Books published by publisher Important Books

An autobiographical narrative, BEHIND THE SCENES traces Elizabeth Keckley's life from her enslavement in Virginia and North Carolina to her time as seamstress to Mary Todd Lincoln in the White House during Abraham Lincoln's administration. It was quite controversial at the time of its release--an uncompromising work that transgressed Victorian boundaries between public and private life, and lines of race, gender, and society.

The Daughter of Time is a 1951 detective novel by Josephine Tey, concerning a modern police officer's investigation into the alleged crimes of King Richard III of England. It was the last book Tey published in her lifetime, shortly before her death. The "Daughter of Time" title is a quotation from the work of Sir Francis Bacon: "Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority." Alan Grant, Scotland Yard Inspector, is feeling bored while confined to bed in hospital with a broken leg. His actress friend, Marta Hallard, suggests that he should amuse himself by researching a historical mystery. She brings him some pictures of historical characters, aware of Grant's interest in human faces. The portrait of King Richard III intrigues him. He prides himself on being able to read a person's character from his appearance and King Richard seems to him a gentle, kind and wise man. Why is everyone so sure that he was a cruel murderer? With the help of other friends and acquaintances, Grant investigates Richard's life and the case of the Princes in the Tower, testing out his theories on the doctors and nurses who attend to him. Grant spends weeks pondering historical information and documents with the help of Brent Carradine, a likeable young American researcher for the British Museum. Using his detective's logic, he concludes that the claim of Richard being a murderer is a fabrication of Tudor propaganda, as is the popular image of the King as a monstrous hunchback.. Josephine Tey was the adopted pen name of Mackintosh who was born in Inverness to Colin Mackintosh and Josephine in 1896. She attended Inverness Royal Academy and then Anstey Physical Training College in Birmingham. She taught physical training at various schools in England and Scotland, but in 1926, she had to return to Inverness to care for her invalid father and began her career as a writer. Josephine was her mother's first name and Tey was the surname of an English grandmother. Josephine Tey died on February 13, 1952 Mackintosh's best-known books were written under the name of Josephine Tey. Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant is the hero in five of her mystery novels and appears in her sixth novel, The Franchise Affair, as a minor character. In 1990, the British-based Crime Writers' Association selected The Daughter of Time as the greatest mystery novel of all time; The Franchise Affair was 11th on the same list of 100 books. The Daughter of Time was the last of Tey's books published during her lifetime. A further crime novel, The Singing Sands, was found in her papers and published posthumously. About a dozen one-act plays and another dozen full-length plays were written under the name of Gordon Daviot. How she chose the name of Gordon is unknown, but Daviot was the name of a scenic locale near Inverness where she had spent many happy holidays with her family. Only four of her plays were produced during her lifetime. Richard of Bordeaux was particularly successful, running for 14 months and making a household name of its young leading man and director, John Gielgud. (Humorously, Tey writes of Inspector Alan Grant that "he had in his youth seen Richard of Bordeaux; four times he had seen it".Proceeds from Tey's estate, including royalties from her books, were assigned to the National Trust.

Emma Lou was born black. Too black for her own comfort and that of her social-climbing wannabe family. Resented by those closest to her, she runs from her small hometown to Los Angeles and then to Harlem of the 1920's, seeking her identity and an escape from the pressures of the black community. She drifts from one loveless relationship to another in the search for herself and a place in a society where prejudice towards her comes not only from whites, but from her own race!

A new edition of a great, underappreciated classic of our time Beryl Markham's "West with the Night "is a true classic, a book that deserves the same acclaim and readership as the work of her contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and Isak Dinesen. If the first responsibility of a memoirist is to lead a life worth writing about, Markham succeeded beyond all measure. Born Beryl Clutterbuck in the middle of England, she and her father moved to Kenya when she was a girl, and she grew up with a zebra for a pet; horses for friends; baboons, lions, and gazelles for neighbors. She made money by scouting elephants from a tiny plane. And she would spend most of the rest of her life in East Africa as an adventurer, a racehorse trainer, and an aviatrix--she became the first person to fly nonstop from Europe to America, the first woman to fly solo east to west across the Atlantic. Hers was indisputably a life full of adventure and beauty. And then there is the writing. When Hemingway read Markham's book, he wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins: "She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer . . . [She] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers . . . It is really a bloody wonderful book." With a new introduction by Sara Wheeler--one of Markham's few legitimate literary heirs--"West with the Night "should once again take its place as one of the world's great adventure stories.

Foreshadowing his later detailed accounts of the Soviet prison-camp system, Solzhenitsyn's classic portrayal of life in the gulag is all the more powerful for being slighter and more personal than those later monumental volumes. Continuing the tradition of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, especially Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn is fully worthy of them in narrative power and moral authority. His greatest work.