by Stephanie Barron
 

As Lady Randolph Churchill, she gave birth to a man who defined the twentieth century -- her son Winston. But Jennie -- reared in the luxury of Gilded Age Newport and the Paris of the Second Empire -- lived an outrageously modern life all her own, filled with controversy, passion, tragedy, and triumph.

by Louis Bayard

About to turn 21 when she arrives in Springfield in 1839, Mary Todd teeters on the brink of old-maidenhood. She's too sharp-tongued and politically astute for the town's eligible men, including, she thinks regretfully, handsome merchant Joshua Speed, whom she initially finds more charming than his friend Lincoln, who is as tongue-tied with ladies as he is plainspokenly eloquent at the Illinois statehouse.

by Marie Benedict

Albert Einstein may not have been the only mastermind behind his groundbreaking ideas about relativity; it turns out the renowned theoretical physicist collaborated a great deal with his first wife, Mileva Maric -- a Serbian woman of modest means who was one of the few women to study math and science at the Zurich Polytechnic School where the two met.

by Melanie Benjamin

Examines the life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the inspiration for  Alice in Wonderland.  Alice and her sisters were "princesses" of Oxford and expected to act in a manner befitting nobility.  At the age of seven, Alice Liddell developed a close, intimate relationship with Charles Dodgson, an instructor at Oxford, who went on to publish as Lewis Carroll.

by Stephanie Dray

Eliza Schuyler Hamilton, a revolutionary woman who, like her new nation, struggled to define herself in the wake of war, betrayal, and tragedy.  She was not just the wronged wife at the center of a political sex scandal -- but also as a founding mother who shaped an American legacy in her own right.

by Charles Frazier

"My name is a heritage of woe," says Varina Howell Davis in a letter.  Varina, called "V",   is married at 18 to the much older Davis; becomes the mother of six children, only one of whom survives her; flees the collapse of the South as a desperate fugitive with a bounty on her head; and, later, is forced to earn a penurious living as a journalist.

by Alice Hoffman

A ghost wife, a stolen child, wandering eyes, hidden ledgers and more bind the 19th-century Jewish community on an island in the West Indies.  To this marvelous mise-en-scene, Hoffman adds a historical character: Rachel Manzana Pomi, the Creole mother of impressionist painter Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro. 

by Nancy Horan

In 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a new home for them. During construction, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.

by Victoria Kelly

Before escape artist Harry Houdini died, he vowed he would find a way to speak to his beloved wife, Bess, from beyond the grave using a coded message known only to the two of them. But when a widowed Bess begins seeing this code in seemingly impossible places, it becomes clear that Harry has an urgent message to convey.

by Christina Baker Kline

Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the twentieth century..

Hollywood, 1938: As soon as she learns that M-G-M is adapting her late husband's masterpiece for the screen, seventy-seven-year-old Maud Gage Baum sets about trying to finagle her way onto the set. Nineteen years after Frank's passing, Maud is the only person who can help the producers stay true to the spirit of the book -- because she's the only one left who knows its secrets.

by Whitney Scharer
 

In 1929, Lee Miller went to Paris to start over, to make art instead of being made into it. She soon catches the eye of the famous Surrealist Man Ray. Though he wants to use her only as a model, Lee convinces him to take her on as his assistant and teach her everything he knows.

by John Burnham Schwartz

Fact and fiction mingle seamlessly in a story of the defection and lonely wanderings of Josef Stalin's only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, beginning with her arrival in New York City after having defected from the Soviet Union in 1967.

by Mary Sharratt

Alma Schindler enraptures every man she meets, including Gustav Klimt, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and Walter Gropius. Yet composer Gustav Mahler is the one the beautiful socialite chooses. Twenty years Alma's senior, he forbids her own composing, subordinating her gifts to service his ego.

by Beth Underdown

In 1645, Alice Hopkins returns to her brother's house in disgrace, husbandless and pregnant. The brother she remembers is now a grown man -- and he's hunting witches.

by Susan Vreeland

It's 1893, and at the Chicago World's Fair, Louis Comfort Tiffany makes his debut with a luminous exhibition of innovative stained-glass windows.  Behind the scenes in his New York studio is the freethinking Clara Driscoll. Publicly unrecognized by Tiffany, Clara conceives of and designs nearly all of the iconic leaded-glass lamps for which he is long remembered.

by Shelley Wood

Reluctant midwife Emma Trimpany is just 17 when she assists at the harrowing birth of the Dionne quintuplets: five tiny miracles born to French farmers in hardscrabble Northern Ontario in 1934.