The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and The Romanovs returns with another masterpiece of narrative biography, the extraordinary story of an obscure young German princess who traveled to Russia at fourteen and rose to become one of the most remarkable, powerful, and captivating women in history. Born into a minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself into Empress of Russia by sheer determination. Possessing...

"Never again" became Queen Elizabeth II's mantra shortly after Princess Diana's tragic death. More specifically, there could never be "another Diana"--a member of the family whose global popularity upstaged, outshone, and posed an existential threat to the British monarchy. Brown takes readers on a tour de force journey through the scandals, love affairs, power plays, and betrayals that have buffeted the monarchy over the last twenty-five years. We...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. Though her life spanned fewer than 40 years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.

Drama by Sophocles, possibly performed in 442 or 441 BC. It examines the conflicting obligations of civic duties versus personal loyalties and religious mores. Antigone concerns that part of the Oedipus story that occurs after Eteocles and Polyneices have killed each other over the succession to the throne of Thebes. Antigone's uncle Creon succeeds to the throne and decrees that anyone who buries the dishonored Polyneices will face capital punishment....

When Queen Bitterblue took the throne of Monsea, she was a child, and her advisers ran the kingdom for her. Now she is beginning to question their decisions, especially how they handle the legacy of her father Leck, who who ruled through his Grace-a special talent for mind-altering-and his taste for darkness and violence. Bitterblue needs to know Monsea's past to lead it into the future, so she begins exploring the city sreets at night, disguised...

In a faraway land, a young warrior must protect an emperor from an uprising and train an inexperienced army, with assistance from his Ranger friends.

Dalinar Kholin's Alethi armies won a fleeting victory at a terrible cost: The enemy Parshendi summoned the violent Everstorm, which now sweeps the world with destruction, and in its passing awakens the once peaceful and subservient parshmen to the horror of their millennia-long enslavement by humans. While on a desperate flight to warn his family of the threat, Kaladin Stormblessed must come to grips with the fact that the newly kindled anger of the...

"A reluctant warrior on the run with an ancient goddess through a lush world full of wild magic, wondrous creatures, and hidden enemies has only five days to end an oppressive Emperor's reign in this beautiful epic fantasy from the author of The Vanished Birds. In the Land of the Strangled Throat, the people suffer under the rule of a despotic Emperor. His sons, the Three Terrors, despoil the countryside and oppress its citizens. When Keema Daware--a...

""Learn you to die," was the advice Jane wrote to her younger sister Katherine, who has no intention of dying. She intends to enjoy her beauty and her youth and fall in love. But she is heir to the insecure and infertile Queen Mary and then to her sister Queen Elizabeth, who will never allow Katherine to marry and produce a Tudor son. When Katherine's pregnancy betrays her secret marriage, she faces imprisonment in the Tower, only yards from her sister's...

"In a tiny shack in the largest township in South Africa, Nombeko Mayeki is born. Put to work at five years old and orphaned at ten, she quickly learns that the world expects nothing more from her than to die young, be it from drugs, alcohol, or just plain despair. But Nombeko has grander plans. She learns to read and write, and at just fifteen, using her cunning and fearlessness, she makes it out of Soweto with millions of smuggled diamonds in her...