After marrying a successful Parisian writer known commonly as Willy, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette is transplanted from her childhood home in rural France to the intellectual and artistic splendor of Paris. Soon after, Willy convinces Colette to ghostwrite for him. She pens a semi-autobiographical novel about a witty and brazen country girl named Claudine, sparking a bestseller and a cultural sensation. After its success, Colette and Willy become the talk of Paris and their adventures inspire additional Claudine novels.
Tag: 19th century
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A Fortunate Man
A gifted engineer flees his austere roots to pursue wealth and success among Copenhagen’s elite. As he rises through the ranks of society, the pride propelling him threatens to be his ruin.
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The Sisters Brothers
Oregon, 1851. Hermann Kermit Warm, a chemist and aspiring gold prospector, keeps a profitable secret that the Commodore wants to know, so he sends the Sisters brothers, two notorious assassins, to capture him on his way to California.
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The Nightingale
In 1825, Clare, a 21-year-old Irish convict, chases a British soldier through the rugged Tasmanian wilderness, bent on revenge for a terrible act of violence he committed against her family. She enlists the services of an Aboriginal tracker who is also marked by trauma from his own violence-filled past.
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The North Water
Henry Drax is a harpooner and brutish killer whose amorality has been shaped to fit the harshness of his world, who will set sail on a whaling expedition to the Arctic with Patrick Sumner, a disgraced ex-army surgeon who signs up as the ship’s doctor. Hoping to escape the horrors of his past, Sumner finds himself on an ill-fated journey with a murderous psychopath. In search of redemption, his story becomes a harsh struggle for survival in the Arctic wasteland.
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Nos Tempos do Imperador
In 1856, the emperor Dom Pedro II lived a marriage of appearances with Teresa Cristina, with whom he was forced to marry at a young age by his parents’ political alliance, having two daughters with her: Isabel and Leopoldina. He truly loves Countess Luisa, a cultured and time-ahead woman who fights for the abolitionist cause and women’s rights, married to Eugenio, the emperor’s cousin. At the same time there are sisters Pilar and Dolores: the first went to a convent after her mother’s death in childhood, growing up among books and dreaming of studying medicine – inspired by the story of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first doctor in the world -, while the second stayed at home to take care of her father, Colonel Eudoro, growing up repressed, illiterate and without vanity.
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1899
When mysterious events change the course of an immigrant ship headed for New York in 1899, a mind-bending riddle unfolds for its bewildered passengers.
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The Gilded Age
It’s 1882 and the Gilded Age is in full swing when Marian Brook, a young orphaned daughter of a Southern general, moves in with her rigidly conventional aunts in New York City. With the help of Peggy Scott, an African-American woman masquerading as her maid, Marian gets caught up in the dazzling lives of her rich neighbors as she struggles to decide between adhering to the rules or forging her own path.
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The Law According to Lidia Poët
In late 19th-century Turin, the young Lidia Poët, fights against everything and everyone to get what is rightfully hers: to be enrolled in the official register of lawyers. A profession, at the time, reserved exclusively for men. Nevertheless, nothing could stop her dream of becoming the first female lawyer in Italy.
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The Wonder
Haunted by her past, a nurse travels from England to a remote Irish village in 1862 to investigate a young girl’s supposedly miraculous fast.