"In a novel perfect for fans of Hazel Gaynor's A Memory of Violets and upstairs-downstairs stories, Annabel Abbs, the award-winning author of The Joyce Girl, returns with the brilliant real-life story of Eliza Acton and her assistant as they revolutionized British cooking and cookbooks around the world. Before Mrs. Beeton and well before Julia Child, there was Eliza Acton, who changed the course of cookery writing forever. England, 1835. London is...

Inspired by the Vermeer painting of the same title, Girl with Pearl Earring, this novel takes the reader inside the world of the 17th century Delft. In seventeenth-century Delft, there's a strict social order -rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, master and servant -and all know their place. When Griet becomes a maid in the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer, she thinks she knows her role: housework, laundry, and the care of his six children....

Fact and fiction blend in a historical novel that chronicles the relationship between seminal architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, from their meeting, when they were each married to another, to the clandestine affair that shocked Chicago society.

Born to the life of an educated Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given a choice at the age of twenty-two: die within months in Atlanta or leave everyone he loves in hopes of finding health in the West. Young, scared, lonely and sick, he arrives on the rawest edge of the Texas frontier in time for an economic crash. Soon he's gambling professionally and living with a high-strung, classically educated Hungarian whore who insists that they...

Abandoned by their family, Antoinette and Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel grew up under the guidance of pious nuns preparing them for simple lives as the wives of tradesmen or shopkeepers. When they came of age, the sisters set out together with a fierce determination to prove themselves worthy to a society that has never accepted them. Their journey propelled them out of poverty and to the stylish cafés of Moulins, the dazzling performance halls of Vichy--...

Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He's a normal Italian teenager--obsessed with music, food, and girls--but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior. In an attempt to protect him, Pino's parents force him to enlist as a German soldier--a move...

"The unconventional life of Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth II's younger sister, is told through the eyes of her loyal lady-in-waiting"--Adapted from cover description. "Springing into post-World War II society, and quite naughty and haughty, Princess Margaret lived in a whirlwind of fame and notoriety. She sparkles in the company of her glittering entourage of wealthy young aristocrats known as the Margaret Set, but can she be a dutiful princess...

When Mary Todd meets Abraham Lincoln in Springfield in the winter of 1840, he is on no one's shortlist to be president. Rough and reticent, he's a country lawyer lacking money and manners, living above a dry goods shop, but with a gift for oratory. Mary, a quick, self-possessed debutante with a tireless interest in debates and elections, at first finds him an enigma. "I can only hope," she tells his roommate, the handsome, charming Joshua Speed, "that...

A historical novel based on the life of Mary Rowlandson. Even before she was captured by Indians on a winter day of violence and terror, Mary Rowlandson sometimes found herself in conflict with her rigid Puritan community. Now, her home destroyed, her children lost to her, she has been sold into the service of a powerful woman tribal leader and made a pawn in the ongoing bloody struggle between English settlers and native people. Battling cold, hunger,...

Tells the epic story of Catherine the Great's improbable rise to power--as seen through the ever-watchful eyes of an all-but-invisible servant close to the throne. Her name is Barbara--in Russian, Varvara. Nimble-witted and attentive, she's allowed into the employ of the Empress Elizabeth, amid the glitter and cruelty of the world's most eminent court. Under the tutelage of Count Bestuzhev, Chancellor and spymaster, Varvara will be educated in skills...