Poised, forthright, and always ready to embrace life, Anita Lobel is the main character in the most personal story she will ever tell.Anita Lobel was barely five years old when World War II began and the Nazis burst into her home in Krakow, Poland, changing her life forever. She spent the days of her childhood in hiding with her brother--who was disguised as a girl--and their Catholic nanny in the countryside, the ghetto, and finally in a convent where the Nazis caught up with her. She was imprisoned in a succession of concentration camps until the end of the war. Sent by the Red Cross to recuperate in Sweden, she slowly blossomed as she discovered books and language and art. Since coming to the United States as a teenager, Anita Lobel has spent her life making pictures. She has never gone back. She has never looked back. Until now. 00-01 Tayshas High School Reading List Anita Lobel was barely five years old when World War II began and the Nazis burst into her home in Krakow, Poland, changing her life forever. She spent the days of her childhood in hiding with her brother--who was disguised as a girl--and their Catholic nanny in the countryside, the ghetto, and finally in a convent where the Nazis caught up with her. She was imprisoned in a succession of concentration camps until the end of the war. Sent by the Red Cross to recuperate in Sweden, she slowly blossomed as she discovered books and language and art. Since coming to the United States as a teenager, Anita Lobel has spent her life making pictures. She has never gone back. She has never looked back. Until now.
HarperCollins 2000-02-02 193 pages