The Madonnas of Leningrad

Author	Adrienne Sharp
ISBN	0374207305

Exiled in Paris, tiny, one-hundred-year-old Mathilde Kschessinska sits down to write her memoirs before all that she believes to be true is forgotten. A lifetime ago, she was the vain, ambitious, impossibly charming prima ballerina assoluta of the tsar’s Russian Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg....

Author	Mary Doria Russell
ISBN	0449004139

Set in Italy during the dramatic finale of World War II, this new novel is the first in seven years by the bestselling author of The Sparrow and Children of God.

It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are...

Author	Susan Vreeland
ISBN	0670038547

Bestselling author Susan Vreeland returns with a vivid exploration of one of the most beloved Renoir paintings in the world

Instantly recognizable, Auguste Renoir's masterpiece depicts a gathering of his real friends enjoying a summer Sunday on a café terrace along the Seine near Paris....

Author	Daphne Kalotay
ISBN	0061962163

Our faculty had an interesting discussion about Russian Winter last week. All enjoyed it very much, some were disappointed in the end (no spoiler) just thought it ended too abruptly. Characters were well drawn and there was an interesting mix of types, all unique and human. One gets a real sense of the...

Author	Robert Alexander
ISBN	0143038656

From the author of the national bestseller The Kitchen Boy comes a gripping historical novel about imperial Russia’s most notorious figure.

Called “brilliant” by USA Today, Robert Alexander’s historical novel The Kitchen Boy swept readers back to the doomed world of the Romanovs....

Author	Helen Dunmore
ISBN	0802139582

Called "elegantly, starkly beautiful" by The New York Times Book Review, The Siege is Helen Dunmore's masterpiece. Her canvas is monumental -- the Nazis' 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed six hundred thousand -- but her focus is heartrendingly intimate.

One family, the Levins,...

Author	Tom Bradby
ISBN	1400032008

January 1917—With St. Petersburg on the brink of revolution, Sandro Ruzsky, the city’s chief police investigator, returns from exile in Siberia only to be assigned a grisly case: the bodies of a young couple found on the ice of the frozen River Neva, just outside the Tsar’s Winter Palace. Ruzsky’s...

Author	Gillian Slovo
ISBN	1844080595

Leningrad. 1933. Loyalties, beliefs, love and family ties: all are about to be tested to the limit in a fight to see who will survive one of the most crushing moments the world will ever know. Boris Ivanov, the father who understands politics and pragmatism; his daughter Natasha, a carefree, delightful...

Author	Elise Blackwell
ISBN	0316738956

When German troops surround Leningrad and cut off food supplies in the fall of 1941, no one imagines that the siege will last 900 long days and take hundreds of thousands of lives. As the first "hunger winter" sets in, the city's residents strip the bark off trees, boil and eat moss-covered stones, and...

Author	Carolly Erickson
ISBN	0739420429

A czarina Alexandra, mulher de Nicolau II, assombrosamente bonita e melancólica, fiel seguidora de Rasputine, executada, juntamente com toda a sua família, no seguimento da Revolução de Outubro de 1917, mantém-se uma personagem enigmática da história mundial.

Num tom confidente,...

Author	Marina Fiorato
ISBN	0312606362

In this exhilarating cross between The Da Vinci Code and The Birth of Venus, an irrepressible young woman in 15th-century Italy must flee for her life after stumbling upon a deadly secret when she serves as a model for Botticelli...

When part-time model and full-time prostitute Luciana Vetra...

Author	Stephanie Cowell
ISBN	0307463214

Sometimes he dreamt he held her; that he would turn in bed and she would be there. But she was gone and he was old. Nearly seventy. Only cool paint met his fingers. “Ma très chère . . .” Darkness started to fall, dimming the paintings. He felt the crumpled letter in his pocket. “I loved you so,” he...

Author	Paul Griner
ISBN	0547055226

This riveting war story introduces us to beautiful Kate Zweig, the English widow of a German surgeon, and Claus Murphy, an exiled American with German roots—two lovers with complicated loyalties.

In 1918, Kate and her husband,Horst, are taken for spies by Russian soldiers and forced to...

Author	Sara Houghteling
ISBN	0307266850

Set in a Paris darkened by World War II, Sara Houghteling’s sweeping and sensuous debut novel tells the story of a son’s quest to recover his family’s lost masterpieces, looted by the Nazis during the occupation.

Born to an art dealer and his pianist wife, Max Berenzon is forbidden from...

Author	Fiona Tierney
ISBN	0545176913

Look out, Sarah: If you can't impress the lion, he'll eat you for lunch! A quick-witted girl teaches the King of the Jungle a thing or two about good behavior.

Sarah is strolling through the jungle, singing a happy song, when Lion pounces. How dare she trespass on his turf? He is King of the Jungle--where...

Author	Elena Gorokhova
ISBN	1439125678

Elena Gorokhova grows up in 1960's Leningrad where she discovers that beauty and passion can be found in unexpected places in Soviet Russia.

A Mountain of Crumbs is the moving story of a young Soviet girl's discovery of the hidden truths of adulthood and her country's profound political deception....

Author	Margaret Forster
ISBN	0099496860

Lost, found, stolen, strayed, sold, fought over... This engrossing, beautifully crafted novel follows the fictional adventures, over a hundred years, of an early 20th-century painting and the women whose lives it touches.

It opens with bold, passionate Gwen, struggling to be an artist,...

Author	John McPhee
ISBN	0374524505

In the 1960s and 1970s, an American professor of Soviet economics forayed on his own in the Soviet Union, bought the work of underground "unofficial" artists, and brought it out himself or arranged to have it illegally shipped to the United States. Norton Dodge visited the apartments of unofficial...

Author

Theodor Plievier

Anyone who has read the histories and memoirs of the fighting on the Eastern Front, especially Stalingrad, will not find anything new in Plievier's book yet it still manages to capture that descent into Hell that was the common experience for the soldiers of this, the greatest battle of the Second World...

Author	Rosemary Crawford
ISBN	0380731916

Michael and Natasha is both an astonishing love story and an illuminating look at the last glorious days of the Romanovs and the brutal revolution that ended their reign. Based on private diaries, letters, and documents long hidden in the Soviet archives, it sheds light on an extraordinary tale of enduring...

Author	Karen Essex
ISBN	0385519710

The author of the bestselling Leonardo's Swans traverses the centuries into the hearts of two extraordinary women to reveal the passions, ambitions, and controversies surrounding the Elgin Marbles.

The Elgin Marbles have been displayed in the British Museum for nearly two hundred years,...

Author	Laurie Lico Albanese
ISBN	0061558346

"Like Fra Filippo's paintings, this love story, set in one of the most intriguing historical periods, is suffused with clear, warm color and fine attention to detail."

-Debra Dean, author of The Madonnas of Leningrad -

A vibrant and enthralling historical novel about art and passion,...

Author	Alison Pick
ISBN	0062034626

The Man Booker Prize finalist Far to Go by acclaimed author Alison Pick is historical fiction at its very best.

When Czechoslovakia relinquishes the Sudetenland to Hitler, the powerful influence of Nazi propaganda sweeps through towns and villages like a sinister vanguard of the Reich's...