Historical Literary Fiction Saga

Alive with incident and insight, presenting with rare scope and intimacy the complex relations among nineteenth-century traders, immigrants, and Native Americans, A Sudden Country is, above all, a heroic and unforgettable story of love and loss, sacrifice and understanding.

Caecilia, Roman born but Etruscan wed, forsakes Rome to return to her husband, Vel Mastarna, exposing herself to the enmity of his people while knowing the Romans will give her a traitor's death if Veii falls. Semni, a reckless Etruscan servant in the House of Mastarna, embroils herself in schemes that threaten Caecilia's son and Semni's own chance for love. Pinna, a destitute Roman prostitute, uses coercion to gain the attention of Rome's greatest general at the risk of betraying Caecilia's cousin.

This is the story of the Hasting family - their secrets, their loves and losses, dreams and heartbreaks - captured in a seamless series of individual moments that span the years between the first World War and the present.

The novel opens in 1914 as William, a young factory worker, spends one last evening at home before his departure for the navy.… His son Billy, grows into a champion cyclist and will ride into the D-Day landings on a military bicycle.… His son in turn, Will, struggles with a debilitating handicap to become an Oxford professor in the 1960s.

Houston in the 1920s is a city of established cotton kings and newly rich oil barons, where the elite live in beaux art mansions behind the gates of Courtlandt Place. Kirby Augustus Allen, grandson of the Allen brothers who founded Houston as a real estate deal, is grooming his daughter Hetty to marry Lamar Rusk, scion of the Splendora oil fortune. Instead, at the No-Tsu-Oh Carnival of 1928, beautiful, rebellious Hetty encounters a mysterious man from Montana dressed in the gear of a wildcatter - an outsider named Garret MacBride.

Napoli, 1938. Carolina è un’operosissima sarta, sposata con don Arturo e madre di ben cinque figli. In occasione della visita di Adolf Hitler alla città, ella ha come un oscuro presentimento: ben presto, in uno sforzo quasi parossistico, inizia a lavorare di buona lena, per riuscire a stipare abbastanza risorse alimentari nella sua sartoria, così come nella cantina di casa. Di lì a pochi anni, poi, il suo impegno risulterà essere stato provvidenziale.

Quando un locandiere scozzese chiede all'austero e riservato Drue, duca di Warminster, di dare un passaggio a una vecchietta la cui carrozza è in panne, lui accetta con riluttanza. La fragile vecchia signora è in realtà una giovane bellezza dai capelli rossi di nome Jabina, scappata di casa per evitare un matrimonio impostole dal padre.

After surviving the loss of both her parents, one to illness and the other to abandonment, Bernice Rosin finds herself at a South Dakota orphanage that will never feel like home. Longing for a life free of poverty and misfortune, she takes matters into her own hands, determined to secure her own happily-ever-after no matter the cost.

What if our homes could tell the stories of others who lived there before us? Set in a small village near Paris, The Balcony follows the inhabitants of a single estate - including a manor and a servants' cottage - over the course of several generations, from the Belle Époque to the present day, introducing us to a fascinating cast of characters. A young American au pair develops a crush on her brilliant employer. An ex-courtesan shocks the servants, a Jewish couple in hiding from the Gestapo attract the curiosity of the neighbors, and a housewife begins an affair.

During the Nazi occupation, fifteen-year-old Paul Vertune, the sensitive son of wheat farmers, prefers gazing at the ocean and contemplating life's mysteries over toiling in the fields of the Brittany coast. One fateful day, Paul's life is spared by a compassionate German soldier with eyes as blue as the sea. When Paul's village is liberated, an angry mob turns against their occupiers. The German soldier, near death, asks Paul to promise him one thing: find his daughter and tell her that her father loved her.

Louis Begley creates multi-faceted characters that come to life under the spell of his crystalline prose. Returning his readers to the wealthy and privileged world of About Schmidt, he introduces them, this time, to an especially poignant protagonist. “A happy man, as the world goes,” Thomas Mistler feels an odd sense of liberation now that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. This hard-driving Madison Avenue mogul suddenly has an excuse to live for the moment. But spending time alone in Venice is not the free-wheeling, self-indulgent experience he had hoped for.

Born to a Russian family of lower nobility, Xenia, an eccentric dreamer who cares little for social conventions, falls in love with Andrei, a charismatic soldier and singer in the Empress's Imperial choir. Though husband and wife adore each other, their happiness is overshadowed by the absurd demands of life at the royal court and by Xenia's growing obsession with having a child - a desperate need that is at last fulfilled with the birth of her daughter. But then a tragic vision comes true, and a shattered Xenia descends into grief, undergoing a profound transformation that alters the course of her life.

The daughter of a Torah scholar in eighteenth-century Ukraine, Gittel has always accepted her place in a family steeped in religion. Married at age twelve to a cold and reclusive rabbi, the young bride gives birth to two sons destined to follow their father's path. Finding very little comfort in family life, Gittel shares her dreams, visions, and a close spiritual understanding with her only confidant: her father-in-law, the Maggid of Mezeritch.

"Masterful...a classic parable of the human condition," said Publishers Weekly about Ethan Canin's For Kings and Planets, and the same can be said about Canin's brilliant new novel. Breathtaking in its suspense and beauty, Carry Me Across the Water tells the story of a complex man's extraordinary life, lived against the backdrop of the central years of the twentieth century.

How did the families who live on Manhattan's Upper East Side get to where they are today? As much a penetrating social history as it is engaging fiction, East Side Story tells of the Carnochans, a family whose Scottish forebears establish themselves in New York's textile business during the Civil War. From there they quickly move on to seize prominent positions in the country's top schools and Manhattan's elite firms. As the novel unfolds, family members across the generations recount their stories, illuminating lives steeped in both good fortune and moral jeopardy.

Caín pone de manifiesto lo que hay de moderno y sorprendente en la prosa de Saramago: la capacidad de hacer nueva una historia que se conoce de principio a fin. Una reflexión acerca del origen del poder y de las manipulaciones que las distintas religiones y sus aliados temporales han ejercido sobre las conciencias de los hombres para evitar que el pensamiento sea libre y el uso de la voluntad independiente de criterios religiosos.

Melina Lindsay är överlycklig när hon får jobbet som sällskapsdam åt mrs Schuster på hennes resa, men lyckan får ett abrupt slut när hon strax efter ankomsten till Marocko blir avskedad. Med bara en veckas lön i fickan finner hon sig nu ensam i ett främmande land. Vad ska hon ta sig till? Hon tar in på ett boende för natten och just när hon tror att det inte kan bli värre dyker en främmande man upp på hennes balkong, desperat efter hjälp. Melina går med på att hjälpa honom, och blir i samma stund indragen i en livsfarlig situation.

När markisen av Heroncourt återvänder från kriget gör han det som en krigshjälte. Tillvaron på hemmaplan, som till en början är fridfull, övergår snart till att bli en ny sorts plåga. Markisen är uttråkad och fördriver sin tid genom att inleda meningslösa affärer med vackra kvinnor, något som om möjligt tråkar ut honom än mer. Vardagen är grå och långsam tills en dag då hans granne Lady Mimosa plötsligt knackar på hans dörr. Den unga kvinnan berättar om sin kusins fruktansvärda planer att begå mord och ber markisen om hjälp.

Markisen av Sarne stönade och öppnade sakta ögonen. Det första han blev medveten om var en molande huvudvärk och sedan att han var torr i munnen. Var befann han sig? Varför mådde han så dåligt? Och varför var han iklädd aftondräkt ...? Det är först en stund senare som markisen inser vad som hänt. Han har blivit drogad av sin ärkefiende och lurad att gifta sig med en för honom okänd kvinna, Romana.

Con questo romanzo inizia il futuro di Jole e Sergio, figli di Augusto e Agnese De Boer, coltivatori di tabacco a Nevada, in Val Brenta. Vent'anni lei, dodici lui, dopo tante vicissitudini i due fratelli sono pronti ad affrontare la più grande delle sfide: lasciare la propria terra, che nulla ha più da offrire, per raggiungere il Nuovo mondo. Un'avventura epica che ha in sé l'incanto e il terrore di tante prime volte: per la prima volta salgono sul treno che li porterà fino a Genova dove, vissuti da sempre tra i profili aspri delle montagne, vedranno il mare - immenso, spaventoso.

1972 - A Saga of Change is not a historical novel; it is fiction based on some events in India, around 1972. Every war or a large scale revolution, accelerates social change. This novel attempts to study the social and attitudinal changes that occurred in an Indian region, close to Indo-Pak border, by considering changes that occurred in some typical students and residents of a town close to the border.