The illegitimate daughter of a captain in the royal navy and an enslaved African woman, the Earl of Mansfield, Dido Belle was sent to live with her great-uncle, one of the most powerful men of the time and a leading opponent of slavery. Growing up in his lavish estate, Dido was raised as a sister and companion to her white cousin, Elizabeth.

When a joint portrait of the girls, commissioned by Mansfield, was unveiled, eighteenth-century England was shocked to see a black woman and white woman depicted as equals. Inspired by the painting, belle vividly brings to life this extraordinary woman caught between two worlds, and illuminates the great civil rights question of her age: the fight to end slavery.

Belle includes 20 pages of black-and-white photos. From acclaimed biographer paula byrne, the sensational true tale that inspired the major motion picture Belle May 2014 starring Tom Wilkinson, Penelope Wilton, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, and Matthew Goode—a stunning story of the first mixed-race girl introduced to high society England and raised as a lady.

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The Baker's Daughter: A Novel

As the two women's lives become intertwined, both are forced to confront the uncomfortable truths of the past and seek out the courage to forgive. She and her family have been protected from the worst of the terror and desperation overtaking her country by a high-ranking Nazi who wishes to marry her. So when an escaped jewish boy arrives on Elsie’s doorstep on Christmas Eve, Elsie understands that opening the door would put all she loves in danger.

Sixty years later, reba adams is trying to file a feel-good Christmas piece for the local magazine, Texas, in El Paso, and she sits down with the owner of Elsie's German Bakery for what she expects will be an easy interview. But reba finds herself returning to the bakery again and again, anxious to find the heart of the story—a story that resonates with her own turbulent past.

In this new york times bestseller, the politics of exclusion, the terrible choices we face in wartime, two women in different eras face similar life-altering decisions, and the redemptive power of love. In 1945, elsie schmidt is a naive teenager, as eager for her first sip of champagne as she is for her first kiss.

For elsie, reba’s questions are a stinging reminder of that last bleak year of World War II.

Elizabeth Taylor

But it was her off-screen life - eight stormy marriages, a jewel-encrusted lifestyle, and struggles with weight and various addictions - that provided the most riveting drama. Along the way, becomes trapped in a cycle of destructive affairs with Richard Burton, she is vilified by fans for stealing singer Eddie Fischer from Debbie Reynolds, and desperately tries to recapture the childhood she never had with the eccentric pop star Michael Jackson.

I've always admitted that i'm ruled by my passions, " she once said - and those passions make for a gripping, epic tale of tribulation and triumph. For a time, elizabeth taylor was the world's biggest star, winner of two Oscars and a Hollywood legend for searing performances in films such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Long before the age of reality television, Taylor showed how fame could take on a volatile life of its own, obscuring the real person behind the media façade. Now, and finally, we meet the real elizabeth taylor as she grows from precocious child star to "the most beautiful woman in the world" to serious actress to pop-culture punch line, successful entrepreneur, philanthropist, in this compelling biography, and HIV/AIDS activist.

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Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search Movie Tie-In

New york times bestsellerthe heartbreaking true story of an irishwoman and the secret she kept for 50 yearsWhen she became pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to a convent to be looked after as a “fallen woman. Then the nuns took her baby from her and sold him, like thousands of others, to America for adoption.

. Fifty years later, Philomena decided to find him. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Philomena’s son was trying to find her. Renamed michael hess, he had become a leading lawyer in the first Bush administration, and he struggled to hide secrets that would jeopardize his career in the Republican Party and endanger his quest to find his mother.

A gripping exposé told with novelistic intrigue, Philomena pulls back the curtain on the role of the Catholic Church in forced adoptions and on the love between a mother and son who endured a lifelong separation.

Vivaldi's Virgins: A Novel

A story of longing and intrigue, half-told truths and toxic lies, Vivaldi's Virgins unfolds through the eyes of Anna Maria dal Violin, one of the elite musicians cloistered in the foundling home where Antonio Vivaldi—known as the Red Priest of Venice—is maestro and composer. In this world, where for fully half the year the entire city is masked and cloaked in the anonymity of Carnival, nothing is as it appears to be.

A virtuoso performance in the tradition of girl with a pearl Earring, Vivaldi's Virgins is a fascinating glimpse inside the source of Vivaldi's musical legacy, interwoven with the gripping story of a remarkable young woman's coming-of-age in a deliciously evocative time and place. Her quest takes her beyond the cloister walls into the complex tapestry of Venetian society; from the impoverished alleyways of the Jewish Ghetto to a masked ball in the company of a king; from the passionate communal life of adolescent girls competing for their maestro's favor to the larger-than-life world of music and spectacle that kept the citizens of a dying republic in thrall.

. In this enthralling new novel, Barbara Quick re-creates eighteenth-century Venice at the height of its splendor and decadence. Fourteen-year-old anna maria, abandoned at the Ospedale della Pietà as an infant, is determined to find out who she is and where she came from.

The English Patient Vintage International

With unsettling beauty and intelligence, this Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. The indian sapper kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the english patient, rescue, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions—and whose memories of suffering, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.

Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The nurse hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient.

Mistress of Rome The Empress of Rome Book 1

Many have tried to destroy the Emperor: a vengeful gladiator, a tormented soldier, an upright senator, a Vestal Virgin. But in the end, the life of Domitian lies in the hands of one woman: the Emperor’s mistress. So gripping, your hands are glued to the book, and so vivid it burns itself into your mind’s eye and stays with you long after you turn the final page.

Diana gabaldon, #1 new york times bestselling author First-century Rome: A ruthless emperor watches over all—and fixes his gaze on one young woman. Thea is a slave girl from Judaea, purchased as a toy for the spiteful heiress Lepida Pollia. The first in an unforgettable historical saga from the USA Today bestselling author of The Alice Network.

Now she has infuriated her mistress by capturing the attention of Rome’s newest and most savage gladiator—and though his love brings Thea the first happiness of her life, their affair ends quickly when a jealous Lepida tears them apart. Remaking herself as a singer for Rome’s aristocrats, Thea unwittingly attracts another admirer: the charismatic Emperor of Rome.

But the passions of an all-powerful man come with a heavy price, and Thea finds herself fighting for both her soul and her sanity.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter: A Novel

So begins this beautifully told story that unfolds over a quarter of a century—in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by the fateful decision made that winter night long ago. A family drama, the memory keeper’s daughter explores every mother's silent fear: What would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? It is also an astonishing tale of love and how the mysterious ties that hold a family together help us survive the heartache that occurs when long-buried secrets are finally uncovered.

From the Trade Paperback edition. David henry to deliver his own twins. He asks his nurse, caroline, to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. A #1 new york times bestseller by kim edwards, kentucky, the memory keeper’s Daughter is a brilliantly crafted novel of parallel lives, familial secrets, and the redemptive power of loveKim Edwards’s stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964 in Lexington, when a blizzard forces Dr.

His son, is perfectly healthy, born first, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split second decision that will alter all of their lives forever.

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Africa: A History

Traders on camels were followed by explorers in caravels and by a plague of invaders, hungry for ivory and diamonds and the "black gold" of slavery. And what we do know is colored by romance - safaris and treks and camel caravans, Solomon's mine and Tutankhamun's curse, the shores of Tripoli and the snows of Kilimanjaro.

Yet the ancestor of all humankind may have lived in Africa. Christianity and Islam battled age-old beliefs - and each other. Most of us still know less about Africa's past and peoples than we do about the continent's wild animals. In just the last half century, independence has swept away the old maps and colonial ways to jar the balance of the world.

Here is Africa's story. The world's longest-lived, literate civilization was African. Through the ages, great civilizations rose and fell in what was once called "darkest" Africa, leaving behind mysterious fortresses and splendid art.

My Life on the Road

And so began a lifetime of travel, of activism and leadership, of listening to people whose voices and ideas would inspire change and revolution. My life on the road is the moving, funny, and profound story of Gloria’s growth and also the growth of a revolutionary movement for equality—and the story of how surprising encounters on the road shaped both.

. Gloria Steinem had an itinerant childhood. Steinem for a casual dinner, this disarmingly intimate book gives a pretty good idea, mixing hard-won pragmatic lessons with more inspirational insights. The new york Times “Steinem rocks. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of our heads and into our hearts.

If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to sit down with Ms. In prose that is revealing and rich, gloria reminds us that living in an open, observant, and “on the road” state of mind can make a difference in how we learn, what we do, and how we understand each other. Praise for my life on the road“this legendary feminist makes a compelling case for traveling as listening: a way of letting strangers’ stories flow, as she puts it, ‘out of our heads and into our hearts.

People“like steinem herself, My Life on the Road is thoughtful and astonishingly humble. From her first experience of social activism among women in India to her work as a journalist in the 1960s; from the whirlwind of political campaigns to the founding of Ms.

The Thistle and the Rose: The Story of Margaret, Princess of England, Queen of Scotland A Novel of the Tudors Book 6

She decides to remain in scotland and carve out her own destiny, surviving a scandalous second marriage and battling with both her son and her brother to the very end. Like all the tudors, england and scotland would unite as one nation, but through her descendants, under one rule, Margaret’s life would be one of turmoil and controversy, and find peace.

From the Trade Paperback edition. The betrothal is meant to end decades of bloody border wars, she finds joy in her marriage to the dashing James IV of Scotland, but it becomes a love match: To Margaret’s surprise, a man sixteen years her senior. From the pen of the legendary historical novelist Jean Plaidy comes the story of Princess Margaret Tudor, whose life of tragedy, and scandal would rival even that of her younger brother, bloodshed, Henry VIII.

Princess margaret tudor is the greatest prize when her father, Henry VII, negotiates the Treaty of Perpetual Peace with neighboring Scotland. When king james is struck down by the armies of henry viii, margaret—Princess of England, but Queen of Scotland—finds herself torn between loyalty to the land and family of her birth and to that of her baby son, now King of the Scots.

But the marriage, and the peace it brings to both nations, does not last.