Biographical fiction Books

Australia's favourite novel, now a major Netflix series, starring Travis Fimmel, Simon Baker, Phoebe Tonkin, Bryan Brown and Anthony La Paglia. The bestselling, multi-award-winning, much-loved novel that has taken Australia, and the world, by storm is...

USA Today bestselling author Eliza Knight returns as she delves into the life of Adele Astaire, who served up smiles and love both on and off the stage—with and without her also famous brother Fred Astaire— along with a determined young...

A sweeping, mesmerising novel of the most enduring and evocative cultural icon of the 20th century. Joyce Carol Oates’ masterpiece is a brilliant and deeply moving portrait of a culture hypnotised by its own myths and the shattering reality of the...

“A timeless and powerful novel of a daring woman who must decide if she will risk everything to follow her passion and find her voice.” —Patti Callahan Henry, New York Times bestselling authorFrom the moment she was born, the transforming beauty of her...

“As intricate and absorbing as a Van Gogh painting…MRS VAN GOGH will stay with me for a long time.” New York Times bestseller Hazel Gaynor“All the characters jump off the page…what we have here is a very fine novel.” Historical Novel Society She’s been...

‘Moving and vital’ i NEWS‘A beautiful book’ EVENING STANDARD‘Deserves to be read by as wide an audience as possible’ DAILY MIRROR How do we give a voice to those who so often remain unheard? Will You Read This, Please? is a frank and impactful...

The Miles Franklin award-winning classic. 'One of the greatest books written this century' - The Illustrated London News 'the thing I am trying to get at is what made Jack different from me. Different all through our lives, I mean, and in a special...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE STELLA PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND FICTION BOOK AWARD‘an illuminating reflection on what it means to live with pain.’ –Publishers Weekly‘Body Friend is a deeply intimate tribute to the fragile and porous...

LONGLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD 2023‘This haunting, magical novel spans centuries and continents, weaving together themes of migration, war, family, and the endurance of love against all odds. Captivating, heartbreaking, and ultimately...

A stunning and unforgettable novel about the pursuit of a creative and independent life, Barbara Hanrahan’s Sea Green is an Australian feminist classic. With a new introduction from Laura Elizabeth Woollett.Virginia is on a ship bound for London, lured...

From the bestselling author of The Frozen River comes an enthralling historical mystery that unravels the extraordinary twists and turns in Anna Anderson’s fifty-year battle to be recognised as Anastasia Romanov. Is she the Russian grand...

A graphic novel anthology focused on the consequences of war, peace and relief, and mental health. All proceeds will be donated to the Ukrainian-based Voices of Children to provide psychological and psychosocial support to children affected by war.Lower...

A graphic novel anthology focused on the consequences of war, peace and relief, and mental health. All proceeds will be donated to the Ukrainian-based Voices of Children to provide psychological and psychosocial support to children affected by war.Lower...

"A window into Canada's role in the making of Ernest Hemingway in clear, clean prose." - Lee Gowan, author of The Beautiful PlaceSent to cover bank robber Red Ryan's daring prison break, a young Ernest Hemingway becomes fascinated with the convict.In...

A musical monument of language to a mother, this novel sings and hums and growls and rattles and tickles and rages and smears and hurts.Humor, pain and copious amounts of love run throughout this critically acclaimed novel by Tom Lanoye that sold almost...

A novel of Felice Bauer, Franz Kafka's first fiance, and the story behind Letters to FeliceFranz Kafka scholars know Felice Bauer, his onetime fiance, through his Letters to Felice, as little more than a woman with a raucous laugh and a taste for...

A young artist meets Stephen Crane as America's hunger for empire draws them both into warOliver Fischer, a self-styled bohemian, boardwalk caricaturist, and student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, enrages his banker father and earns the...

'Societies are oiled with the unpaid, unaccounted for, work of women. It is the very glue that binds us together, and yet we are blind to it; a woman's work remains invisible.'Rosalind Franklin knows that to be a woman in a...

A weird, wild ride across non-narrative vignettes and dryly funny aphorisms exploring the shared intensity of violence and the erotic.As if hauled up squirming from the bowels of the internet, Sex Goblin metabolizes sex writing, popular culture, and...

CBC BOOKS: 2024 SPRING FICTION PREVIEW A queer writer travelling through India can't escape the regrets of his past, nor the impending ruin of his present. "I am leaving for the winter I have to get away from this small town and all its dangers to write,...

FEATURED ONLITHUB CBC BOOKS:2024 SPRING FICTION PREVIEW Dickinson after her death: a novel of the trio of women who brought Emily Dickinson's poems out of the shadowsWhen she died, Emily Dickinson left behind hundreds of texts scribbled on scraps of...

A dark chapter in recent human historyThe first part of this novel follows the adventures of three young friends during a memorable last mountain climbing trip to a remote area of a country under the control of a ruthless authoritarian regime. During...

Bardskull is the record of three journeys made by Martin Shaw, the celebrated storyteller and interpreter of myth, in the year before he turned fifty. It is unlike anything he has written before. This is not a book about myth or narrative: rather, it is...

Twenty-five-year-old Anthony Patch appears to have it all: a Harvard education, an apartment in New York City, memberships at all of the best clubs, and a generous trust fund to draw from. Sure, his grandfather is not happy with Anthony's lack of...

"One of those rare biographical novels that bring a whole world to life in a way that lingers in memory." -Jay Parini, author of Borges and MeThis absorbing, sensitive novel portrays a famed author in a moment of crisis: an aging Hugo von Hofmannsthal...

Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott meet the horrors of the Civil War as they minister to its casualtiesAfter the Union Army's defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and...

After growing up with an alcoholic mother and an intermittent stepfather, Alex pines for connection, even as he sabotages his life with substances, and substitutes one failed relationship for the next. Shuffling from troubled home to chaotic institution,...

In exile from his home country of Peru, Ricardo Funes embodies the ultimate starving artist. Fired from almost every job he's held-usually for paying more attention to literature than work-he sets himself up in a rundown shack where he works on writing...

Best known for his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was burdened by familial shame, which began with his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, the infamously unrepentant Salem witch trial judge. In this, the eighth stand-alone book in The...

A shattering biographical novel of J.D. Salinger in combatSalinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter...

Set in Aleppo in 2012, when everyday life was metronomically punctuated by bombing, Roundabout of Death offers powerful witness to the violence that obliterated the ancient city's rich layers of history, its neighborhoods and medieval and...

"A perfect book."Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story and Genet: A BiographyIn June 1897, the young Constantine Cavafy arrives in Paris on the last stop of a long European tour, a trip that will deeply shape his future and push him toward his poetic...

In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalised as hysterics reveal what history ignored'Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?' wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history's ghosts,...

1941, Hitler's army crosses into Soviet-ruled Ukraine in a secret mission titled "Operation Barbarossa. A young Jewish girl, Hanna Slivka is fourteen when German soldiers arrive in her small village of Kwasova. Until their arrival, Hanna has split her...

Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the MurasakiShikibu PrizeIntroducing Hiromi Ito, an award-winning Japanese author who has been compared to Haruki Murakami and Yoko Tawada.The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi...

This graphic novel is a fictional memoir set between 1955 and 2010. It chronicles the life of William Delaroux and his continuous struggle to make the best of difficult circumstances. The book starts with Bill's memories of being a latchkey kid of a...

Based on a true story set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, The Purchased Bride tells the tale of Maria, a Greek girl who was bought at age fifteen by a much older, wealthy Ottoman man.As the Ottoman Empire falls and insurgents torch their Greek...

After nine years in a Dutch asylum center, an Iraqi refugee tries to start a new life as a European citizen and discovers that to make friends in the western world, you need a dog.After nine years in a Dutch asylum center, Samir finally has the chance to...

A thirty-five-year-old writer decides she wants to have children. Rounds of IVF treatments and several years later, she has two daughters and sits down to write this book. World's Best Mother is a sublime journey - through pregnancy, the mothering of...

Just shy of his fiftieth birthday, bestselling French author Frederic and his ten-year-old daughter travel the globe in search of immortality.What does the man who has everything fame, fortune, a new love, and a new baby want for his fiftieth birthday?...

A daring and imaginative novel based on the lives of The Last Poets, New York's legendary Hip-Hop pioneers from the ghettos.Even readers unfamiliar with The Last Poets' historic significance as building blocks of the hip-hop and rap movement, will...

The second installment of Argentine literary giant Ricardo Piglia's acclaimed bibliophilic trilogy follows his alter ego, Emilio Renzi, as his literary career begins to take off in the tumultuous years 1968-1975-running a magazine, working as a...

The Story of the Woman Who Fooled the Yankees and Rebels Alike. As a child, Sarah Emma Edmonds dreamed of faraway places and adventure, often picturing herself as a man. When her abusive father traded her hand in marriage for a few head of livestock, she...

An American student in 1970s Kyoto rambles among the city's beauties and traditions, learning as he goes. Don Ascher is a young American living in Kyoto in the 1970s.He is a studentof Japanese. He also teaches English, works at...

BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER"Brings Isabella Stewart Gardner fully, intimately alive-irrepressible and avid for life. In this richly compelling novel, Emily Franklin beautifully conjures this extraordinary woman and her world."-Claire Messud, author of The...

"[Genoa] invites us to pass our minds down a new but ancient track, to become, ourselves, both fact and fiction, and to discover something true about the geography of time."-William Gass, The New York Times"Genoa is a spectacular confrontation with...

A grand historical novel about Gertrude Bell, one of the most influential women of the twentieth century. She was the most celebrated adventurer of her day, the brains behind Lawrence of Arabia, an adviser to kings and desert sheikhs, and the British...

Finalist, Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging WritersI have just heard for the first time the expression "to make soup": it means to mix the bottom-of-the-pocket drugs of everyone huddled in the club toilet stall, opened MD, ketamine,...