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Biographical fiction

  • Author:
    Fortier, Dominique
    Summary:

    A whimsical and misanthropic imagining of Emily Dickinson's life. Paper Towns is a novelized account of Emily Dickinson's life, focusing on her childhood, the homes she lived in throughout her life, her family relationships, and her gradual reclusiveness, as she becomes consumed by getting words down on paper, and writing becomes an end in itself. Dickinson's childhood seems idyllic, and the headstrong Emily is both serious and fanciful. As she presses flowers between the pages of heavy books to preserve them, she reflects that books drink the water of flowers. When she is given a kaleidoscope for Christmas, she sees it as a device for taking the world as it is and making it unrecognizable, saying to her mother in response to the gift, "But I already have so many books ..." The account of her adult life focuses on her writing and gardening, her gradual withdrawal from society, her relationships with family members and her limited contact with people from the outside world. She is disappointed with flesh and blood, and prefers letters, reflecting that you can't have books and a life, after seeing her classmates abandon their dreams to take their place in society. She remains close to her sister, but upon returning to her childhood home Homestead, after a 25-year absence, she reflects that of all the members of her family, she likes the house the best.

  • Author:
    Papp, Susan M.
    Summary:

    In this story of love and loss, Tibor Schroeder, a Christian and reservist in the Hungarian forces allied with Nazi Germany, and Hedy Weisz, a young Jewish woman meet and fall in love during the Second World War - a time when romantic liaisons and marriage between Christians and Jews were not only frowned upon but against the law. Not knowing of the dangers that await them, Tibor and Hedy pledge their lives to each only to be torn apart when Hedy and her family are herded into one Nagyszollos’ ghettoes. Twenty-five years pass before the lovers are finally reunited in Canada. Based on true events, this sprawling love story of hope, courage, and redemption will stay with readers long after finishing the book. A documentary, based on this story, from Postmodern Productions is scheduled for release in March 2009.

  • Author:
    Drewe, Robert
    Summary:

    Ned Kelly is the most wanted man in Australia. When the authorities bring in an army of police to catch him, Ned plans an extraordinary showdown at the Inn at Glenrowan. It is an event which will cement his status as the legendary revolutionary hero of the Australian underclass forever.

  • Author:
    Birch, Carol
    Summary:

    London had the best freaks, always had. The Egyptian Hall, the Promenade of Wonders, the Siamese twins, pinheads, midgets, cannibals, giants, living skeletons, the fat, the hairy, the legless, the armless, the noseless, London had seen it all. In the Hall of Ugliness the competition was stiff. But noone had ever seen anything quite like Julia ... Pronounced by the most eminent physician of the day to be "a true hybrid wherein the nature of woman presides over that of the brute," Julia Pastrana stood apart from the other carnival acts. She was fluent in English, French and Spanish, an accomplished musician with an exquisite singing voice, equally at ease riding horseback and turning pirouettes--but all anyone noticed was her utterly unusual face. Alternately vilified and celebrated, Julia toured through New Orleans, New York, London, Berlin, Vienna, and Moscow, often hobknobbing with high society as she made her fame and fortune. Beneath the flashy lights and thunderous applause lies a bright, compassionate young woman who only wants people to see beyond her hairy visage--and perhaps, the chance for love. When Julia visits a mysterious shaman in the back alleys of New Orleans, he gives her a potion and says that she'll find a man within the year. Sure enough, Julia soon meets Theodore Lent, a boyishly charming showman who catapults Julia onto the global stage. As they travel the world, the two fall into an easy intimacy, but the question of whether Theo truly cares for Julia or if his management is just a gentler form of exploitation lingers heavily with every kind word and soft embrace.

  • Author:
    Winter, Kathleen, Voillot, Sophie
    Summary:

    Un homme erre dans les rues de Montréal. Selon l’état civil, il s’appelle Jimmy Blanchard, mais il s’exprime dans le plus pur anglais du XVIIIe siècle. Lui-même affirme qu’il n’est nul autre que le général James Wolfe, vainqueur de la bataille des plaines d’Abraham. Fait troublant, Jimmy est le portrait tout craché du fameux général : corps dégingandé, tignasse rousse et menton fuyant. Et il en montre aussi le caractère, celui d’un homme perpétuellement assailli par la mélancolie, à la fois tendre et têtu, qui aime ses chiens et ses camarades, et par-dessus tout sa mère. S’il est revenu d’entre les morts, dit-il, c’est pour reprendre les onze jours qu’on lui a volés quand l’Angleterre a adopté le calendrier grégorien, en 1752. Ces onze jours, du 3 au 13 septembre, coïncidaient avec un mois de permission que le jeune officier – il a vingt-cinq ans à l’époque – avait réclamé pour aller à Paris, jours qui auraient dû être consacrés à la danse, à la liberté, au repos mérité après dix ans de combats. Mais James/Jimmy, dont l’esprit est manifestement troublé, s’emmêle dans la chronologie. Toutes les campagnes où il s’est illustré se confondent dans sa mémoire, Carthagène, Dettingen, Culloden, Québec… pour ne plus former qu’un seul champ de bataille où la guerre fait rage éternellement. Sophie Cotterill, cette chamane qui vit dans une tente sur les flancs du mont Royal et qui l’a recueilli, est catégorique : sa seule chance de briser l’enchantement et de trouver enfin la paix, c’est de retourner à Québec, sur le lieu exact de sa mort, le 13 septembre, jour anniversaire de la célèbre bataille.

  • Author:
    Keeney, Patricia
    Summary:

    One Man Dancing is based on the true story of a young Ugandan actor-dancer growing into artistic maturity during the murderous regime of dictator Idi Amin. It follows Charles from his youth in Uganda’s colonial villages, and through his work with artistic guru Robert Serumaga, which takes him on an eye-opening whirlwind international tour. Bounced from Africa to Europe to Canada and back again, Charles experiences bizarre and dangerous encounters with assassination, natural disaster, Idi Amin, and even the CIA. Based on the extraordinary life of a Ugandan actor, One Man Dancing is a political mystery, a story of risk and freedom, a harrowing tale of theatre and personal belief.

  • Author:
    Crane, Dede
    Summary:

    In One Madder Woman, Dede Crane vividly recreates the life of Berthe Morisot, the sole female member of the renowned group of artists known as the Impressionists. Inspired by true events, One Madder Woman charts her complicated relationship with her sister and rival, Edma, and her tumultuous love affair with Édouard Manet, the charismatic enfant terrible of the Paris Salon, against a backdrop of upheaval and war in mid-19th-century Paris. One Madder Woman illuminates the stories behind familiar masterpieces, and sketches a life teeming with obstacles defied and conquered by the genius of Morisot. At a time when art was a space completely dominated by men, Morisot upends all expectations of what a “proper woman” should be and manages to carve out her own place in the art world. Crane’s rich prose and lyrical expression bring this revolutionary artistic period to life, in vivid and glorious colour.

  • Author:
    Henry, Patti Callahan
    Summary:

    Megs Devonshire is brilliant with numbers and equations, on a scholarship at Oxford, and dreams of solving the greatest mysteries of physics. The younger brother she loves with all her heart doesn't have long to live. When George becomes captivated by a brand-new book called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and begs her to find out where Narnia came from, there's no way she can refuse. Megs soon finds herself taking tea with the Oxford don and his own brother, imploring them for answers. What she receives instead are more stories, stories of Jack Lewis's life, which she takes home to George. Why won't Mr. Lewis just tell her plainly what George wants to know? The answer will reveal to Meg many truths that science and math cannot.

  • Author:
    Grady, Wayne, Hamelin, Louis
    Summary:

    Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book. October 1970. Two kidnappings. One dead. A crisis unlike anything the country had ever seen — here is the story behind history . . . Thirty years after the October Crisis, Sam Nihilo, a freelance writer whose career is in a slump, is drawn to the conspiracy theories that have proliferated in the wake of the events. While investigating the death of one of the FLQ hostages, Nihilo sees his life consumed by an inquiry that leads him further into a flurry of facts, both known and newly discovered. Soon, secret agents, corrupt police officers, politicians, and former terrorists of the Front de Libération du Québec form a mysterious constellation around him, and at the centre lies a complicated and dangerous truth. In the tradition of Don DeLillo’s Libra, October 1970 is a thrilling fictional account of the events that shaped one of the most volatile moments in recent history.

  • Author:
    Leslie, Doris
    Summary:

    The life and times of the Countess of Blessington and the well known men who were her lovers, in the early 19th Century.

  • Author:
    Barnes, Julian
    Summary:

    A compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich: Julian Barnes's first novel since his best-selling, Man Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending. In 1936, Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, executed on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, various women and wives, his children-and all who are still alive themselves hang in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, for decades to come he will be held fast under the thumb of despotism: made to represent Soviet values at a cultural conference in New York City, forced into joining the Party and compelled, constantly, to weigh appeasing those in power against the integrity of his music. Barnes elegantly guides us through the trajectory of Shostakovich's career, at the same time illuminating the tumultuous evolution of the Soviet Union. The result is both a stunning portrait of a relentlessly fascinating man and a brilliant exploration of the meaning of art and its place in society.

  • Author:
    Thornell, Kristel
    Summary:

    Winner, Dobbie Literary Award, FAW Barbara Ramsden Award, Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelist Award, and The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. Night Street is the passionate story of a young painter, Clarice Beckett, who defies society’s strict conventions and indifferent art critics alike and leads an intense private and professional life. With her extraordinary talent for making simple city and seascapes haunting and mysteriously revelatory, Clarice paints prolifically and lives largely, overcoming the seemingly confined existence. Inspired by the art and life of the Victorian artist Clarice Beckett (1887–1935), Night Street is the story of a painter who, having remained unmarried by choice, continues to live with her ageing parents. Hers is an existence which, from the outside, appears both restrictive and monotonous. In fact, it masks a vibrant and passionate hidden life. With a mobile painting trolley in lieu of a studio, Clarice makes her way through the streets and coastline of Melbourne at dawn and dusk where she creates sombre, enigmatic landscapes. Through her art, she enters into a world of sensuality and freedom, away from the constraints of a conservative and disapproving society. Thornell is a beautiful writer. Her evocation of the painter Clarice, who fights against societal conventions whilst being pushed, to outwardly adhere to them, is powerful, eloquent and moving. The clarity and simplicity of Thornell’s writing resonates through the book, highlighting its undercurrent of fervour and passion, as it propels the narrative forward with a masterful sense of poetic urgency. Night Street began with Thornell’s first encounter with the paintings of Clarice Beckett at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The subtle power of Beckett’s enigmatic landscapes enabled her to imagine Clarice’s inner life and shape an extraordinary novel.

  • Author:
    Bass, Rick
    Summary:

    Maxine, Bonnie, and Jim Ed Brown are a family act with a hit record sitting atop 1959's country music charts. The world at their feet, lives of success seem to spread out before them like an unending highway. But celebrity has its price, and the times ahead will deliver more than their fair share of bumps in the road.

  • Author:
    Jin, Ha
    Summary:

    During the 1937 attack on Nanjing, American missionary and women's college dean Minnie Vautrin decides to remain at her school during a violent Japanese attack that renders the school a refugee center for ten thousand women and children.

  • Author:
    Khalil, Danah
    Summary:

    Danah's eating disorder has a personality – it's a demon she calls Ed, the voice in her head that undermines her self-esteem and her perception of the world. How can she explain that even when she tries to develop healthier eating habits, there is a demon wriggling inside her mind, determining her every step? The eighteen-year-old author of this novel for teens brings her own journal entries to life, revealing the mental anguish of a teen suffering with anorexia and the terrifying grip the disorder holds on her.

  • Author:
    Freedman, Benedict
    Summary:

    Katherine Mary O'Fallon was 16 when she went from Boston to a ranch in Canada. Soon she met Mike Flanningan of the Canadian Mounted Police and they went to live in the far north. Their story is a romance and they experience happiness, hardship, tragedy, and courage together.

  • Author:
    Chiaverini, Jennifer
    Summary:

    Presents a fictionalized account of the friendship between Mary Todd Lincoln and her dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave.

  • Author:
    Law, Janice
    Summary:

    Artist Francis Bacon gets tangled up in murder while visiting the English countryside in the final mystery of this Lambda Award-winning series. Francis Bacon awakes in a four-poster bed with a punishing hangover and a naked footman beside him. The setting and company mean he's in the country, and that spells disaster for an up-and-coming artist whose natural habitat is the nightclubs and back alleys of swinging Soho. But he's put aside his distaste for the pastoral life for the sake of his favorite cousin, Poppy, a spirited young debutante who's committed the biggest blunder a deb can make: She's fallen in love with Freddie Bosworth-and must be rescued at all costs. Bosworth is a cad, an accused blackmailer with a love for Mussolini and dark secrets too terrible to tell. Fortunately, Poppy comes to her senses, breaking the engagement, and Francis thinks their troubles are over. But when the cousins take a walk through the manor grounds the next day, they find a handsome young man in a pin-striped suit lying dead in the grass. Freddie's throat has been cut, and Francis's life is on the line. Along his globetrotting adventures-which have taken him everywhere from Tangier to Berlin-Francis has been mixed up with spies, killers, and the misfits of the cities' underworlds. Now Janice Law, the Edgar Award-nominated author of Afternoons in Paris, continues to imagine the early years of the fascinating Irish-born painter, a notorious bon vivant, in the thrilling last installment of her popular mystery series.Mornings in London is the 6th book in the Francis Bacon Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

  • Author:
    ROBERTS, Ann Victoria
    Summary:

    One long hot summer in the 1880s, Bram Stoker escaped to Whitby from the pressures of theatre life in London. These months are unaccounted for in the life of the future author of Dracula, and round them Ann Roberts has woven a passionate mysterious novel

  • Author:
    Harper, Karen
    Summary:

    A young widow and candlemaker, Varina Westcott, agrees to travel to Wales to investigate the suspicious death of the newly married Prince Arthur as a secret request of Queen Elizabeth of York, the wife of Henry VII. But with each clue, fears arise that the conspiracy Varina is confronting is far more ambitious and treacherous than even the queen imagined. And it aims to utterly destroy the Tudor dynasty.

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