The daughter of New York financier Leonard Jerome, Jennie Jerome Churchill was born into wealth --- and scandal. Upon her parents’ separation, her mother took Jennie and her sisters to Paris, where Mrs. Jerome was determined to marry her daughters into the most elite families. Fleeing to Queen Victoria’s England after Paris fell to revolt, Jennie soon caught the eye of aristocrat Randolph Spencer-Churchill, son of the Duke of Marlborough. It was love at first sight, their unconventional marriage driven by mutual ambition and the birth of two sons. She brashly carried on a lifelong intimate friendship with Edward, Prince of Wales, and had two later marriages to younger men. When her son Winston launched his brilliant political career, Jennie guided him to success, his most vocal and valuable supporter.

From her beginnings as the daughter of a courtesan to her extraordinary transformation into the most celebrated actress of her era, Sarah Bernhardt is brought to life by an internationally bestselling author praised for his historical novels featuring famous women. C. W. Gortner’s THE FIRST ACTRESS is a fascinating, intimate account of a woman whose unrivaled talent and indomitable spirit has enshrined her in history as the Divine Sarah.

Barely 19, Minnie knows that her station in life as a Danish princess is to leave her family and enter into a royal marriage. The winds of fortune bring her to Russia, where she marries the Romanov heir, Alexander, and becomes empress. When resistance to his reign strikes at the heart of her family and the tsar sets out to crush all who oppose him, Minnie --- now called Maria --- must tread a perilous path of compromise in a country she has come to love. Her husband’s death leaves their son Nicholas as the inexperienced ruler of a deeply divided and crumbling empire. As the unstoppable wave of revolution rises anew to engulf Russia, Maria will face her most dangerous challenge and her greatest heartache.

Glamorous and predatory, the Borgias fascinated and terrorized 15th-century Renaissance Italy, and Lucrezia Borgia, beloved daughter of the pope, was at the center of the dynasty’s ambitions. Slandered as a heartless seductress who lured men to their doom, was she in fact the villainess of legend, or was she trapped in a familial web, forced to choose between loyalty and survival? THE VATICAN PRINCESS is the first novel to describe Lucrezia’s coming-of-age in her own voice.

Raised in genteel poverty after the First World War, Maria Magdalena Dietrich dreams of a life on the stage. With her sultry beauty, smoky voice, seductive silk cocktail dresses and androgynous tailored suits, Marlene performs to packed houses and becomes entangled in a series of stormy love affairs. For the beautiful, desirous Marlene, neither fame nor marriage and motherhood can cure her wanderlust. Setting sail for America, she quickly becomes one of Hollywood’s leading ladies. C. W. Gortner’s novel reveals the inner life of a woman of grit, glamour and ambition who defied convention, seduced the world, and forged her own path on her own terms.

Coco Chanel was a woman with a vision who fought every convention of her time to become the most iconic fashion designer the world has ever known. She hit her stride in the 1920s with a style that freed women and money that brought her a freedom she had never known. As her reputation and business reached new heights, Chanel became the woman every man wanted and every woman wanted to be.

London, 1558. Queen Mary is dead, and Elizabeth ascends the throne. Summoned to court from exile abroad, Elizabeth’s intimate spy, Brendan Prescott, is reunited with the young queen. Elizabeth dispatches him on a mission: to find her favored lady in waiting, Lady Parry. The mystery surrounding Lady Parry deepens as Brendan begins to realize there is far more going on at the manor than meets the eye. But the closer he gets, the more he learns that in his zeal to uncover the truth, he could be precipitating Elizabeth’s destruction.

Mary Tudor wears the English crown, but she needs an heir to deny her half-sister Elizabeth’s claim to the throne once and for all. Unfortunately, that heir proves hard to come by, and Mary’s tenuous grasp on the throne grows weaker with every rumor. When a known spy arrives at court, neither sister knows what to make of the situation.

“No one believed I was destined for greatness.” So begins Isabella’s story, in C. W. Gortner’s novel about one of history’s most famous and controversial queens --- the warrior who united a fractured country, the champion of the faith whose reign gave rise to the Inquisition, and the visionary who sent Columbus to discover a New World.