Books like Heroes & villains by Angela Carter

A Dominican‑American teenager in New Jersey struggles with weight, family history, and an unbreakable love, while his dream of becoming a writer clashes with a centuries‑old curse that haunts his lineage.

Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel satirically exposes the decadence of 1920s London’s upper‑class socialites, mocking the ‘Bright Young Things’ with razor‑sharp wit.

An undercover reporter follows a celebrity into rehab to uncover juicy gossip about her personal life.

Angela Carter’s Wise Children follows twin vaudeville stars Dora and Nora Chance as they recall a glittering early‑twentieth‑century career and their complex relationship to their illegitimate father, Sir Melchior Hazard, in a lyrical family saga.

In this satirical, erotically charged fantasy, a cityer falls for Doctor Hoffman's glass‑clad daughter while confronting his reality‑warping inventions, cannibals, and surreal creatures across distorted time and space.

From a gladiator to a renegade conquistador to England's greatest warrior-king -- six men who changed the course of history. In the history of warfare, an elite group of men have attained legendary status through their courage, ambition, and unrivaled military genius. But many of these same men possessed deep personal character flaws. In Heroes and Villains acclaimed historian Frank McLynn focuses on six of the most powerful and magnetic leaders of all time: Spartacus, Attila the Hun, Richard the Lionheart, Cortes, Tokugawa Ieyasu and Napoleon. How did these mortal men rise to positions of seemingly invincible power? What were the motives, the personal strength, or more often weaknesses, that drove them to achieve what no one else dared? In six powerful portraits, McLynn brilliantly evokes the critical moments when each of these warriors proved his mettle in battle, changing their own lives, the destiny of their people, and in some cases, the history of the world. We discover what drove Spartacus to take on the might of Rome against seemingly impossible odds, and how the young Napoleon rose to power in dramatic fasion at the Siege of Toulon. Heroes and Villains is more than a collection of individual biographies. By examining the complex psychologies of these extraordinary men, Frank McLynn builds up a convincing profile of the ultimate warrior. - Jacket flap.