Other books that might interest you

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  Murder by Misrule

  Anna Castle

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  Brilliant Francis Bacon is at a loss -- and in danger. 
  Francis Bacon is charged with investigating the murder of a fellow barrister at Gray's Inn. He recruits his unwanted protégé Thomas Clarady to do the tiresome legwork. The son of a privateer, Clarady will do anything to climb the Elizabethan social ladder. 
  Bacon's powerful uncle Lord Burghley suspects Catholic conspirators of the crime, but other motives quickly emerge. Rival barristers contend for the murdered man's legal honors and wealthy clients. Highly-placed courtiers are implicated as the investigation reaches from Whitehall to the London streets. 
  Bacon does the thinking; Clarady does the fencing. Everyone has something up his pinked and padded sleeve. Even the brilliant Francis Bacon is at a loss — and in danger — until he sees through the disguises of the season of Misrule. 
  "Castle's characters brim with zest and real feeling." — Kirkus Starred Review. 
  Don't dally! Jump right into this first book in the award-winning Francis Bacon mystery series.

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  The Diamond of London

  Andrea Penrose

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  Even with her privileged life, Lady Hester Stanhope knows that claiming the adventurous life she truly wants will not be easy, thanks to her eccentric father's stifling grip. With the help of her renowned statesman uncle William Pitt the Younger, she takes on the glittering, treacherous heights of London Society. Her formidable intelligence, outspoken opinions, and headstrong determination gain the favor of the beau monde's leading taste-maker Beau Brummell—and she quickly learns to bend the rules of the ton to her own advantage. And as her uncle's hostess, she astutely uses her skills to preside over—and give advice to—the most influential figures of her day, rising to a position unequaled in society . . .But when it comes to holy matrimony, Hester will settle for no less than a passionate match of equals—a search marked by challenges and heartbreak. Her affair with a charismatic naval officer tempts her with forbidden pleasures—even as it threatens her reputation. Her love for a sophisticated, brilliant diplomat offers the marriage of her dreams . . . and unsuspected betrayal. And as England is plunged into war, Hester's world changes forever, causing her to find courage and strength amid loss, chart a completely unexpected future—and make a glorious legacy forever hers . . .

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  Old Filth

  Jane Gardam

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  First in the Old Filth trilogy. A New York Times Notable Book. “Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters” (The New York Times Book Review). 
   
  Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away. 
   
  Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” that retraces much of the twentieth century’s torrid and momentous history.  
   
  SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE 
   
  “Will bring immense pleasure to readers who treasure fiction that is intelligent, witty, sophisticated and—a quality encountered all too rarely in contemporary culture—adult.” —The Washington Post 
   
  “Gardam is an exquisite storyteller, picking up threads, laying them down, returning to them and giving them new meaning . . . Old Filth is sad, funny, beautiful and haunting.” —The Seattle Times 
   
  “A masterpiece of storytelling.” —The Dallas Morning News

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  A Short History of the United...

  Edward Channing

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  Channing's best known work, A History of the United States, is regarded as one of the most complete and accurate accounts of American history and received the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for History. (Summary from Wikipedia)

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  Mad Richard

  Lesley Krueger

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  A riveting story of talent and the price it exacts, set in a richly imagined Victorian England 
  Called the most promising artist of his generation, handsome, modest, and affectionate, Richard Dadd rubbed shoulders with the great luminaries of the Victorian Age. He grew up along the Medway with Charles Dickens and studied at the Royal Academy Schools under the brilliant and eccentric J.M.W. Turner. 
  Based on Dadd’s tragic true story, Mad Richard follows the young artist as he develops his craft, contemplates the nature of art and fame — as he watches Dickens navigate those tricky waters — and ultimately finds himself imprisoned in Bedlam for murder, committed as criminally insane. 
  In 1853, Charlotte Brontë — about to publish her third novel, suffering from unrequited love, and herself wrestling with questions about art and artists, class, obsession and romance — visits Richard at Bedlam and finds an unexpected kinship in his feverish mind and his haunting work. 
  Masterfully slipping through time and memory, Mad Richard maps the artistic temperaments of Charlotte and Richard, weaving their divergent lives together with their shared fears and follies, dreams, and crushing illusions.

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  This Side of Paradise

  F Scott itzgerald

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  This Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his breakthrough. 
  Published in 1920, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature. The novel explores the theme of love warped by greed and status-seeking. 
  
  Written in an adventurously mixed style, the book's success was driven in part by the enthusiasm of reviewers. Burton Rascoe of the Chicago Tribune wrote that "it bears the impress, it seems to me, of genius. It is the only adequate study that we have had of the contemporary American in adolescence and young manhood." H. L. Mencken wrote that This Side of Paradise was the "best American novel that I have seen of late."

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