Biographical fiction Books

Bardskull is the record of three journeys made by Martin Shaw, the celebrated storyteller and interpreter of myth, in the year before he turned fifty. It is unlike anything he has written before. This is not a book about myth or narrative: rather, it is...

Twenty-five-year-old Anthony Patch appears to have it all: a Harvard education, an apartment in New York City, memberships at all of the best clubs, and a generous trust fund to draw from. Sure, his grandfather is not happy with Anthony's lack of...

Lovers of Haiku, Zen and Japan will find this novel truly inspiring!An extraordinary man at a crucial time and place.Imprisoned during World War I as a conscientious objector and interned during World War II as an enemy alien, Reginald Horace Blyth was a...

Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott meet the horrors of the Civil War as they minister to its casualtiesAfter the Union Army's defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and...

After growing up with an alcoholic mother and an intermittent stepfather, Alex pines for connection, even as he sabotages his life with substances, and substitutes one failed relationship for the next. Shuffling from troubled home to chaotic institution,...

Best known for his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was burdened by familial shame, which began with his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, the infamously unrepentant Salem witch trial judge. In this, the eighth stand-alone book in The...

A shattering biographical novel of J.D. Salinger in combatSalinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter...

"A perfect book."Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story and Genet: A BiographyIn June 1897, the young Constantine Cavafy arrives in Paris on the last stop of a long European tour, a trip that will deeply shape his future and push him toward his poetic...

'Perhaps the luminous novel is this thing that I started writing today, just now. Maybe these sheets of paper are a warm-up exercise. [...] But it's quite possible that if I go on writing as I usually do with no plan, although this time I know very well...

1941, Hitler's army crosses into Soviet-ruled Ukraine in a secret mission titled "Operation Barbarossa. A young Jewish girl, Hanna Slivka is fourteen when German soldiers arrive in her small village of Kwasova. Until their arrival, Hanna has split her...

Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the MurasakiShikibu PrizeIntroducing Hiromi Ito, an award-winning Japanese author who has been compared to Haruki Murakami and Yoko Tawada.The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi...

This graphic novel is a fictional memoir set between 1955 and 2010. It chronicles the life of William Delaroux and his continuous struggle to make the best of difficult circumstances. The book starts with Bill's memories of being a latchkey kid of a...

Based on a true story set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, The Purchased Bride tells the tale of Maria, a Greek girl who was bought at age fifteen by a much older, wealthy Ottoman man.As the Ottoman Empire falls and insurgents torch their Greek...

After nine years in a Dutch asylum center, an Iraqi refugee tries to start a new life as a European citizen and discovers that to make friends in the western world, you need a dog.After nine years in a Dutch asylum center, Samir finally has the chance to...

A thirty-five-year-old writer decides she wants to have children. Rounds of IVF treatments and several years later, she has two daughters and sits down to write this book. World's Best Mother is a sublime journey - through pregnancy, the mothering of...

Just shy of his fiftieth birthday, bestselling French author Frederic and his ten-year-old daughter travel the globe in search of immortality.What does the man who has everything fame, fortune, a new love, and a new baby want for his fiftieth birthday?...

Amsterdam Airport, 1998. Samir Karim steps off a plane from Vietnam, flushes his fake passport down the toilet, and requests asylum. Fleeing Iraq to avoid conscription into Saddam Hussein's army, he has spent seven years anonymously wandering...

A daring and imaginative novel based on the lives of The Last Poets, New York's legendary Hip-Hop pioneers from the ghettos.Even readers unfamiliar with The Last Poets' historic significance as building blocks of the hip-hop and rap movement, will...

The second installment of Argentine literary giant Ricardo Piglia's acclaimed bibliophilic trilogy follows his alter ego, Emilio Renzi, as his literary career begins to take off in the tumultuous years 1968-1975-running a magazine, working as a...

The Story of the Woman Who Fooled the Yankees and Rebels Alike. As a child, Sarah Emma Edmonds dreamed of faraway places and adventure, often picturing herself as a man. When her abusive father traded her hand in marriage for a few head of livestock, she...

An American student in 1970s Kyoto rambles among the city's beauties and traditions, learning as he goes. Don Ascher is a young American living in Kyoto in the 1970s.He is a studentof Japanese. He also teaches English, works at...

BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER"Brings Isabella Stewart Gardner fully, intimately alive-irrepressible and avid for life. In this richly compelling novel, Emily Franklin beautifully conjures this extraordinary woman and her world."-Claire Messud, author of The...

"[Genoa] invites us to pass our minds down a new but ancient track, to become, ourselves, both fact and fiction, and to discover something true about the geography of time."-William Gass, The New York Times"Genoa is a spectacular confrontation with...

Finalist, Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging WritersI have just heard for the first time the expression "to make soup": it means to mix the bottom-of-the-pocket drugs of everyone huddled in the club toilet stall, opened MD, ketamine,...