Book picks similar to
The Trusted Servant by Alison MacLeod
historical
history-fiction
lit-historical
literature
Gangs of Bombay: From Failing a Million-Dollar Startup to Creating a Criminal Empire
Divyansh Mundra - 2019
When the million-dollar stock prediction startup of Lakshya and Naman (two brilliant IIT-grads) tanks; they are taken in by Manav, their college friend who makes a living out of selling drugs. Debt-ridden and homeless, the two decide to help their friend in selling ‘The Holy Grail’, the newest drug in the Indian markets which is sold for margins never heard before, and the three end up making the quickest money they have seen. Lured and intrigued, they decide to sell and make as much as possible in two months before leaving the drug trade for good, and in that time, they expand their drug enterprise under Lakshya’s guidance by applying their startup strategies. Unknown to them though, they cross paths with the five infamous historical gangs of Bombay, who’ve survived and thrived since the British occupation of the city. Artavardiya, the powerful boss of the Parsi gang Surtis, takes interest in Lakshya and his drug enterprise after being charmed by his brilliance and vision. He takes him under his guidance and that is when Lakshya is able to gauge the extent to which the criminal underbelly of Mumbai is spread, spiralling down and knowing in his heart that he’d never be able to escape. In a tale of gang-wars and blood, love and loss, loyalty and betrayal, and mind-numbing revelations spread amidst brutal action and insane twists— explore the crime of the city that never sleeps. Will Lakshya and his friends expand their drug business like a startup? Will they succeed in dealing with mind-games and bullets of the five historical gangs of Mumbai? Will they survive the trials of their personal lives while the demons of their pasts try to catch up with them? And will these brilliant minds fall against the richest crime syndicates of the country? Read the crime-thriller that would keep you on the edge of your seats, about a few brilliant minds who lost their million-dollar startup and turned their skills to create a criminal empire.
WARWICK - The Man Behind The Wars of the Roses
Tony Riches - 2014
He becomes a warrior knight, bravely protecting the north against invasion by the Scots. A key figure in what have become known as ‘the Wars of the Roses,’ he fought in most of the important battles. As Captain of Calais, he turns privateer, daring to take on the might of the Spanish fleet and becoming Admiral of England. The friend of kings, he is the sworn enemy of Queen Margaret of Anjou. Then, in an amazing change of heart, why does he risk everything to fight for her cause? Writers from William Shakespeare to best-selling modern authors have tried to show what sort of man Richard Neville must have been, with quite different results. Sometimes Warwick is portrayed as the skilled political manipulator behind the throne, shaping events for his own advantage. Others describe him as the ‘last of the barons’, ruling his fiefdom like an uncrowned king. Whatever the truth, his story is one of adventure, power and influence at the heart of one of the most dangerous times in the history of England.
One of Us Buried
Johanna Craven - 2021
She is put to work at the female factory of Parramatta; a place where the women’s only hope of food and lodgings is to offer their bodies to the settlement’s men. Nell is given shelter by Lieutenant Blackwell, a brooding soldier to whom she is inexplicably drawn. Despite warnings from the other women, Blackwell’s motives seem decent, and beneath the roof of a military officer, Nell sees a chance to become more than just a convict woman sent to the factory to be forgotten. But tensions are high in New South Wales, with the young colony teetering on the edge of a convict rebellion. And as Nell treads a dangerous line between obedience and power, she learns the role of a factory lass is to remain silent – or face a walk to the gallows.
Nellie's War
Victor Pemberton - 1998
The runaway evacuees who give her shelter call her Nellie, the only girl in 'Toff' Hecht's gang, until, yet again, tragedy strikes, and she is forced to move on. But when Nellie meets the great music hall illusionists, Monsieur and Madame Pierre - alias Bert and Doris Beckwith - her life begins again. In the magical world of bright lights and greasepaint she finds a wonderful new family. But even as she is happily stitching costumes backstage, Nellie can't stop thinking about her old life in the bombed-out rubble - and more particularly, about the restless young Jewish boy, 'Toff' Hecht...
The Giants Look Down
Sonja Price - 2016
It is the late 1960s and the family enjoy an idyllic life in the Vale of Kashmir, despite the area being riddled with conflict and poverty. But after a devastating earthquake wipes out her entire family, Jaya is taken into the care of relatives in Delhi, who attempt to marry her off and keep secret from her the possibility that Tahir, her younger brother, has survived the earthquake. After escaping from the arranged marriage Jaya is put through medical training in Scotland, as she had always dreamed, and where she develops feelings for her foster family’s eldest son, Alastair, who is engaged to someone else. In the meantime, Tahir has been abducted by a band of Kashmiri freedom fighters, who have made him one of their own. Jaya finally returns to her troubled homeland to find him and come to terms with the loss of her family. Alastair, who arrives in Kashmir to announce his love for Jaya, is kidnapped by the freedom fighters, forcing her to risk everything to get him back.
The Tsars
Alexander Ivanov - 2018
Here, historian Alexander Ivanov reveals their fears and betrayals, privilege and debauchery, conspiracies and rivalries, love and tragedy as they forged Russia into one of the world's greatest empires. No ruler in history has embodied the oppressive domination of these rulers more vividly than Alexander Ivanov's opening subject, Tsar Ivan IV, the first of all the Russian tsars, known to history as Ivan the Terrible. Although a gifted ruler who did much to unite and improve the conditions in his primitive country, Ivan was also a notorious sadist who delighted in torturing and murdering anyone who displeased him. Ivan's death in 1584 ushered in the Time of Troubles, thirty-five years of famine, plague, and war that crippled the nation. A series of rulers attempted to cope with the devastation, beginning with Ivan's successor Boris Godunov. Finally, grasping for stability, Russia's nobles begged young Michael Romanov, the great-nephew of Ivan's beloved wife Anastasia, to take the throne. Michael successfully united the war-torn and ravaged nation and founded a dynasty that would rule for 300 years. The Romanov line produced Russia's most brilliant yet most unconventional sovereign: Peter the Great, a towering figure of a man whose restless, creative mind led him on an inexorable quest to modernize and civilize the still backward nation. The reforms he enacted so enraged nobles and peasants alike that Peter had to quash a series of rebellions to keep his crown. Ruthlessly stifling dissent and massacring rebels, he ultimately cowed the Russian people into submission, achieving a legacy that nearly equaled his ambitions. It was left to a woman - and a foreigner, at that - to lead the nation further out of the darkness. German princess Sophie Friederike Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst, known to the world as Catherine the Great, absorbed the principles of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and applied them to a country built on the backs of millions of serfs. However ineffective some of her policies, in the end, she made Russia a major player on the European stage. Serfdom was finally abolished in the nineteenth century, but it would be decades before Russian peasants could own land of their own and learn to farm it productively. The boyars and tsars clung to power until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The sad fate of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, marked the end of the absolute power that Ivan the Terrible had so exploited. The abuses would continue but under a new and drastically different form of government.
Our Plantation: Life on a Southern Cotton Plantation during the Civil War
Richard E. Graglia - 2017
Her husband and elder son rode off to save slavery in the Confederate Cavalry. Their plantation would now be controlled by a brutish slave master and sadistic slave overseers. Would their slaves revolt? Would Yankee armies attack and destroy their way of life? The slave master already had designs on Clare Ellen Fairchild and couldn’t wait until her husband rode off to war and hopefully die for his Cause. It was April, planting season. The very long and very hot summer awaited them. Clare Ellen was told that this war would be over by September and to ‘not worry her pretty little head’ about it. Clare Ellen was told wrong. She and her children should have worried their pretty little heads.
Unpunished
William Peter Grasso - 2011
Presidential candidate. Murderer. Unpunished is a tale of murder, ambition, corruption, and the redemptive power of love. Leonard Pilcher, a scion of entitlement and privilege, is a congressman, presidential candidate...and a murderer. As an American pilot interned in Sweden during WWII, he kills one of his own crewmen and gets away with it, without suspicion. Two people have witnessed the murder--American airman Joe Gelardi and his secret Swedish lover, Pola Nilsson-MacLeish--but they cannot speak out without paying a devastating price. Tormented by their guilt and separated by a vast ocean after the war, Joe and Pola maintain the silence that haunts them both...until 1960, when Congressman Pilcher's campaign for his party's nomination for president gains momentum. As he dons the guise of war hero, one female reporter, anxious to break into the "boy's club" of TV news, fights to uncover the truth against the far-reaching power of the Pilcher family's wealth, power that can do any wrong it chooses--even kill--and remain unpunished. Just as the nomination seems within Pilcher's grasp, Pola reappears to enlist Joe's help in finally exposing Pilcher for the criminal he really is. As the passion of their wartime romance rekindles, they must struggle to bring Pilcher down before becoming his next victims.
The Collier's Wife
Chrissie Walsh - 2020
When Amy visits her husband Hugh at Beckett's Park Hospital, he doesn't recognise her. Broken after serving four devastating years in the First World War, Hugh is a shadow of the man he once was. Can he ever again be the man Amy knew and loved?Barnsborough, 1912. The first time Hugh and Amy meet, the connection between them is instant and electric. While a librarian's assistant and a collier might not be the most conventional pair, the two come together over a love of books that quickly turns into more. Neither suspects their families have secrets that threaten to tear them apart...True love's path is rarely simple... but can Hugh and Amy find their way back to each other?
Cara's Land
Elvi Rhodes - 1991
Beckwith was isolated, sometimes beautiful, sometimes inhospitable, and had been owned by the Hendry family since 1700.When Cara fell in love with Edward Hendry, it was not what her family had intended for her.Edward was fifteen years older than Cara, a pacifist, and a widower with two children, one of whom bitterly resented her new stepmother.But Cara was determined to make the marriage work, in spite of the hard life on the farm, in spite of Edward's reserved personality and the shadow of Nancy, his former wife.Her greatest friend on the farm was Edward's mother.Edith Hendry, a loyal and wise daleswoman, was to see the young bride through many tragedies, many vicissitudes and the years of trying to run the wild sheep farm on her own.And as Cara's life began to change, so Cara changed too, finding a complete and utter happiness where she had never expected to.
Mary Dannie
Patricia Keil - 2010
It is the story of the struggles, simple joys and wisdom surrounding a young girl growing up in the 1940's in Appalachia.
A Brighter Dawn
Rosie Harris - 2011
Keep well away from that Hadyn Jenkins.' In spite of her father's words of warning, Sharon Pritchard decides to give up everything to follow her heart. However, her new life with Hadyn is anything but easy. Although he is handsome and charming, he is feckless and unreliable. And they soon find themselves sinking ever faster into poverty. The birth of their son should be a joyous occasion, but Sharon fears for him amongst the filth and despair of Tiger Bay. And when Hadyn's errant ways catch up with him, Sharon is faced with a devastating truth. Can her love for Hadyn survive and will she be able to provide a better future for herself and her son...?
From the Paperback edition.
Anne Boleyn
E. Barrington - 1932
E. Barrington tells the romantic history of the most beautiful and vivid of them all - his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Anne rises to fame when she captures the heart of King Henry. He is married to Katharine of Aragon, but she is six years his senior, and though she has provided him with sons throughout their marriage, they have all died. Henry is desperate for an heir, and he becomes captivated by the mysterious and shrewd Anne Boleyn. But Christian law stands in his way, and their courtship is put on hold as he battles those in power to gain a divorce from Katharine. And the moment Anne finally gets what she wants - the crown - is also the moment her downfall begins… Barrington’s classic novel portrays Anne as shrewd, lovely, ambitious, generous, disillusioned, and resolved to capitalize her beauty for her own ends. This is the story of Anne, but also of the days of Anne - when the question over a woman’s virtue was paramount in the great game of kings and kingdoms… E Barrington is a pseudonym of Elizabeth Louisa Moresby (1862 – 3 January 1931), a British-born novelist who became the first prolific, female fantasy writer in Canada. Her other historical novels include ‘Glorious Apollo: The Life of Lord Byron’, ‘Queen of Hearts: A Novel of Marie Antoinette’ and ‘The Laughing Queen: A Novel of Cleopatra’. Endeavour Press is the UK’s leading independent publisher of digital books.
Doctor Rose and the Outlaw
R.O. Lane - 2020
She sets up her medical practice there. One night she's called out to help a gang of outlaws that have been shot to pieces while trying to rustle cattle. One of the outlaws is a young man that she develops feelings for, but he's in and out of her life for months on end. The outlaw attempts to change his life and go straight. It's a challenge that Rose encourages. It's the tale of two people who grow to care deeply for each other, and when Rose is kidnapped, the outlaw, now her husband, rides out to save her. Another novel of the Old West from the pen of R. O. Lane.
The Atlantis Papyrus
Jay Penner - 2019
vivid... gripping. Takes you through a thrilling quest in a violent ancient world." Some secrets are best left unrevealed323 B.C.King Alexander the Great has died without a clear successor and the citizens of a vast empire wait nervously for what comes next. But Captain Deon has other worries—his family will be sold to slavery if he does not clear his debt soon. Desperate, he accepts a mission from Alexander’s wily Royal Secretary in return for a generous reward. All he has to do is steal a papyrus from the King's funeral procession.A papyrus with a stunning secret that can transform the balance of powers that fight for Alexander’s throne.Plunged into the heart of succession wars and thrust between bloody ambitions of greater men, Deon is forced to embark on a dangerous journey and battle those he fears, to decode the ancient clues before time runs out for his family. But the more he learns, the more he realizes that his decisions will decide the life and death of not only his loved ones but also that of millions of innocents.-------- BONUS: Join the newsletter on the author's website to get a free "History behind the book" that sheds light on some of the interesting events after Alexander's death.