Sally Cabot Gunning has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators. The most-rated is Bound.
Monticello
Summary
From the critically acclaimed author of The Widow's War comes a captivating work of literary historical fiction that explores the tenuous relationship between a brilliant and complex father and his devoted daughter - Thomas Jefferson and Martha Jefferson Randolph. After the death of her beloved mother, Martha Jefferson spent five years abroad with her father, Thomas Jefferson, on his first diplomatic mission to France. Now, at 17, Jefferson's bright, handsome eldest daughter is returning to the lush hills of the family's beloved Virginia plantation, Monticello. While the large, beautiful estate is the same as she remembers, Martha has changed. The young girl who sailed to Europe is now a woman with a heart made heavy by a first love gone wrong. The world around her has also become far more complicated than it once seemed. The doting father she idolized since childhood has begun to pull away. Moving back into political life, he has become distracted by the tumultuous fight for power and troubling new attachments. The home she adores depends on slavery, a practice Martha abhors. But Monticello is burdened by debt, and it cannot survive without the labor of her family's slaves. The exotic distant cousin she is drawn to has a taste for dangerous passions, dark desires that will eventually compromise her own. As her life becomes constrained by the demands of marriage, motherhood, politics, scandal, and her family's increasing impoverishment, Martha yearns to find her way back to the gentle beauty and quiet happiness of the world she once knew at the top of her father's "little mountain".
©2016 Sally Cabot Gunning (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
The Widow's War
Summary
The Red Tent meets The Scarlett Letter in this haunting historical novel set in a colonial New England whaling village. "When was it that the sense of trouble grew to fear, the fear to certainty? When she sat down to another solitary supper of bread and beer and picked cucumber? When she heard the second sounding of the geese? Or had she known that morning when she stepped outside and felt the wind? Might as well say she knew it when Edward took his first whaling trip to the Canada River, or when they married, or when, as a young girl, she stood on the beach and watched Edward bring about his father’s boat in the Point of Rock Channel. Whatever its begetting, when Edward’s cousin Shubael Hopkins and his wife Betsey came through the door, they brought her no new grief, but an old acquaintance.” When Lyddie Berry’s husband is lost in a storm at sea, she finds that her status as a widow is vastly changed from that of respectable married woman. Now she is the “dependent” of her nearest male relative - her son-in-law. Refusing to bow to societal pressure that demands she cede everything that she and her husband worked for, Lyddie becomes an outcast from family, friends, and neighbors - yet ultimately discovers a deeper sense of self and, unexpectedly, love. Evocative and stunningly assured, The Widow’s War is an unforgettable work of literary magic, a spellbinding tale from a gifted talent.
©2009 Sally Cabot Gunning (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
The Rebellion of Jane Clarke
Summary
From the author of The Widow’s War and Bound comes a compelling new novel about a young woman’s struggle to decide where her loyalties lie - with family or with forbidden love; with royalist tradition or upstart independence - on the eve of the Revolutionary War. It’s 1769. The Winslow and Clarke families have been feuding over mill stream rights for generations, but Jane Clarke has managed to stay comfortably aloof, neither doubting her father’s claims nor getting overly involved. But when someone hacks the ears off Mr. Winslow’s horse, everyone in town believes that Mr. Clarke is the culprit, and Jane’s worldview and trust in her father are turned upside down. So when Phineas Pain asks for her hand in marriage after securing her father’s blessing, Jane says no and is sent to Boston as punishment to care for her spinster aunt. But when Jane arrives in Boston, the only thing she can think about is the conflict in her life - father vs. daughter, loyalist vs. rebel, Winslow vs. Clarke - that is now complicated further by her seemingly unbalanced aunt, the kind British soldiers and the local townspeople who taunt them, and her beloved brother who is fervently channeling his own frustrations into rebel activity. As political tensions mount, Jane finds herself deeply embroiled in the impending war and as a witness to the Boston Massacre, and she comes to question the seeming truth.
©2010 Sally Cabot Gunning (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
Bound
Summary
An indentured servant finds herself bound by law, society, and her own heart in this novel set in colonial Cape Cod from the author of acclaimed The Widow’s War. Indentured servant Alice Cole barely remembers when she was not “bound”, first to the Morton family, then to their daughter Nabby - her companion since childhood - when she wed. But Nabby’s new marriage is not happy, and when Alice finds herself torn between her new master and her old friend, she runs away to Boston. There she meets a sympathetic widow named Lyddie Berry and her lawyer companion, Eben Freeman. Impulsively stowing away on their ship to Satucket on Cape Cod, Alice finds employment making cloth with Lyddie. Yet as Alice soon discovers, freedom - as well as gratitude, friendship, and trust - has a price far higher than she ever imagined.
©2009 Sally Cabot Gunning (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers