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Judy Goodman and Beverly Caldwell have different reasons for putting continents and oceans between themselves and their disparate pasts, but they have the same desire—to earn a coveted position on an elite team of stewardesses for Pan American Airlines. For Judy, running away from an oppressive marriage in small-town Pennsylvania is a risk she must take. And for Beverly, leaving behind the gilded cage of New York society will allow her to pursue a future of her own making.

In 1917 Siegfried Sasson, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer in World War I. His reason: the war was a senseless slaughter. He was officially classified "mentally unsound" and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. There a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, set about restoring Sassoon's "sanity" and sending him back to the trenches.

It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories. Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations.

The press dubs them "the Gold Dust twins." Born within a week of one another in Manhattan in 1912, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton both inherit unimaginable fortunes. By the time of their lavish coming-out balls, they are two of the richest women in the world. Barbara, heiress to the Woolworth millions, amasses seven husbands over her lifetime. Doris, meanwhile, has a sophistication and financial savvy that Barbara tries endlessly to emulate.

Amid the brutality of the Holocaust, one bright spot shone inside the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. In the shadows of the smokestacks was a wooden hut where children sang, staged plays, wrote poetry, and learned about the world. Within those four walls, brightly adorned with hand-painted cartoons, the youngest prisoners were kept vermin-free, received better food, and were even taught to imagine having full stomachs and a day without fear. Their guiding light was a twenty-seven-year-old gay, Jewish athlete: Fredy Hirsch.

The year is 1908, the height of the Belle Époque, and a brilliant, young French woman named Gabriële, newly graduated from the most elite music school in Europe, meets a volcanic Spanish artist named Francis. Following a whirlwind romance, they marry and fall headlong into a Paris that is experimenting with new forms of living, thinking, and creating. Soon after marrying Francis, Gabriële meets Marcel, another young artist, five years her junior. Soon, Francis, Marcel, and Gabriële are all involved in a fervent affair that will change the course of art history and redefine the avant-garde.

Thomas Wolfe’s first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, is at once a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story and a dark novel depicting a cynical post-war world view. The book follows the life of Eugene Grant, a young man driven by passion, intellect, and a search for something greater than himself. His earliest years in rural North Carolina include a wonderful education in poetry and literature against the backdrop of a loving, but tumultuous family life.

In Symphonie Pathétique entwirft Klaus Mann das Lebensbild des großen russischen Komponisten Peter Iljitsch Tschaikowsky. Die versunkenen Szenerien von St. Petersburg und Moskau im späten 19. Jahrhundert, das kaiserliche Berlin und die Gewandhaus-Stadt Leipzig werden darin lebendig. Doch der Glanz der bürgerlichen Welt ist trügerisch: Wegen seiner Homosexualität war Tschaikowsky zeitlebens zum Außenseiter verdammt. Die Seelenqualen und die Einsamkeit, unter denen der Komponist litt, zeichnet Klaus Mann einfühlsam nach, konnte doch kaum einer diese so gut nachempfinden wie der Autor selbst.

It’s the 1970s, and from hippie London to Warhol’s Factory in New York, reluctant aristocrat Loulou de la Falaise is desperately seeking adventure. Having escaped an early, unhappy marriage, she arrives on a whim in Paris—the champagne-soaked heart of the fashion world, where the rigid old world of haute couture and the fast-paced new world of ready-to-wear are vying for supremacy. Glamour, sex, and cocaine nights fuel the Paris fashion scene. Its crown prince is the soulful and intensely gifted Yves Saint Laurent.

Originally published in 1965, this autobiographical novel covers a key year in Jack Kerouac’s life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac’s fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London.

It’s 1343 and Jeanne de Clisson is out for revenge. At forty-three, her perfect life—a loving husband, three young children, and two castles in the French countryside—shatters when Phillip VI, the King of France, arrests and beheads her husband for treachery. There’s no evidence and no trial—only the execution. The nobles are shocked. The paranoid king is relieved. And Jeanne…Jeanne wants the king’s head on a pike.

The boy Nero lives. His mother Agrippina has married her way to power, tangling the Emperor Claudius in her skirts. The emperor may have a son and heir of his own, but Agrippina sees no obstacles to her ambition. Rome is a path through a marsh, lit by torches. Those who walk it are always one step from disaster–and the road itself is treacherous, slippery with blood. Claudius may have the world at his feet, but he has Agrippina in his bed.

It’s 1947 when Sister Mary Agnes arrives in New Mexico. Her mission is to establish a monastery in the town of Roswell, where weeks before rumors of the crash landing of an unidentified craft have triggered a crisis of faith. Residents are drifting away from the divine, awed no longer by the heavens but rather the stars.

In the early hours of Sunday, August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe’s live-in housekeeper wakes with a sinking feeling. She knocks loudly at her employer’s locked bedroom door, and when there is no answer, she calls Monroe’s psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson. Greenson breaks into Monroe’s bedroom and finds a horrifying scene: the thirty-six-year-old movie star lying naked, lifeless, face down on her bed, still clutching the telephone receiver.

It begins with Thomas, the son of a Suffolk tradesman. A brilliant boy sent to study at Oxford at the tender age of eleven. It ends with a disgraced Cardinal, cast from the King's side and estranged from those he loves. In her groundbreaking new novel, Alison Weir draws out the inner man for the first time and tells his story. It is one of a scholar, a lover and a father, a rival, a politician and a priest. A man who built an empire in England while leading a secret second life, who paid the highest price for his success.

The favored daughter of the Pharaoh, Egyptian Princess Cleopatra spent her childhood hiding amid the scrolls in the great library of Alexandria, dreaming of one day writing her own story. When her father dies, naming both Cleopatra and her selfish brother Ptolemy as his successors to the throne, danger arises. While the young Queen sails the Nile to greet her people, her brother plots to eliminate her and rule the empire alone. But while Ptolemy has the power of the kingdom behind him, Cleopatra has her cunning wits.

1469. For almost ten years, Edward IV has ruled with the Earl of Warwick's support, but now rebellion threatens the fragile peace. Heiress Isobel Fenton is determined not to be separated from her beloved manor of Beaumancote. But as unseen witness to a summary execution, she is propelled into the world of personal feud and national politics. She's left in the protection of the formidable Earl, who has begun to foment rebellion, but is set to marry his enemy's heir, Thomas Lacey.

Based on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the field with two women, and inside his head was a ticking time-bomb.

Melding prose, poetry, imagined interviews and ephemeral photography, Ondaatje weaves together a lyrical reinterpretation of Billy’s short, infamous existence, forming a portrait of a young man, and a young country, borne out of violence, threaded through with disaster, yet rich in wonder.

Ein Schicksal, das über eine halbe Million Russland-Deutsche teilten. Nummer-1-Bestseller-Autorin Hera Lind erzählt die wahre Geschichte der Schwarzmeer-Deutschen Lydia, die erst 16 Jahre alt ist, als sie in einen sibirischen Gulag verschleppt wird. 1944 beginnt für die 16-jährige Lydia ein Alptraum, der nicht enden will: Als die Rote Armee auf ihr kleines Dorf bei Odessa in der Ukraine vorrückt, flieht die Familie. Sie schaffen es sogar bis nach Deutschland, doch sie werden zurückgeholt. Mit Mutter und vier Geschwistern wird Lydia bei minus 50 Grad nach Sibirien verschleppt.