Carol Shields

Sophia Alekseevna, the half-sister of Peter the Great, was the first woman to tule Russia. In 1682, ten-year-old Peter and his mentally retarded brother Ivan were declared joint tsars with 25 year old Sophia as their regent. The regency lasted for seven years until Sophia was ousted by Peter and dispatched to a convent for the last 15 years of her life.

With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Carol Shields explores the life of a writer whose own novels have engaged and delighted readers for the past two hundred years. In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb and beloved novelist from her early family life in Steventown to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relationship with her sister Cassandra. She reveals both the very private woman and the acclaimed author behind the enduring classics Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. With its fascinating insights into the writing process from an award–winning novelist, Carol Shields’s magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created.

Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was a French painter. Her style is generally considered Rococo and shows interest in the subject of neoclassical painting. After her studio was seized, for practicing without a license, she applied to the Academie de Saint Luc, which unwillingly exhibited her works in their Salon. In 1783, she was made a member of the Academie. She painted portraits of many of the nobility of the day and as her career blossomed, she was invited to the Palace of Versailles to paint Marie Antoinette. After the arrest of the royal family during the French Revolution Vigee-Lebrun fled France with her young daughter Julie. She lived and worked for some years in Italy, Austria, and Russia. She was welcomed back to France during the reign of Emperor Napoleon I. She visited England at the beginning of the nineteenth century and painted the portrait of several British notables including Lord Byron.

Blood trickles down through every generation, seeps into every marriage. An international bestseller and winner of the Whitbread Biography Award, Bad Blood is a tragicomic memoir of one woman's escape from a claustrophobic childhood in post-World War II Britain and the story of three generations of the author's family and its marriages.

In one of the most extraordinary memoirs of recent years, Bad Blood brings alive in vivid detail a time -- the '40s and '50s -- not so distant from us but now disappeared. As a portrait of a family and a young girl's place in it, it is unsurpassed.