Obscure People and Different Perspectives
Explore unique viewpoints with 'Obscure People and Different Perspectives'—a curated list of books offering rare insights and hidden narratives from lesser-known voices.
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Cleopatra's Heir
by Gillian Bradshaw
Caesar and Cleopatra--together they could have forged an empire the likes of which had never been seen before. Tragically, it was not meant to be ... but what of the son that came of their passion? Bradshaw gives readers an answer in "Cleopatra's Heir." The power and might of Rome in all her glory meets the splendor of ancient Egypt with the story of Caesarion, the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.
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Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • From the bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending comes an “extraordinary … first rate” novel (The New York Times Book Review) that follows the lives of two very different British men and explores the grand tapestry of late-Victorian Britain. As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later—one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world’s most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife—their fates become inextricably connected.
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The Rising Shore
by Deborah Homsher
This novel tells the story of the Lost Colony through the voices of two pioneering women who sail from London to the wild American shore in 1587. This was the first English attempt to establish a settlement in the New World. It failed; the colonists vanished. THE RISING SHORE-ROANOKE brings to life the courageous women who joined this venture. FIC014000
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The Emancipator's Wife
by Barbara Hambly
As a girl growing up in Kentucky, she lived a sheltered, privileged life filled with picnics and plantation balls. Vivacious, impulsive, and intoxicated by politics, she is a Todd of Lexington, an aristocratic family whose ancestors defeated the British. But no one knows her secret fears and anxieties. Although she is courted by the most eligible suitors in the land, including future senator Stephen Douglas, it is a gangly lawyer from Illinois who captures her heart. After a stormy courtship and a broken engagement, Abraham Lincoln will marry twenty-four-year-old Mary Todd and give her a ring inscribed with the words “Love Is Eternal.” But their happiness won’t last nearly so long. Their first child will be born under the gathering clouds of a civil war, and three more follow. As Lincoln’s star rises, the pleasure-loving Mary learns, often the hard way, the rules of being a politician’s wife. But by the time the fiery storm of war passes, tragedy will have claimed two sons, scandal will shadow her days as First Lady, and an assassin’s bullet will take Lincoln himself, leaving Mary alone and all but forgotten by the nation that owed her husband its survival. Yet it is in the years to come that Mary Todd Lincoln will truly come into her own. In public, she will fight to preserve Lincoln’s memory even as she battles a bitterly contested insanity trial. In private, she will struggle with depression and addiction as she endures the betrayals–both real and imagined–of family and friends. With a gifted novelist’s imagination and a historian’s eye for detail, Barbara Hambly tells a story of astonishing scope, richly peopled with real-life characters and their fictional counterparts, a tour-de-force tale of power, politics, and the role of women in nineteenth- century America. The result is a Mary Todd Lincoln few have seen and none will forget–the fascinating, controversial woman of whom her husband could say: “My wife is as handsome as when she was a girl and I fell in love with her; and what is more, I have never fallen out”–Mary Todd, the woman who loved Abraham Lincoln.
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Mozart's Wife
by Juliet Waldron
Based on original sources, including family letters and scholarly biographies this is a biographical novel about Constanze, Moazrt's wife.
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Inamorata
by Joseph Gangemi
Inspired by Scientific American's 1922 offer of a five thousand dollar prize for concrete evidence of "conclusive psychic manifestations," Martin Finch, a Harvard graduate student, attempts to discover whether Mina Crawley, a Philadelphia socialite, is able to contact the spirit realm, only to find himself falling in love with his subject. A first novel. Reprint.
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The Confession of Piers Gaveston
by Brandy Purdy
The history books tell us that Piers Gaveston was many things: arrogant, ambitious, avaricious, flamboyant, extravagant, reckless, brave, and daring, indiscreet, handsome, witty, vivacious, vain, and peacock-proud, a soldier and champion jouster, the son of a condemned witch, who used witchcraft, his own wicked wiles, and forbidden sex to entice and enslave King Edward II, alienate him from his nobles and advisors, and keep him from the bed of his beautiful bride Isabelle. Edward's infatuation with Gaveston, and the deluge of riches he showered on him, nearly plunged England into civil war. Now the object of that scandalous and legendary obsession tells his side of the story in The Confession of Piers Gaveston: "Mayhap even now, when I have only just begun, it is already too late to set the story straight. My infamy, I fear, is too well entrenched. Whenever they tell the story of Edward's reign I will always be the villain and Edward, the poor, weak-willed, pliant king who fell under my spell, the golden victim of a dark enchantment. There are two sides to every coin; but when the bards and chroniclers, the men who write the histories, tell this story, will anyone remember that?"
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The Tsar's Dwarf
by Peter Fogtdal
Soerine, a deformed female dwarf from Denmark, is given as a gift to Tsar Peter the Great, who is smitten by her freakishness and intellect. Against her will, she becomes a jester in his court, in this masterfully told and brilliantly translated novel about aberration, endurance, and the human condition.