Liane de Pougy, known as Paris's most beautiful and notorious courtesan, was a Folies-Bergère dancer who became a princess and died a nun. Between 1919 and 1941 she wrote her intimate memoir, My Blue Notebooks. Making modern tell-alls seem downright tepid by comparison, this long-out-of-print classic is a fascinating look into the mind of an audacious woman of great intelligence and humor. In My Blue Notebooks, de Pougy describes hosting the likes of Jean Cocteau and the poet Max Jacob, her best friend ("Never again. Never more than one writer at a time"). She shares her literary critiques of her "friend" Colette ("I look down on her with a grimace of disgust"), recalls the funeral of Nicholas I (she happened to be in St. Petersburg at the time), and reports the sad early death of her acquaintance Marcel Proust. She writes graphically of her many sexual liaisons with both men and women, including her complex marriage to the "too handsome" Prince Georges Ghika of Romania and her difficult relationship with Nathalie Clifford Barney, perhaps the real love of her life. Here is a voyeuristic feast of high society living during the first decades of the twentieth century.

" Anna Held (1870?-1918), a petite woman with an hourglass figure, was America's most popular musical comedy star during the two decades preceding World War I. In the colorful world of New York theater during La Belle Époque, she epitomized everything that was glamorous, sophisticated, and suggestive about turn-of-the-century Broadway. Overcoming an impoverished life as an orphan to become a music-hall star in Paris, Held rocketed to fame in America. From 1896 to 1910, she starred in hit after hit and quickly replaced Lillian Russell as the darling of the theatrical world. The first wife of legendary producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., Held was the brains and inspiration behind his Follies and shared his knack for publicity. Together, they brought the Paris scene to New York, complete with lavish costumes and sets and a chorus of stunningly beautiful women, dubbed ""The Anna Held Girls."" While Held was known for a champagne giggle as well as for her million-dollar bank account, there was a darker side to her life. She concealed her Jewish background and her daughter from a previous marriage. She suffered through her two husbands' gambling problems and Ziegfeld's blatant affairs with showgirls. With the outbreak of fighting in Europe, Held returned to France to support the war effort. She entertained troops and delivered medical supplies, and she was once briefly captured by the German army. Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld's Broadway reveals one of the most remarkable women in the history of theatrical entertainment. With access to previously unseen family records and photographs, Eve Golden has uncovered the details of an extraordinary woman in the vibrant world of 1900s New York.

She finds an envelope: 'To be opened in the event of my death'. It's her husband's handwriting. But he's still alive . . . THE ENTHRALLING STORY OF SECRETS, FAMILY AND THE DANGER OF THE TRUTH 'STAGGERINGLY BRILLIANT' Sophie Hannah 'ANOTHER MASTERCLASS' Grazia _________ Cecilia Fitzpatrick thought she knew her husband. That is until she finds an envelope with his writing on: 'to be opened in the event of my death'. She opens it, and learns a shocking truth he has never dared reveal. Now Cecilia faces a terrible choice. Because revealing her husband's secret will hurt those she loves the most . . . But could the consequences of staying silent be worse? _________ 'Finely wrought tension holds up until the final page' TELEGRAPH 'A tense, page-turning story which gradually draws everyone together in a devastating climax' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'Dark and compelling . . . a must read' SUN

Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Lucile's occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic, in control of the Paris metro system; she gave away all her money; she was hospitalized, medicated, and released in a kind of trance. Young Delphine was left to wonder: What changed her, or what shaped her all along? In this brilliant investigation into her own family history, Delphine de Vigan attempts to "write her mother," seeking out something essential as she interviews aging relatives, listens to recordings, and reads Lucile's own writings. It is a history of luminous beauty and rambunctious joy, of dark secrets and silences. There are untimely deaths and failures of memory. There are revelations and there is the ultimately unknowable. And in the face of the unknowable, personal history becomes fiction: De Vigan must choose from differing accounts and fill in important gaps, using her writer's imagination to reconstruct a life. De Vigan writes her most expansive novel yet with acute self-awareness and marvelous sympathy. Nothing Holds Back the Night is a remarkable work, universally recognizable and singularly heartbreaking.