Download or read book The Queen of Subtleties written by Suzannah Dunn and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2011-04-28 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tremendously vivid, page-turning and plausible novel that depicts the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, the most spirited, independent and courageous of Henry’s queens, as viewed from both the bedrooms and the kitchens of the Tudor court.

Download or read book Queen of Subtleties written by Suzannah Dunn and published by . This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tragic love, a powerful, dangerous king, and an unlikely friendship between two distinctive women combine in this richly woven historical novel of a doomed young queen.

Download or read book Queen of Subtleties the written by Suzannah Dunn and published by . This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tragic love, a powerful, dangerous king, and an unlikely friendship between two distinctive women combine in this richly woven historical novel of a doomed young queen.

Download or read book Gaia Queen of Ants written by Hamid Ismailov and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Uzbek author-in-exile Hamid Ismailov comes a dark new parable of power, corruption, fraud, and deception. Ismailov narrates an intimate clash of civilizations as he follows the lives of three expatriates living in England. Domrul is a young Turk with vague and painful memories of ethnic strife in the Uzbekistan of his childhood. His Irish girlfriend Emer struggles with her own adolescent trauma from growing up in war-torn Bosnia. Domrul is the caretaker for Gaia, the eighty-year-old, powerful wife of a Soviet party boss with a mysterious past. One of Ismailov’s few novels written in Uzbek, Gaia, Queen of Ants offers a rare portrait of a complex and little-known part of the world. A plot centered on political corruption and ethnic conflict is punctuated with Sufi philosophy and religious gullibility. As Ismailov’s characters grapple with questions of faith, power, sex, and family, Gaia, Queen of Ants presents a moving tale of universal themes set against a Central Asian backdrop in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Quite Contrary written by Suzannah Dunn and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 1992 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning debut novel from the author of Venus Flaring and Tenterhooks. Elizabeth, a young, overworked hospital doctor, gets a phone call from her father late on a Friday night telling her that her mother is dangerously ill. Over the course of the weekend that follows, Elizabeth, on duty as ever and confronting the barely controlled chaos of a busy casualty ward, finds moments to reminisce about her childhood, its joys and its miseries. Past and present are interwoven in a series of vivid tableaux, drawing the reader into an intimate understanding of Elizabeth's life as a whole.

Download or read book The Born Queen written by Greg Keyes and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2008-03-25 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, Greg Keyes has crafted a brilliant saga of magic, adventure, and love set against a backdrop of clashing empires and an ancient, reawakened evil. Now, with The Born Queen, Keyes brings his epic to a masterly close, gathering the strands of plot and character into a stunning climax that both completes and transcends all that has gone before. The Briar King is dead, and the world itself follows him to ruin. Aspar White, wounded and tired, must embark on one last quest to save the forest and the people he loves, but he has little hope of success. Anne Dare at last sits on the throne of Crotheny, but for how long? The Church, now led by the corrupt and powerful Marché Hespero, has declared a holy war against her, giving the king of Hansa the pretext he needs to unleash his vast might on the young queen and her unready army. But Hansa is the least of Anne’s worries. The Hellrune, war seer of Hansa, strikes at her through vision and prophecy. The Kept–last of the elder Skasloi lords–weaves his own dark webs. Anne’s teacher and ally in the sedos world might also be her worst enemy, and Anne’s own mounting strength compels her toward madness. Surviving these dangers and mastering her eldritch abilities are merely prelude to the real struggle. There are many–some with power matching or even exceeding Anne’s own–who are willing to kill in order to seize control. For whoever sits upon the throne will have the ultimate command to bring about the world’s salvation–or its apocalypse.

Download or read book The Sixth Wife written by Jean Plaidy and published by Crown. This book was released on 2009-02-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dangerous court intrigue and affairs of the heart collide as renowned novelist Jean Plaidy tells the story of Katherine Parr, the last of Henry VIII’s six queens. Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard, was both foolish and unfaithful, and she paid for it with her life. Henry vowed that his sixth wife would be different, and she was. Katherine Parr was twice widowed and thirty-one years old. A thoughtful, well-read lady, she was known at court for her unblemished reputation and her kind heart. She had hoped to marry for love and had set her heart on Thomas Seymour, the dashing brother of Henry’s third queen. But the aging king—more in need of a nurse than a wife—was drawn to her, and Katherine could not refuse his proposal of marriage. Queen Katherine was able to soothe the King’s notorious temper, and his three children grew fond of her, the only mother they had ever really known. Trapped in a loveless marriage to a volatile tyrant, books were Katherine’s consolation. But among her intellectual pursuits was an interest in Lutheranism—a religion that the king saw as a threat to his supremacy as head of the new Church of England. Courtiers envious of the Queen’s influence over Henry sought to destroy her by linking her with the “radical” religious reformers. Henry raged that Katherine had betrayed him, and had a warrant drawn up for her arrest and imprisonment. At court it was whispered that the king would soon execute yet another wife. Henry’s sixth wife would have to rely on her wits to survive where two other women had perished. . . .

Download or read book The Queen s Sorrow written by Suzannah Dunn and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plain and dutiful and a passionate Catholic, Mary Tudor is overjoyed when she becomes Queen of England. After the misery of her childhood, when her father, Henry VIII, rejected her and her mother, Mary feels at last that she is achieving her destiny. And when she marries Philip of Spain, her happiness is complete. But Mary's delight quickly turns sour as she realizes that her husband does not love her—indeed, that he finds her devotion irritating. Desperate for a baby, she begins to believe that God is punishing her. Her people are horrified at the severity of the measures she takes and begin to to turn against their queen, who is lonely, frightened, and desperate for love. Rafael, a member of Philip of Spain's entourage, reluctantly witnesses the tragedy that unfolds as the once-feted queen tightens her cruel hold on the nation. As Rafael becomes closer to Mary, his life—and newfound love—are caught up in the terrible chaos.

Download or read book The Lady of Misrule written by Suzannah Dunn and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Escorting the nine-day queen Lady Jane Grey across the Tower of London from throne room into imprisonment is Elizabeth Tilney, who surprised even herself by volunteering for the job. All Elizabeth knows is she's keen to be away from home; she could do with some breathing space. And anyway, it won't be for long: everyone knows Jane will go free as soon as the victorious new queen is crowned. Which is a good thing because the two sixteen-year-olds, cooped up together in a room in the Gentleman Gaoler's house, couldn't be less compatible. Protestant Jane is an icily self-composed idealist, and Catholic Elizabeth is . . . well, anything but.They are united though by their disdain for the seventeen-year-old boy to whom Jane has recently been married: petulant, noisily-aggrieved Guildford Dudley, held prisoner in a neighboring tower and keen to pursue his prerogative of a daily walk with his wife.As Jane's captivity extends into the increasingly turbulent last months of 1553, the two girls learn to live with each other, but Elizabeth finds herself drawn into the difficult relationship between the newlyweds. And when, at the turn of the year, events take an unexpected and dangerous direction, her newfound loyalties are put to the test.

Download or read book Tenterhooks written by Suzannah Dunn and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best book yet from this witty writer In these ten stories, Suzannah Dunn shows her considerable talent for writing short fiction Wonderfully funny, clever observations of womens' lives: Auntie Fay comes to Spain for the summer, survives on insulin injections, tans to the hue of a blood blister and routinely saves the skins of Renee and her unfortunate family; the sixth form do Pembrokeshire, on a field trip of stale cigarettes, smuggled scotch, and finally, mutiny; a young woman remembers her first real love - for the ghost of her aunt's boyfriend Dunn is poised to win a major prize -Venus Flaring was called in by the Booker judges

Download or read book The Last Tudor written by Philippa Gregory and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final book of the Tudor series from #1 New York Times bestselling author Philippa Gregory features one of the most famous women in history, Lady Jane Grey, and her two sisters, each of whom dared to defy her queen. Jane Grey was queen of England for nine days. Her father and his allies crowned her instead of the dead king’s half-sister Mary Tudor, who quickly mustered an army, claimed her throne, and locked Jane in the Tower of London. When Jane refused to betray her Protestant faith, Mary sent her to the executioner’s block, where Jane transformed her father’s greedy power-grab into tragic martyrdom. “Learn you to die,” was the advice Jane wrote to her younger sister Katherine, who has no intention of dying. She intends to enjoy her beauty and her youth and fall in love. But she is heir to the insecure and infertile Queen Mary and then to her sister Queen Elizabeth, who will never allow Katherine to marry and produce a Tudor son. When Katherine’s pregnancy betrays her secret marriage, she faces imprisonment in the Tower, only yards from her sister’s scaffold. “Farewell, my sister,” writes Katherine to the youngest Grey sister, Mary. A beautiful dwarf, disregarded by the court, Mary keeps family secrets, especially her own, while avoiding Elizabeth’s suspicious glare. After seeing her sisters defy their queens, Mary is acutely aware of her own danger, but determined to command her own life. What will happen when the last Tudor defies her ruthless and unforgiving cousin Queen Elizabeth?

Download or read book The Queen s Dumbshows written by Claire Sponsler and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-04-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No medieval writer reveals more about early English drama than John Lydgate, Claire Sponsler contends. Best known for his enormously long narrative poems The Fall of Princes and The Troy Book, Lydgate also wrote numerous verses related to theatrical performances and ceremonies. This rich yet understudied body of material includes mummings for London guildsmen and sheriffs, texts for wall hangings that combined pictures and poetry, a Corpus Christi procession, and entertainments for the young Henry VI and his mother. In The Queen's Dumbshows, Sponsler reclaims these writings to reveal what they have to tell us about performance practices in the late Middle Ages. Placing theatricality at the hub of fifteenth-century British culture, she rethinks what constituted drama in the period and explores the relationship between private forms of entertainment, such as household banquets, and more overtly public forms of political theater, such as royal entries and processions. She delineates the intersection of performance with other forms of representation such as feasts, pictorial displays, and tableaux, and parses the connections between the primarily visual and aural modes of performance and the reading of literary texts written on paper or parchment. In doing so, she has written a book of signal importance to scholars of medieval literature and culture, theater history, and visual studies.

Download or read book The Creation of Anne Boleyn written by Susan Bordo and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illuminating history examines the life and many legends of the 16th century Queen who was executed by her husband, King Henry VIII. Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne’s life and a revealing look at her afterlife in the popular imagination. Why is her story so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? Was she the flaxen-haired martyr of Romantic paintings or the raven-haired seductress of twenty-first-century portrayals? (Answer: neither.) But the most provocative question of all concerns Anne’s death: How could Henry order the execution of a once beloved wife? Drawing on scholarship and critical analysis, Bordo probes the complexities of one of history’s most infamous relationships. She then demonstrates how generations of polemicists, biographers, novelists, and filmmakers have imagined and re-imagined Anne: whore, martyr, cautionary tale, proto “mean girl,” feminist icon, and everything in between. In The Creation of Anne Boleyn, Bordo steps off the well-trodden paths of Tudoriana to tease out the human being behind the competing mythologies, paintings, and on-screen portrayals.

Download or read book Fire from Heaven written by Mary Renault and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller and Man Booker Prize Finalist: A novel of ancient Greece by the author Hilary Mantel calls “a shining light.” Alexander the Great stands alone as a leader and strategist, and Fire from Heaven is Mary Renault’s unsurpassed dramatization of the formative years of his life. His parents fight for their precocious son’s love: On one side, his volatile father, Philip, and on the other, his overbearing mother, Olympias. The story tells of the conqueror’s two great bonds—to his horse, Oxhead, and to his dearest friend and eventual lover, Hephaistion—and of the army he commands when he is barely an adult. Coming of age during the battles for southern Greece, Alexander the Great appears in all of his colors—as the man who first takes someone’s life at age twelve and who swiftly eliminates his rivals as soon as he comes to power—and emerges as a captivating, complex, larger-than-life figure. Fire from Heaven is the first volume of the Novels of Alexander the Great trilogy, which continues with The Persian Boy and Funeral Games. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary Renault including rare images of the author. “Mary Renault is a shining light to both historical novelists and their readers. She does not pretend the past is like the present, or that the people of ancient Greece were just like us. She shows us their strangeness; discerning, sure-footed, challenging our values, piquing our curiosity, she leads us through an alien landscape that moves and delights us.” —Hilary Mantel

Download or read book Brooklyn Bridge written by Karen Hesse and published by Feiwel & Friends. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karen Hesse has achieved many honors for her more than twenty books over the course of her award-winning career: the Newbery Medal, the Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Award, the MacArthur Fellowship "Genius" Award, and the Christopher Medal. Her novels burn with intensity, and keenly felt, deeply researched, and are memorable for their imagination and intelligence. So it is with great pride and excitement that we present Karen Hesse's first novel in over five years: Brooklyn Bridge. It's the summer of 1903 in Brooklyn and all fourteen-year-old Joseph Michtom wants is to experience the thrill, the grandeur, and the electricity of the new amusement park at Coney Island. But that doesn't seem likely. Ever since his parents—Russian immigrants—invented the stuffed Teddy Bear five months ago, Joseph's life has turned upside down. No longer do the Michtom's gather family and friends around the kitchen table to talk. No longer is Joseph at leisure to play stickball with the guys. Now, Joseph works. And complains. And falls in love. And argues with Mama and Papa. And falls out of love. And hopes. Joseph hopes he'll see Coney Island soon. He hopes that everything will turn right-side up again. He hopes his luck hasn't run out—because you never know. Through all the warmth, the sadness, the frustration, and the laughter of one big, colorful family, Newbery Medalist Karen Hesse builds a stunning story of the lucky, the unlucky, and those in between, and reminds us that our lives—all our lives—are fragile, precious, and connected. Brooklyn Bridge is a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Download or read book Seraphina written by Rachel Hartman and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new vision of knights, dragons, and the fair maiden caught in between . . . Four decades of peace have done little to ease the mistrust between humans and dragons in the kingdom of Goredd. Folding themselves into human shape, dragons attend court as ambassadors, and lend their rational, mathematical minds to universities as scholars and teachers. As the treaty's anniversary draws near, however, tensions are high. Seraphina has reason to fear both sides. An unusually gifted musician, she joins the court just as a member of the royal family is murdered. While a sinister plot to destroy the peace is uncovered, Seraphina struggles to protect the secret behind her musical gift, one so terrible that its discovery could mean her very life. Seraphina's tortuous journey to self-acceptance will make a magical, indelible impression on its readers.

Download or read book Mrs Lincoln s Rival written by Jennifer Chiaverini and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker and Canary Girls reveals Mary Todd Lincoln’s very public social and political contest with Kate Chase Sprague in this astute and lively novel of the politics of state—set against the backdrop of Civil War Era Washington. Beautiful, intelligent, regal, and entrancing, young Kate Chase Sprague stepped into the role of establishing her thrice-widowed father, Salmon P. Chase, in Washington society as a Lincoln cabinet member and as a future presidential candidate. For her efforts, The Washington Star declared her “the most brilliant woman of her day. None outshone her.” None, that is, but Mary Todd Lincoln. Though Mrs. Lincoln and her young rival held much in common—political acumen, love of country, and a resolute determination to help the men they loved achieve greatness—they could never be friends, for the success of one could come only at the expense of the other...