Simon Sebag Montefiore has 10 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 11 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 64 ratings. The most-rated is The Romanovs.
The Romanovs
Summary
The Romanovs were the most successful dynasty of modern times, ruling a sixth of the world's surface for three centuries. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world's greatest empire? And how did they lose it all?
This is the intimate story of 20 tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired by holy autocracy and imperial ambition. Simon Sebag Montefiore's gripping chronicle reveals their secret world of unlimited power and ruthless empire building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence, and wild extravagance, with a global cast of adventurers, courtesans, revolutionaries, and poets, from Ivan the Terrible to Tolstoy and Pushkin to Bismarck, Lincoln, Queen Victoria, and Lenin.
To rule Russia was both imperial-sacred mission and poisoned chalice: Six of the last 12 tsars were murdered. Peter the Great tortured his own son to death while making Russia an empire and dominated his court with a dining club notable for compulsory drunkenness, naked dwarfs, and fancy dress. Catherine the Great overthrew her own husband (who was murdered soon afterward), enjoyed affairs with a series of young male favorites, conquered Ukraine, and fascinated Europe. Paul I was strangled by courtiers backed by his own son, Alexander I, who in turn faced Napoleon's invasion and the burning of Moscow, then went on to take Paris. Alexander II liberated the serfs, survived five assassination attempts, and wrote perhaps the most explicit love letters ever composed by a ruler. The Romanovs climaxes with a fresh, unforgettable portrayal of Nicholas II and Alexandra, the rise and murder of Rasputin, war, and revolution - and the harrowing massacre of the entire family.
Dazzlingly entertaining and beautifully written from start to finish, The Romanovs brings these monarchs - male and female, great and flawed, their families and courts - blazingly to life. Drawing on new archival research, Montefiore delivers an enthralling epic of triumph and tragedy, love and murder, encompassing the seminal years 1812, 1914, and 1917, that is both a universal study of power and a portrait of an empire that helps define Russia today.
©2016 Simon Sebag Montefiore (P)2016 Random House Audio
Jerusalem
Summary
Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgement Day and the battlefield of today’s clash of civilizations. From King David to Barack Obama, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of three thousand years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism and coexistence.
How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the “center of the world” and now the key to peace in the Middle East? In a gripping narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city in its many incarnations, bringing every epoch and character blazingly to life. Jerusalem’s biography is told through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the men and women - kings, empresses, prophets, poets, saints, conquerors and whores - who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem. As well as the many ordinary Jerusalemites who have left their mark on the city, its cast varies from Solomon, Saladin and Suleiman the Magnificent to Cleopatra, Caligula and Churchill; from Abraham to Jesus and Muhammad; from the ancient world of Jezebel, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod and Nero to the modern times of the Kaiser, Disraeli, Mark Twain, Lincoln, Rasputin, Lawrence of Arabia and Moshe Dayan.
Drawing on new archives, current scholarship, his own family papers and a lifetime’s study, Montefiore illuminates the essence of sanctity and mysticism, identity and empire in a unique chronicle of the city that many believe will be the setting for the Apocalypse. This is how Jerusalem became Jerusalem, and the only city that exists twice - in heaven and on earth.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2011 Simon Sebag Montefiore (P)2011 Random House Audio
Young Stalin
Summary
Young Stalin tells the story of an exceptional, charismatic, darkly turbulent young man born into obscurity, fancying himself a poet and a priest, and finally embracing revolutionary idealism as his Messianic mission in life. Equal parts scholar and terrorist, a mastermind of bank robberies, extortion, piracy, and murder, he was so impressive in his brutality that Lenin made him, along with Trotsky, his chief henchman.
Here is Stalin the supreme dictator in the making - his psychology, his loves and hatreds, his intellectual interests, his knowledge of the world - learning how to triumph in the Kremlin and create the USSR in his profoundly flawed image.
Based on exhaustive research and astonishing new evidence, Young Stalin is a brilliant prehistory of the USSR from the perspective of those who would bring it into being.
©2007 Simon Sebag Montefiore (P)2007 Blackstone Audio Inc.
Stalin
Summary
Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his crimes - as many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulag - has given him the lasting distinction as a personification of evil in the 20th century. But though the facts of Stalin’s reign are well known, this remarkable biography reveals a Stalin we have never seen before as it illuminates the vast foundation - human, psychological and physical - that supported and encouraged him, the men and women who did his bidding, lived in fear of him and, more often than not, were betrayed by him. In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research, brilliant synthesis and narrative élan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalin’s court from the time of his acclamation as “leader” in 1929, five years after Lenin’s death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of 73. Through the lens of personality - Stalin’s as well as those of his most notorious henchmen, Molotov, Beria and Yezhov among them - the author sheds new light on the oligarchy that attempted to create a new world by exterminating the old. He gives us the details of their quotidian and monstrous lives: Stalin’s favorites in music, movies, literature (Hemingway, The Forsyte Saga and The Last of the Mohicans were at the top of his list), food and history (he took Ivan the Terrible as his role model and swore by Lenin’s dictum “a revolution without firing squads is meaningless”). We see him among his courtiers, his informal but deadly game of power played out at dinners and parties at Black Sea villas and in the apartments of the Kremlin. We see the debauchery, paranoia, and cravenness that ruled the lives of Stalin’s inner court, and we see how the dictator played them one against the other in order to hone the awful efficiency of his killing machine. With stunning attention to detail, Montefiore documents the crimes, small and large, of all the members of Stalin’s court. And he traces the intricate and shifting web of their relationships as the relative warmth of Stalin’s rule in the early 1930s gives way to the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the upheaval of World War II (there has never been as acute an account of Stalin’s meeting at Yalta with Churchill and Roosevelt) and the horrific postwar years when he terrorized his closest associates as unrelentingly as he did the rest of his country. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar gives an unprecedented understanding of Stalin’s dictatorship and, as well, a Stalin as human and complicated as he is brutal. It is a galvanizing portrait: razor-sharp, sensitive, and unforgiving.
©2007 Simon Sebag Montefiore (P)2019 Random House Audio
Red Sky at Noon
Summary
The stunning new novel from the New York Times best-selling author of The Romanovs and Jerusalem, set during an epic cavalry ride across the hot grasslands outside Stalingrad during the darkest times of World War II "The black earth was already baking and the sun was just rising when they mounted their horses and rode across the grasslands towards the horizon on fire...." Imprisoned in the Gulags for a crime he did not commit, Benya Golden joins a penal battalion made up of Cossacks and convicts to fight the Nazis. He enrolls in the Russian cavalry, and on a hot summer day in July 1942, he and his band of brothers are sent on a suicide mission behind enemy lines - but is there a traitor among them? The only thing Benya can truly trust is his horse, Silver Socks, and that he will find no mercy in the onslaught of Hitler's troops as they push east. Spanning 10 epic days, between Benya's war on the grasslands of southern Russia and Stalin's intrigues in the Kremlin, between Benya's intense affair with an Italian nurse and a romance between Stalin's daughter and a war correspondent, this is a sweeping story of passion, bravery, and survival - where betrayal is a constant companion, death just a heartbeat away, and love, however fleeting, offers a glimmer of redemption. A London Times pick of the month.
©2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
One Night in Winter
Summary
The acclaimed novelist and prizewinning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore explores the consequences of forbidden love in this heartbreaking epic, inspired by a true story that unfolds in Stalin's Russia during the bleak days after World War II. A jubilant Moscow is celebrating the Soviet Union's victory over Hitler when gunshots ring out though the city's crowded streets. In the shadow of the Kremlin, a teenage boy and girl are found dead. But this is no ordinary tragedy, because these are no ordinary teenagers. As the children of high-ranking Soviet officials, they inhabit a rarefied world that revolves around the exclusive Josef Stalin Commune School 801. The school, which Stalin's own children attended, is an enclave of privilege - but, as the deaths reveal, one that hides a wealth of secrets. Were these deaths an accident, a suicide pact…or murder? Certain that a deeper conspiracy is afoot, Stalin launches a ruthless investigation. In what comes to be known as the Children's Case, youths from all over Moscow are arrested by state security services and brought to the infamous interrogation rooms of the Lubyanka, where they are forced to testify against their friends and their families. Among the casualties of these betrayals are two pairs of illicit lovers, who find themselves trapped at the center of Stalin's witch hunt. As the Children's Case follows its increasingly terrifying course, these couples discover that the decision to follow one's heart comes at a terrible price. A haunting evocation of a time and place in which the state colluded to corrupt and destroy every dream, One Night in Winter is infused with the desperate intrigue of a political thriller. The eminent historian Simon Sebag Montefiore weaves fact and fiction into a richly compelling saga of sacrifice and survival, populated by real figures from the past. But within the darkness shines a deeply human love story, one that transcends its moment as it masterfully explores our capacity for loyalty and forgiveness.
©2014 Simon Sebag Montefiore (P)2014 HarperCollins Publishers
Catherine the Great and Potemkin
Summary
It was history's most successful political partnership - as sensual and fiery as it was creative and visionary. Catherine the Great was a woman of notorious passion and imperial ambition. Prince Potemkin - wildly flamboyant and sublimely talented - was the love of her life and her co-ruler.
Together they seized Ukraine and Crimea, defining the Russian empire to this day. Their affair was so tumultuous that they negotiated an arrangement to share power, leaving Potemkin free to love his beautiful nieces, and Catherine her young male favourites. But these 'twin souls' never stopped loving each other.
Drawing on their intimate letters and vast research, Simon Sebag Montefiore's enthralling, widely acclaimed biography restores these imperial partners to their rightful place as titans of their age.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio on our desktop site.
©2019 Simon Sebag Montefiore (P)2019 Orion Publishing Group
Debt of Loyalty
Summary
An uncivil war in space sends a planet spinning out of control in the next thrilling Kat Falcone novel by bestselling author Christopher G. Nuttall. The Commonwealth has fractured, its interstellar order breaking down into civil war. On one side is Hadrian, the outlaw king of Tyre, driven from his homeworld and forced into a fragile alliance with the colony worlds; on the other sits a parliament determined to restrain him at all costs. The time for talk is over. The matter can be settled only by war. Loyal to the king, Admiral Kat Falcone leads her fleets into battle, joined by allies with motives of their own. But her friend and former comrade Commodore William McElney has chosen to join the Houses of Parliament. They now find themselves on opposing sides of a civil war, trapped into waging a series of battles that neither wants to fight but that they dare not lose. And as shadows and secrets come to light, they may find themselves watching helplessly as the war tears the universe they fought for apart.
©2020 by Christopher G. Nuttall. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Royal Rabbits of London
Summary
Life is an adventure. Anything in the world is possible - by will and by luck, with a moist carrot, a wet nose, and a slice of mad courage! Shylo has always been the runt of the litter, the weakest and quietest of all of his family. His siblings spend their days making fun of him for not being like the rest of them. But when Shylo stumbles across a band of ratzis and overhears their evil plan to take a photo of the queen in her nightie, it's up to this unlikely hero to travel to London and inform the Royal Rabbits of London about the diabolical plot! The Royal Rabbits of London have a proud history of protecting the royal family, and now the secret society need to leap into action to stop the ratzis.... But can a rabbit as feeble and shy as Shylo convince them the queen is in danger? The Hobbit meets Fantastic Mr. Fox meets Watership Down in this charming novel from best-selling authors Santa and Sebag Montefiore, which proves even the smallest rabbit can be the biggest hero.
©2016 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Santa Montefiore (P)2016 W.F. Howes
The Cock Is the Culprit
Summary
‘The butterfly effect of the crowing of a rooster in the wrong place at the wrong time unleashes chaotic winds of change in a village. In this stunning tale, Unni R. holds up a mirror to Kerala society, with all its foibles and deceptions, and its recently acquired appetite for top-down bigotry. Masterly storytelling laced with wit and humaneness.’ (N.S. Madhavan) In a small village in Kerala, people begin to feel threatened by an invisible rooster that crows at odd hours. It is heard interrupting the morning and night prayers at the temple, the mass at the church, the azaan at the mosque and the martyrs’ day ceremony. When it hoots in the middle of the national anthem being sung at the local school, it is instantly labelled as a threat to national security. It offends the sentiments of all those who are religious, political, patriarchal, exploitative, fanatical and homophobic. Naturally, there are many baying for its blood. The witch-hunt that ensues fuels suspicions that the invisible cock might even be a human; an anarchist who is trying to destabilize the nation with help from outside. Incisive and hilarious by turns, The Cock Is the Culprit does an astute job of exposing the dark underbelly of Kerala society.
©2019 Unni R.; Translation copyright 2020 J. Devika (P)2021 Audible, Inc.