Book picks similar to
Man of the world by Layne Maheu


netgalley
review-copies
france
hist-fiction

The Shadows of Versailles


Cathie Dunn - 2020
    Broken by tragedy. Consumed by revenge.Fleur de La Fontaine attends the court of King Louis XIV at Versailles for the first time. Dazzled by the opulence, she is soon besotted with handsome courtier, Philippe de Mortain. When she believes his words of love, she gives in to his seduction – with devastating consequences.Nine months later, when the boy she has given birth to is whisked from her grasp, she flees the convent and finds shelter at the brothel of Madame Claudette.Jacques de Montagnac, a spy working for the Lieutenant General, investigates a spate of abducted children from the poorer quartiers of Paris when his path crosses Fleur’s. He searches for her son, but the trail leads to a dead end – and a dreadful realisation.Her son’s suspected fate too much to bear, Fleur decides to avenge him. With the help of her new acquaintance, the Duchess de Bouillon, Fleur visits the famous midwife, La Voisin, but it’s not the woman’s skills in childbirth that Fleur seeks.La Voisin dabbles in poisons.Will Fleur see her plan through? Or can she save herself from a tragic fate?Delve into The Shadows of Versailles and enter the sinister world of potions and black masses during the Affairs of the Poisons, a real series of events that stunned the court of the Sun King!

Young and Beardless: The Search for God, Purpose, and a Meaningful Life


John Luke Robertson - 2016
    He also shares what it’s like to navigate the walk from boyhood to becoming a man. Topics in this book include friendship, kindness, dreaming big, embracing your God-given uniqueness, taking chances, and choosing mentors.John Luke speaks frequently on dreams (how to build a dream for your life), schemes (how to plan for your dream to come true), and building teams (choosing the people around you who will become a team that helps make your dream come true through their support, honesty, and care). He will incorporate these important guidelines into the book, ultimately helping young people learn how to find and pursue a clear-cut purpose in their lives.Teens and young adults will enjoy reading his story, and they will benefit by reading Robertson’s wisdom and perspective on how to grow up and live out your purpose. And, with the Robertsons, this book is sure to be fun!

The Cult of Eden


Bill Halpin - 2019
    When a surprise pregnancy shreds their already meager budget, Will drops out of college and settles for work at a low-end diner. There, a small act of kindness draws the attention of Victor Degas, a man with an unsettling presence and deformed eyes. Unbeknownst to Will, Degas belongs to an ancient, sophisticated cult known as the Edens and believes Will to be the key to gaining otherworldly power. As the sun sets on Good Friday, Degas orchestrates a home invasion in which Will and his baby boy, Gideon, are kidnapped, leaving Shannon to join forces with an unreliable agent from the Roman Catholic Church. While Will struggles to save other innocents from the Eden parish below the city, Shannon discovers that the cult plans to use her family for an unimaginable demonic ritual, and that the Vatican may let it happen. With no one to trust but themselves, Shannon and Will must fight not only to survive, but to keep their humanity intact. THE CULT OF EDEN is the first volume in The Unrisen saga.

The American Girl


Rachael English - 2017
    Rose Moroney is seventeen, smart, spirited – and pregnant. She wants to marry her boyfriend. Her ambitious parents have other plans. She is sent to Ireland, their birthplace, to deliver her daughter in a Mother and Baby home. Against Rose's will, her baby is taken for adoption. Dublin 2013. Martha Sheeran’s life has come undone. Her marriage is over, and her husband has moved on with unsettling speed. Under pressure from her teenage daughter, she starts looking for the woman who gave her up for adoption more than forty years before. Martha's search for her birth mother leads her to the heart of long-buried family secrets and forces her to question everything she thought she knew. When her first love, Paudie Carmody, re-enters the frame, she's also forced to take a hard look at her own life. From Boston to rural Ireland; from Dublin back to Boston, The American Girl is a heart-warming and enthralling story about mothers and daughters, love and cruelty and, ultimately, the struggle for acceptance – and the embrace of new horizons.

Three Times Loser... Love Never Dies


Akash Verma - 2010
    Mandira, a top MNC executive in New Delhi receives a letter.Shonali, a Corporate Slut in Mumbai receives a letter.Three unknown people; three different lives; one common thread that binds them together. Alok.Why is he calling them after so many years? What is it that he has, which he wants to return back to each one of them?Three times loser... it the story of love and friendship; of sacrifice and deceit and of victories and heart-breaks. The story meanders through the narrow by lanes of Paliwal Park in Agra to the politically alive corridors of Lucknow University and finally lights up the studios of Smile FM in New Delhi. The quest for love continues over years; over time; and over cities. Does it find its destination in the end?From the bestselling of 'It happened that Night' comes another intriguing tale that wrenches your heart, and makes you look fondly at the emotion called love; that is so hard to find; yet so easy to lose.

I will love once again!


Krishna Verma - 2012
    

Who Stole My Time?


Sunil Mishra - 2020
    If by reading this story, we can critically examine our relationship with social media and reset it, the objective of the book would be partly met.Satvik, Sandeep and Ashok are three college friends meeting in Goa after a 25-year gap. While reminiscing about their college days, they discuss the craze of social media these days. They chance upon an idea of creating ‘Paybook’ – a new social media app that pays the users for their engagements. The app becomes an instant hit. This, however, also unfolds a series of events that take the friends to the unchartered territories.

The Bone Season: Sneak Preview


Samantha Shannon - 2013
    Nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working in the criminal underworld of Scion London, based at Seven Dials, employed by a man named Jaxon Hall. Her job: to scout for information by breaking into people's minds. For Paige is a dreamwalker, a clairvoyant and, in the world of Scion, she commits treason simply by breathing.It is raining the day her life changes for ever. Attacked, drugged and kidnapped, Paige is transported to Oxford - a city kept secret for two hundred years, controlled by a powerful, otherworldly race. Paige is assigned to Warden, a Rephaite with mysterious motives. He is her master. Her trainer. Her natural enemy. But if Paige wants to regain her freedom she must allow herself to be nurtured in this prison where she is meant to die.The Bone Season introduces a compelling heroine and also introduces an extraordinary young writer, with huge ambition and a teeming imagination. Samantha Shannon has created a bold new reality in this riveting debut.

Off Script


Marci Ien - 2020
    As a Black female news anchor and, later, the first Black woman in Canada to co-host a national morning show, Marci felt the pressure to stay “on script”—with little room for error. She had to be great. She had to show, every day, that she deserved to be there.When her career veered sharply away from the news, Marci embraced her new role “off script.” With a greater opportunity to speak her mind on the air, Marci now bravely shares experiences from her own life with viewers and pursues more ways to make a difference in her community.In Off Script, Marci shares personal milestones, tales of resilience and kindness, dramatic moments from her career as a journalist and insights from the many unforgettable people that she’s met and interviewed. Living off script means having the courage to speak up, trust your voice and follow your own formula for what matters most.

You Can Take Her Home Now


Anna Jefferson - 2019
    Why does everyone else look like they're smashing motherhood when she's barely made it out of her maternity leggings and out of the house? Her other half tries to say all the right things (can't he just keep making her toast?). Her mum is brilliant (but on the other side of the country). Her two new mum-friends seem to feel like misfits too - but there's really just one person she wants to open up to . . . only Emily hasn't spoken to her for fifteen years. Lonely but not alone, Emily's about to discover that when you're starting a family, what you really need are your friends.

Diamond: BEHIND EVERY STRONG WOMAN IS AN EPIC STORY: historical crime fiction at its most gripping


Jessie Keane - 2022
    Now calling herself 'Diamond Dupree', she goes to Paris to become an artist's model but the world there is different to what she had supposed it would be and she soon falls on hard times. When she manages to escape at the end of the First World War, she leaves behind her a mystery - and a dead man.Back home in London, she reluctantly re-joins the Soho family 'firm' she'd once been glad to leave behind. Having grown tougher during her time in Paris, she soon becomes a force to be reckoned with, a feared and respected gangland queen. But then she meets Jacob Dunne, the youngest son of a wealthy aristocratic family, and sparks fly.But can she escape the long arm of the law and the hangman's noose, when the crimes of her past finally catch up with her?For fans of Martina Cole and Kimberley Chambers, as well as viewers of Peaky Blinders, this is historical crime fiction at its most compelling.

The Trouble Boys


E.R. Fallon - 2018
     The Trouble Boys is an historical crime novel about the Irish mob in New York City from the 1920s to the 1950s. The story opens in pre-WWII Europe when young Irish immigrant Colin O’Brien settles with his family in New York City. There Colin befriends a Cuban-American boy named Johnny Garcia. Life in America isn’t what Colin’s family expects and he experiences a shocking tragedy that alters his life. As Johnny and Colin grow into men, their friendship changes. They begin working for different crime syndicates, with Colin joining the ranks of charismatic Tom McPhalen’s Irish mob and Johnny becoming a member of debonair Tito Bernal’s Cuban gang. As Colin’s rise in the ranks of organized crime becomes increasingly more brutal and demeaning and his friendship with Johnny deteriorates, he begins to question his place in the seductive yet violent world he’s found himself in.

Raising A Thief


Paul Podolsky - 2020
    

Her Silent Husband


Sam Vickery - 2021
    We built a family and a happy, stable home. You said we were a team. But now I’m holding my daughter’s hand all alone as you lie still in your hospital bed. You’ve left me to look after our children all by myself. I will never understand why.The moment Beth finds out that her husband Drew is in a coma her entire world comes crashing down. With four children to care for, and her six-year-old daughter Ceci still recovering from heart surgery, she can’t imagine how she’ll be able to manage on her own.But then she finds out that Drew tried to end his own life. And as she desperately waits to find out if he’ll wake up, she must grapple with the devastating idea that he may not want to.Beth has no idea why Drew would do this, but when his sister Gemma arrives at hospital she seems less surprised – there were terrible secrets that Drew had been keeping from Beth. Lies about his past and the person he really is. Lies that will change everything Beth thought she knew about her husband and could tear her perfect family life apart…

Mother May I


S.E. Green - 2021
    But she prayed tonight that they’d make this stupid baby he wanted.Meet Nora: Flawless. Enigmatic. Conniving. Ruthless.At seventeen, she escaped the grip of her cold and abusive mama after catching the eye of charismatic Merrell Hodges. His riches and fame became hers. In exchange, she could play the role of doting wife.But she alone was not enough; he wanted a family.With the birth of their perfect daughter, Elizabeth, something foreign and unnerving touches Nora: love. She wants to protect and lavish her child. She would show her mama how a real mother should be. But the sins of nature and nurture run deep. There’s a defiance and manipulation in young Elizabeth that’s all-too-familiar and triggering. Nora can’t shake her mama’s prophetic words: You’re going to hate that kid. Just wait. When Nora’s fortune goes sideways after a tragedy with shocking repercussions, she’s determined to reclaim her relevance. With a cunning plan—and surprising ally—Nora reinvents herself as benevolent icon, good mother, and the powerful, authentic woman she deserves to be.But seeds of the past still fester, haunting Nora’s victory and explosive, contradictory behavior. Caught in a cycle of fate, she’s both the heroine and villain of her own story. And as Elizabeth grows into an equally stubborn and strongminded young woman, Nora may have finally met her match.But if there’s one thing never to do, it’s to underestimate Nora