Mary Sharratt has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is Illuminations.
Daughters of the Witching Hill
Summary
In Daughters of the Witching Hill, Mary Sharratt brings history to life in a vivid and wrenching novel of strong women, family and betrayal inspired by the 1612 Pendle witch trials.Bess Southerns, an impoverished widow, lives with her children in a crumbling old tower in Pendle Forest. Drawing on Catholic ritual, medicinal herbs, and guidance from her spirit-friend Tibb, Bess heals the sick and foretells the future in exchange for food and drink. As she ages, she instructs her best friend, Anne, and her granddaughter, Alizon, in her craft. Anne ultimately turns to dark magic, while Alizon struggles to accept the power she has inherited and dreams of a simpler life. But when a peddler suffers a stroke after exchanging harsh words with Alizon, a local magistrate tricks her into accusing her family and neighbors of witchcraft. Suspicion and paranoia reach frenzied heights as friends and loved ones turn on one another and the novel draws to an inevitable conclusion.
©2010 Mary Sharratt (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
Illuminations
Summary
Audie Award Finalist, Inspirational/Faith-Based Fiction, 2014 Skillfully interweaving historical fact with psychological insight and vivid imagination, Sharratt's redemptive novel, Illuminations, brings to life one of the most extraordinary women of the Middle Ages: Hildegard von Bingen, Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath. Offered to the Church at the age of eight, Hildegard was entombed in a small room where she was expected to live out her days in silent submission as the handmaiden of a renowned but disturbed young nun, Jutta von Sponheim. Instead, Hildegard rejected Jutta's masochistic piety and found comfort and grace in studying books, growing herbs, and rejoicing in her own secret visions of the divine. When Jutta died some thirty years later, Hildegard broke out of her prison with the heavenly calling to speak and write about her visions and to liberate her sisters and herself from the soul-destroying anchorage. Riveting and utterly unforgettable, Illuminations is a deeply moving portrayal of a woman willing to risk everything for what she believed.
©2012 Mary Sharratt (P)2012 Tantor
Vanishing Point
Summary
In the tradition of Philippa Gregory's smart, transporting fiction comes this tale of dark suspense, love, and betrayal, featuring two star-crossed sisters, one lost and the other searching. Bright and inquisitive, Hannah Powers was raised by a father who treated her as if she were his son. While her beautiful and reckless sister, May, pushes the limits of propriety in their small English town, Hannah harbors her own secret: their father has given her an education forbidden to women. But Hannah's secret serves her well when she journeys to colonial Maryland to reunite with May, who has been married off to a distant cousin after her sexual misadventures ruined her marriage prospects in England.As Hannah searches for May, who has disappeared, she finds herself falling in love with her brother-in-law. Alone in a wild, uncultivated land where the old rules no longer apply, Hannah is freed from the constraints of the society that judged both her and May as dangerous - too smart, too fearless, and too hungry for life. But Hannah is also plagued by doubt, as her quest for answers to May's fate grows ever more disturbing and tangled.
©2006 Mary Sharratt (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
Ecstasy
Summary
Gustav Klimt gave Alma her first kiss. Gustav Mahler fell in love with her at first sight and proposed only a few weeks later. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius abandoned all reason to pursue her. Poet and novelist Franz Werfel described her as one of the very few magical women that exist. But who was this woman who brought these eminent men to their knees? In Ecstasy, Mary Sharratt answers that question. Coming of age in the midst of a creative and cultural whirlwind, Alma Schindler yearned to make her mark as a composer. A brand-new era of possibility for women was dawning, and she was determined to make the most of it. But when Alma lost her heart to the great composer Gustav Mahler, he demanded that she give up music. Torn by her love and in awe of his genius, she had to discover how to remain true to herself and her artistic passion. Part cautionary tale and part triumph of the feminist spirit, Ecstasy reveals the true Alma Mahler: composer, author, daughter, sister, mother, wife, lover, and muse.
©2018 Mary Sharratt (P)2018 Dreamscape Media, LLC
The Dark Lady's Mask
Summary
Aemilia Bassano Lanier is beautiful and accomplished, but her societal conformity ends there. She frequently cross-dresses to escape her loveless marriage and gain freedoms only men enjoy, but a chance encounter with a ragged, little-known poet named Shakespeare changes everything. They leave plague-ridden London for Italy, where they begin secretly writing comedies. Their Italian idyll, though, cannot last, and their collaborative affair comes to a devastating end.
Will gains fame and fortune for their plays back in London and, years later, publishes the sonnets mocking his former muse. Not one to stand by in humiliation, Aemilia takes up her own pen in her defense and in defense of all women.
The Dark Lady's Mask gives voice to a real Renaissance woman.
©2016 Mary Sharratt (P)2016 Dreamscape Media, LLC