As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show.
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Far from her family, her country, and her home and thrust into the role of woman, wife, and queen at the age of 14, Marie Antoinette lived a brief but astonishing existence. With searing insight and wondrous narrative skill, Sena Jeter Naslund offers a fresh, vivid picture of this compelling woman that goes beyond popular myth. Based on impeccable historical research, Abundance reveals a young woman very different from the one who supposedly said of the starving French peasants, “Let them eat cake.”
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In the tradition of Philippa Gregory’s smart, transporting fiction comes this tale of dark suspense, love, and betrayal, featuring two star-crossed sisters, one lost and the other searching.
Bright and inquisitive, Hannah Powers was raised by a father who treated her as if she were his son by giving her a forbidden education. Her beautiful and reckless sister, May, pushes the limits of propriety in their small English town, Hannah harbors her own secret: their father has given her an education forbidden to women. But Hannah’s secret serves her well when she journeys to colonial Maryland to reunite with May,
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Before he wrote some of the twentieth century’s greatest fiction, before he married Zelda, F. Scott Fitzgerald loved Ginevra, a fickle young Chicago socialite he met during the winter break from Princeton. But Ginevra threw over the soon-to-be-famous novelist, and the rest is literary history. Ginevra would be the model for many of Fitzgerald’s coolly fascinating but unattainable heroines, including the elusive object of Jay Gatsby’s unrequited love, Daisy Buchanan.
In this captivating and moving novel, Caroline Preston imagines what life might have been like for Fitzgerald’s first love, following Ginevra from her gilded youth as the daughter of a tycoon through disillusioned marriage and motherhood.
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Slavery as it existed in Africa has seldom been portrayed—and never with such texture, detail, and authentic emotion. Inspired by actual 19th-century court records, Unconfessed is a breathtaking literary tour de force.
They called her Sila van den Kaap, slave of Jacobus Stephanus Van der Wat of Plettenberg Bay, in the colony of South Africa. They called her murderer, and demanded that she explain her terrible violence. A woman fit for hanging . . . condemned to death on April 30, 1823, only to have her sentence commuted to a lengthy term on the notorious Robben Island.
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Covering nearly four acres and soaring 425 feet at its highest point, St. Peter’s Basilica is both a monument to the glory of God and a testament to the genius, ambition, and will of men. R. A. Scotti’s Basilica chronicles the epic construction effort behind this architectural treasure.
Pope Julius II—who took both his name and his disposition from the Roman emperor—conceived St. Peter’s at the height of the Renaissance to replace Constantine’s fourth-century basilica. It was completed some 150 years later during the Baroque papacy of Alexander VII. Along the way, the printing press revolutionized mass communication,
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