Showing results by author "A. A. Gill" in All Categories

How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies—of strength, style, and creativity—shaped Woolf’s path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf’s French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L’Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf’s aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer.

Wild Embers explores the fire that lies within every soul, weaving words around ideas of feeling at home in your own skin, allowing yourself to heal, and learning to embrace your uniqueness with love from the universe. Featuring rewritten fairy-tale heroines, goddess wisdom, and poetry that burns with revolution, this collection is an explosion of femininity, empowerment, and personal growth.

1918: Pretty, vivacious Grand Duchess Maria Romanov, the 19-year-old daughter of the fallen Tsar Nicholas II, lives with her family in suffocating isolation, a far cry from their once-glittering royal household. Her days are a combination of endless boredom and paralyzing fear; her only respite are clandestine flirtations with a few of the guards imprisoning the family - never realizing her innocent actions could mean the difference between life and death.

1911: When 15-year-old Mary Kirk meets Wallis Warfield at summer camp, she’s immediately captivated by her fearless, brazen, and self-assured personality. Though Mary’s family isn’t crazy about Wallis, Mary stands by her side - even years later when rumors swirl about Wallis and her reckless behavior with the Prince of Wales. But when Mary’s loyalty to Wallis comes into question, their friendship will be put to the test. 1997: After a romantic proposal in Paris, Rachel and her fiancé Alex are in a cab when the car ahead crashes.

Sisters Alice and Jenny are in their early 20s when the Germans occupy their home of Jersey. Alice, a nurse, is called to work in the German hospital, unaware that she will find a great love but that she will make an even greater sacrifice and be sent to a place across the seas where she will witness unbearable suffering. Meanwhile her sister, Jenny, is drawn into a circle of islanders who decide to rise up and resist the occupiers. For both sisters, the war will cause them to make extraordinary choices, experience unimaginable heartbreak and emerge forever changed....

They could have been allies: two self-made millionaires who invented a global industry, in an era when wife and mother were supposed to be the highest goals for their sex. Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein each founded empires built on grit and determination…and yet they became locked in a feud spanning three continents, two world wars, and the Great Depression.

This fantasy and science fiction teen anthology edited by Samira Ahmed and Sona Charaipotra contains a wide range of stories from fourteen bestselling, award-winning, and emerging writers from the South Asian diaspora that will surprise, delight, and move you. So listen on, for after all, magic has no borders.

Two orphaned girls become found family amidst the horrors of WWII in a gripping and heart-wrenching tale of friendship, loss and survival against the odds which sweeps the listener across wartime Europe to Budapest from the mountains of Scotland.

When Inspector James Hardy learns the body of a young woman discovered in the River Thames is that of a friend, his life goes into a tail-spin. The victim’s flatmate is on the run for her life. She could be the key to catching the killer. In a race against time, Hardy must track her down before the killer does. As the truth behind the investigation unfolds, Hardy’s own family come under threat. With two young daughters to protect and an investigation that twists and turns, Hardy finds himself pushed to the limit.

Inspired by extraordinary true events, this remarkable debut novel reveals the enduring power of love and the strength of the human spirit in one woman's quest to find her son, and a little boy's dream to be found.

It's 1977, and Connie Fortune has an easy, freewheeling life as a wildlife photographer and illustrator. A new contract brings her to the Little Dip valley in Oregon to track down a rare bird, but a clash with Sylvie Garoul, the valley's owner and matriarch of the mysterious Garoul family, and her daughter, the haughty, frustrating, but somehow bewitching Marie Garoul, ruins the deal.

Ivy Bauer is a young, bright soil scientist and inventor of a game changing organic irrigation system. She’s on top of the world when, suddenly, her husband is killed in a biking accident. Needing space to grieve, she takes a summer job as a gardener in Malibu. Conrad Reed is a wealthy Hollywood has-been who, after the death of his wife, feels overwhelmed by the care of his anxious stepson Hudson, massive cliffside estate, and deteriorating career.

Edmund Hillary - A Biography is the story of the New Zealand beekeeper who climbed Mount Everest. A man, who against expedition orders, drove his tractor to the South Pole; a man honored around the world for his pioneering climbs, yet who collapsed on more than one occasion on a mountain, and a man who gave so much to Nepal yet lost his family to its mountains.

Get a completely new look at guitar legend Eddie Van Halen with this groundbreaking oral history, composed of more than 50 hours of interviews with Eddie himself as well as his family, friends, and colleagues.

Your Baby Can Self-Feed, Too, is the inclusive guide to introducing solids. Over 25 percent of children experience challenges with this big step—both typically developing babies and those with (known or unknown) physical or neurological differences. Resources on how to help babies who face obstacles in making the move to solid foods are scarce. That’s where this audiobook comes in.

Why Mummy Drinks is the brilliant novel from Gill Sims, the author of the online sensation Peter and Jane. It is Mummy's 39th birthday. She is staring down the barrel of a future of people asking if she wants to come to their advanced yoga classes and polite book clubs where everyone claims to be tiddly after a glass of Pinot Grigio and says things like 'oooh gosh, are you having another glass?'

England, 1840. For the two decades following the death of her beloved sister, Jane, Cassandra Austen has lived alone and unwed, spending her days visiting friends and relations and quietly, purposefully working to preserve her sister’s reputation. Now in her 60s and increasingly frail, Cassandra goes to stay with the Fowles of Kintbury, family of her long-dead fiancé, in search of a trove of Jane’s letters. Dodging her hostess and a meddlesome housemaid, Cassandra eventually hunts down the letters and confronts the secrets they hold.

A storm is raging over Damson Island, a desolate yet beautiful rocky outcrop off the south coast of England. The island's magnificent main house belongs to theatre director Randall Dobson, a man desperate to have his play ready for its West End stage debut. With time running out, he asks leading cast members to attend final rehearsals there. Cut off from the mainland by the storm, tensions rise, accusations fly and secrets are whispered. But despite old rivalries resurfacing and jealousy rearing its ugly head, it still comes as a shock when one of their number is brutally murdered.

1966, NYC: Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls hits the bookstores and she is desperate for a bestseller. It’s steamy, it’s a page-turner, but will it make the big money she needs? In London, Jackie Collins’s racy The World Is Full of Married Men launches her career. But neither author is prepared for the price they will pay for being women who dare to write about sex. Jacqueline and Jackie are lambasted by the literary establishment, deluged with hate mail, and even condemned by feminists. In public, both women shoulder the outcry with dignity; in private, they are crumbling.

Private detective P. Manjunath thinks like fire and works like dust as he sets out to investigate existential cataclysms unfolding over the globe—not knowing that the ripples in reality he sees are being caused by Dr. Krishna, a scientist in a utopian future and technically the god of their world. As Manjunath’s investigation disrupts God’s plans, a Danish police officer attains enlightenment, a lapel pin gives disruptive advice, a sentient wall provides the key to creativity, a pill cures the human condition, and everyone in the world develops a lisp at the same time.