Faced with a future of strict ceremony and royal duties, Empress Elisabeth of Austria rebels against her public image and comes up with a plan to protect her legacy.

Illicit love, madness, betrayal-- it isn't always good to be the queen.

A young and powerful empress in China is threatened by her cousin, a man who wants the throne to himself, and when she is saved by a mysterious stranger she must choose between duty to her country or her own dreams.

The story of Catherine the Great, a young girl who would transform herself from an obscure German Princess into Russia's most powerful regent. Includes dramatizations.

Empress Catherine II brought Europe to Russia, and Russia to Europe, during her long and eventful reign (1762-1796). She fostered the Enlightenment and greatly expanded the empire created by Tsar Ivan the Terrible, shifting the balance of power in Europe eastward. Famous for her will to power and for her dozen lovers, Catherine was also a prolific and gifted writer. She published political theory, journalism, comedies, operas, and history, while writing...

Raised in the Dusklands where her power to create illusions was regarded as a curse, Sylvie has traveled to Coeur d'Or, where the Amber Empress, the cruel Severine, rules in hopes of finding her legacy--but the court is full of dark secrets and deadly intrigues, and Sylvie, now renamed Mirage, must learn to hone her magic, and find her way past the enmity of the empress to claim the place that is hers by right of birth.

"The setting is China's Forbidden City in the last days of its imperial glory, a vast complex of palaces and gardens run by thousands of eunuchs and encircled by a wall in the center of Peking. In this highly ordered place - tradition-bound, ruled by strict etiquette, rife with political and erotic tension - the Emperor, "the Son of Heaven," performs two duties: he must rule the court and conceive an heir. To achieve the latter, tradition provides...

A biography of the German princess who became the absolute ruler of the Russian empire and won for herself the reputation of being a great enlightened monarch.