THE KING’S KNIGHT A mysterious cult is sacrificing beautiful young women to a demonic force that has promised them the kingdom of France in return for the blood of their victims. Only one man can save Paris from chaos and terror?the Chevalier d’Eon! From the Trade Paperback edition.
The book that was banned in England is now available through the Internet at Amazon.com for all the world to see. It's the story of Le Chevalier d'Eon, his major success as a master spy, and his tender love affair with seventeen year old Charlotte, Queen of England. Every English Royal knows but will forever deny it happened. The truth is not supposed to be told...ever. Not then. Not now. Never. Two experienced French spies tried to get to Russia's Empress Elizabeth. Both were jailed and killed. Le Chevalier d'Eon, conscripted into King Louis Fifteenth's small group called THE KING'S SECRET is successful and he becomes Empress Elizabeth's closest personal friend. He personally veers Russia away from England and into the French camp. All this takes Le Chevalier d'Eon away from the love of his life, the girl he is about to marry, young Princess Charlotte who's waiting for him to return to her in Mecklinburg, Germany. But too late. She is kidnapped and taken to England to be King George the Third's wife. She will be Queen of England. Reacting immediately to Charlotte's message that she needs help, d'Eon rushes to London's Saint James Court. Acknowledged as the greatest master spy of all time by Washington, D.C.'s INTERNATIONAL SPY MUSEUM, this novel is based on fact. Len d'Eon is from the same ancestral family as the Cavalier. He and his wife Barbara researched the story in Tonnerre, France, London's British Museum Library, La Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris and wherever the Cavalier's shoes took him. G.P.Putnam's Sons first published this novel in hardcover. It's wwww.Amazon.com/books to buy the book. Visit www.lechevalierdeon.com for continuing info.
Born in 1728, French aristocrat Charles d'Eon de Beaumont had served his country as a diplomat, soldier, and spy for fifteen years when rumors that he was a woman began to circulate in the courts of Europe. D'Eon denied nothing and was finally compelled by Louis XVI to give up male attire and live as a woman, something d'Eon did without complaint for the next three decades. Although celebrated as one of the century's most remarkable women, d'Eon was revealed, after his death in 1810, to have been unambiguously male. Gary Kates's acclaimed biography of d'Eon recreates eighteenth-century European society in brilliant detail and offers a compelling portrait of an individual who challenged its conventions about gender and identity.
KINGDOM COME Lia is still searching for her murderer, but will success save her soul or doom her to the fires of hell? Her fate is tied to the destiny of the kingdom of France- and the bloodthirsty cult that plots to destroy it. So when the cultists kidnap the king's mistress, the Chevalier Sphinx finds herself in a deadly race against time! From the Trade Paperback edition
Cross-dressing author, envoy, soldier and spy Charles d'Eon de Beaumont's unusual career fascinated his contemporaries and continues to attract historians, novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, image makers, cultural theorists and those concerned with manifestations of the extraordinary. D'Eon's significance as a historical figure was already being debated more than 45 years before his death. Not surprisingly, such sensational material has attracted the attention of enthusiasts, scholars and literateurs to 'the strange case of the chevalier d'Eon'. He has also attracted the attention of psychologists and sexologists, and for most of the last century his gender transformation has been viewed through a Freudian lens. His cross-dressing, it was usually assumed, must have a psychosexual explanation. Until the second half of the twentieth century the terms 'Eonist' and 'Eonism' were the standard English words for transvestites and transvestism respectively, but 'Eonism' was also, thanks to Havelock Ellis, widely regarded as a psychological condition or compulsion. However, in the mid-twentieth century, new ideas about gender-identity disorders led to d'Eon being redefined not as a transvestite, but a transsexual - a person who considers their sex to have been 'misassigned'. The essays in this collection contribute to d'Eon's rehabilitation as a figure worthy of scholarly attention and display a variety of disciplinary approaches. Drawing on new research into d'Eon's life, this volume offers original and nuanced readings of how a gender identity could come to be negotiated over time.
The paths of two women from different walks of life intersect amid counterculture of the 1960s in this haunting and provocative novel from the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend Named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Christian Science Monitor Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind introduces two women who meet as freshmen on the Columbia campus in 1968. Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. She is mortified by Ann's romanticization of the underprivileged class, which Georgette herself is hoping college will enable her to escape. After the violent fight that ends their friendship, Georgette wants only to forget Ann and to turn her attention to the troubled runaway kid sister who has reappeared after years on the road. Then, in 1976, Ann is convicted of murder. At first, Ann's fate appears to be the inevitable outcome of her belief in the moral imperative to "make justice" in a world where "there are no innocent white people." But, searching for answers to the riddle of this friend of her youth, Georgette finds more complicated and mysterious forces at work. The novel's narrator Georgette illuminates the terrifying life of this difficult, doomed woman, and in the process discovers how much their early encounter has determined her own path, and why, decades later, as she tells us, "I have never stopped thinking about her."
A cold case reaches from Cape Town’s shadowy past to bucolic Bordeaux, France, in this thriller by the Barry Award-winning author of Thirteen Hours. When a cold case dossier lands on Captain Benny Griessel’s desk, he and his partner Vaughn Cupido, fellow member of the Hawks elite police unit in South Africa, reluctantly set to work reviewing the evidence. Did ex-cop Johnson Johnson simply disappear on the world’s most luxurious train line—or was he murdered? Two fellow travelers might have the answers Griessel and Cupido need, but they too seem to have disappeared, and the few clues that exist suggest a cover-up. Meanwhile, Daniel Darret has settled into a new, quiet life in Bordeaux, far from his revolutionary past in South Africa. But now a man from that past has reappeared. And he wants to commission Daniel’s unique skills one more time. As the two storylines come crashing together, Griessel and Cupido are left uncertain of the truth—and of their own future. A top-notch addition to the acclaimed Benny Griessel series, The Last Hunt makes a brave and powerful statement about the pervasive corruption that has stolen so much from Deon Meyer’s native country. “Superb…this may be the breakthrough book this author deserves.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A New York Times Notable Book Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires. A Man's Place is the companion book to her critically acclaimed memoir about her mother, A Woman's Story.
La Gumas powerful, firsthand account depicts the dedicated South African people who risked their lives in the underground movement against apartheid. The main characters, Beukes and Elias, are among others determined to undermine apartheids blatant oppression and demeaning tactics. The authors knack for rich descriptions and weaving the past with the present transports readers to the grind of working in an underground political organization and the challenges of confronting hardships, change, and injustice on a daily basis.
The acclaimed author of The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine “explores the peculiarities of familial relations to tremendous result” (Asymptote). A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021 Max lives with his grandparents in a residential home for refugees in Germany. When his grandmother—a terrifying, stubborn matriarch and a former Russian primadonna—moved them from the Motherland it was in search of a better life. But she is not at all pleased with how things are run in Germany: the doctors and teachers are incompetent, the food is toxic, and the Germans are generally untrustworthy. His grandmother has been telling Max that he is an inept, clueless weakling since he was a child and she’d spend the day sitting in the back of his classroom to be sure he came to no harm. While he may be a dolt in his grandmother’s eyes, Max is bright enough to notice that his stoic and taciturn grandfather has fallen hopelessly in love with their neighbor, Nina. When a child is born to Nina that is the spitting image of Max’s grandfather, things come to a hilarious if dramatic head. Everybody will have to learn to defend themselves from Max’s all-powerful grandmother. Alina Bronsky, author of The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, writes of family dysfunction and machinations with a droll and biting humor, a tremendous ear for dialog, and a generous heart that is forgiving of human weakness. “[A] comic feel-bad novel. Bronsky has a Dickensian flair for writing about miserable children—or, rather, the miseries of childhood.” —Vulture