The Historical Fiction category has 5,886 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 31,971 ratings. The most-rated is The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
The Guest Book
Summary
2019 Amazon.com Best Books of the Year "Orlagh Cassidy narrates Blake's beautifully written multigenerational story of love and lies with consummate skill. Elegant and clear, distant yet passionate, she helps listeners discover the quirks in characters' personalities and explore their motives, both evident and hidden." —AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner This program includes a bonus conversation with the author. “Sarah Blake is such a beautiful writer she can make any world shimmer." (Paula McLain, New York Times best-selling author of The Paris Wife and Love and Ruin) The thought-provoking new audiobook by New York Times best-selling author Sarah Blake A lifetime of secrets. A history untold. No. It is a simple word, uttered on a summer porch in 1936. And it will haunt Kitty Milton for the rest of her life. Kitty and her husband, Ogden, are both from families considered the backbone of the country. But this refusal will come to be Kitty’s defining moment, and its consequences will ripple through the Milton family for generations. For while they summer on their island in Maine, anchored as they are to the way things have always been, the winds of change are beginning to stir. In 1959 New York City, two strangers enter the Miltons’ circle. One captures the attention of Kitty’s daughter while the other makes each of them question what the family stands for. This new generation insists the times are changing. And in one night, everything does. So much so that in the present day, the third generation of Miltons doesn’t have enough money to keep the island in Maine. Evie Milton’s mother has just died, and as Evie digs into her mother’s and grandparents’ history, what she finds is a story as unsettling as it is inescapable, the story that threatens the foundation of the Milton family myth. Moving through three generations and back and forth in time, The Guest Book asks how we remember and what we choose to forget. It shows the untold secrets we inherit and pass on, unknowingly echoing our parents and grandparents. Sarah Blake’s triumphant novel tells the story of a family and a country that buries its past in quiet, until the present calls forth a reckoning.
©2019 Sarah Blake (P)2019 Macmillan Audio
My Mother's Secret
Summary
Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are simple, ordinary people until 1939, when the Nazis invade their homeland. Providing shelter to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland is a death sentence, but Franciszka and Helena do exactly that. In their tiny home in Sokal, they hide a Jewish family in a loft above their pigsty, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen, and a defecting German soldier in the attic - each party completely unknown to the others. For everyone to survive, Franciszka will have to outsmart her neighbors and the German commander. Told simply and succinctly from four different perspectives, My Mother's Secret is a testament to the kindness, courage, and generosity of ordinary people who chose to be extraordinary.
©2013 J. L. Witterick (P)2015 Tantor
The Greatest Knight
Summary
From humble beginnings and a narrow escape from death in childhood, William Marshall steadily rises through the ranks to become tutor in arms to the son of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Based on fact, this is the story of William Marshal, the greatest knight of the Middle Ages, unsurpassed in the tourneys, adeptly manoeuvring through the colourful, dangerous world of power and politics to become one of the most powerful magnates of the realm and eventually Regent of England.
©2006 Elizabeth Chadwick (P)2006 Soundings
The Silver Eagle
Summary
The Forgotten Legion fought against almighty odds at the very edge of the known world - and lost. Now Brennus the Gaul, Tarquinius the Etruscan soothsayer and Romulus, bastard son of a Roman nobleman, are prisoners of Parthia. They dream of escape, but in the brutal fighting which lies ahead, only two will survive. Meanwhile, Fabiola, Romulus's twin sister, is caught up in the vicious eddies of Roman politics. Hunted by slave catchers she flees, hoping to find her lover, Brutus, bound for Alexandria with Caesar. Ben Kane's brilliant second novel plunges his characters into a cauldron of war and terror, as Caesar and the Roman Republic hurtle towards their day of reckoning.
©2009 Ben Kane (P)2011 Random House AudioGO
The Covenant
Summary
James A. Michener's masterly chronicle of South Africa is an epic tale of adventurers, scoundrels, and ministers, the best and worst of two continents, who carve an empire out of a vast wilderness. From the Java-born Van Doorn family tree springs two great branches: one nurtures lush vineyards, the other settles the interior to become the first Trekboers and Afrikaners. The Nxumalos, inhabitants of a peaceful village unchanged for centuries, unite warrior tribes into the powerful Zulu nation. And the wealthy Saltwoods are missionaries and settlers who join the masses to influence the wars and politics that ravage a nation. Rivalries and passions spill across the land of The Covenant, a story of courage and heroism, love and loyalty, and cruelty and betrayal, as generations fight to forge a new world.
©1980 James A. Michener (P)2015 Random House Audio
Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle
Summary
Manda Scott's Boudica will tell the extraordinary, resounding story of Britain's first and greatest warrior queen, the woman who remains one of the great female icons. In AD 60, Boudica, war leader of the Eceni, led her people in a final bloody revolt against the occupying armies of Rome. It was the culmination of nearly 20 years of resistance against an occupying force that sought to crush a vibrant, complex civilisation and replace it with the laws, taxes and slavery of the Roman Empire. Gloriously imagined, Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle re-creates the beginnings of a story so powerful its impact has survived through the ages, recounting the coming of age of Breaca, who at 12 kills her first warrior. This is the unforgettable world of tribal Britain in the years before the Romans came: a twilight world of Dreamers and the magic of the gods; a world where warriors fight for honour as much as victory. It is a world of passion and courage and spectacular, heart-felt heroism pitched against overwhelming odds.
©2003 Manda Scott (P)2020 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
The Winter Soldier
Summary
A sweeping, unforgettable love story of a young doctor and nurse at a remote field hospital in the First World War. Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a 22-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives - at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains - he discovers a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled, and only a single mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains. But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever. From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front; from hardscrabble operating rooms to battlefields thundering with Cossack cavalry, The Winter Soldier is a story of war and medicine, of family, of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and finally, of the mistakes we make and the precious opportunities to atone.
©2018 Daniel Mason (P)2018 Hachette Audio
The Road to Rome
Summary
The third novel in The Forgotten Legion trilogy takes the main protagonists from North Africa back to Rome in the build-up to the assassination of Julius Caesar. Having survived the perils of a journey across half the world, Romulus and Tarquinius are press-ganged into the legions, which are under imminent threat of annihilation by the Egyptians. Meanwhile in Rome, Romulus's twin sister Fabiola lives in fear for her life, loved by Brutus, but wooed by Marcus Antonius, his deadly enemy. Soon after, Romulus fights at Zela, the vicious battle where Caesar famously said, 'Veni, vidi, vici'. Tarquinius, separated from Romulus in the chaos of war, hides in Alexandria, searching for guidance. But mortal danger awaits them both. From the battlefields of Asia Minor and North Africa, to the lawless streets of Rome and the gladiator arena, they face death daily, until on the Ides of March, the twins are reunited and must decide either to back or to betray Caesar on his day of destiny.
©2010 Ben Kane (P)2011 Random House AudioGo LTD
Warlock
Summary
One of the world's most acclaimed adventure writers returns to the world of ancient Egypt with the stunning sequel to the
New York Times best-selling
River God.
After the death of his beloved Queen Lostris, Taita retreats into the forbidding deserts of North Africa to become a hermit. He devotes himself to the study of the occult and, armed with extraordinary powers, he gradually transforms himself into a warlock. After years of study, he discovers the divine purpose of his bereavement when he is called upon to save the dynasty of Lostris from the clouds of evil that loom over Egypt.
Exploding with all the drama, mystery, and passion of a bygone time, Warlock is a masterpiece from a storyteller at the height of his powers.
©2008 Wilbur Smith (P)2004 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Summary
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction, 2008 Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku: the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim. Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience – and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time. Also includes the bestselling short story collection Drown.
©2007 Junot Diaz (P)2007 Penguin Audio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. and Books on Tape
The Phantom Tree
Summary
Browsing an antiques shop in Wiltshire, Alison Bannister stumbles across a delicate old portrait - identified as the doomed Tudor queen Anne Boleyn. Except Alison knows better. The subject is Mary Seymour, the daughter of Katherine Parr, who was taken to Wolf Hall in 1557 and presumed dead after going missing as a child. And Alison knows this because she, too, lived at Wolf Hall and knew Mary...more than 400 years ago. The painting of Mary is more than just a beautiful object for Alison - it holds the key to her past life, the unlocking of the mystery surrounding Mary’s disappearance and how Alison can get back to her own time. To when she and Mary were childhood enemies yet shared a pact that now, finally, must be fulfilled, no matter the cost. Best-selling author of House of Shadows, Nicola Cornick offers a provocative alternate history of rivals, secrets, and danger, set in a time when a woman’s destiny was determined by the politics of men and luck of birth. A spellbinding tale for fans of Kate Morton, Philippa Gregory, and Barbara Erskine.
©2018 Nicola Cornick (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers, Limited
Away
Summary
A stunning, evocative novel set in Ireland and Canada, Away traces a family’s complex and layered past. The narrative unfolds with shimmering clarity and takes us from the harsh northern Irish coast in the 1840s to the quarantine stations at Grosse Isle and the barely hospitable land of the Canadian Shield; from the flourishing town of Port Hope to the flooded streets of Montreal; from Ottawa at the time of Confederation to a large-windowed house at the edge of a Great Lake during the present day. Graceful and moving, Away unites the personal and the political as it explores the most private, often darkest corners of our emotions where the things that root us to ourselves endure. Powerful, intricate, lyrical, Away is an unforgettable novel.
©1993 Jane Urquhart (P)2018 Audible, Inc.
Temptation's Darling
Summary
Number one New York Times best-selling author Johanna Lindsey blends passion and humor in a dazzling, Regency-era novel in which a disastrous debutante becomes the toast of the town with a little help from a friend of the Prince Regent's. Threatened by powerful enemies, William Blackburn, Earl of Ketterham, lives in exile in the Scottish Highlands with his daughter Vanessa. When she comes of age, William urges her to return to her mother in England to make her debut. Raised with all the advantages and freedom a boy would have, Vanessa doubts she can fit into the mold of a proper young lady. Still, she agrees to re-enter fashionable society, determined to end the vendetta against her father, never imagining the high price she will have to pay. Lord Montgomery Townsend enjoys living on the edge, courting danger as he fixes potentially scandalous problems for the Prince Regent. While hiding out at the home of the Countess of Ketterham, Monty watches a disaster-in-the-making as his hostess tries to prepare her estranged daughter for a match with the pompous son of a powerful family. Puzzled as to why independent-minded Vanessa submits to being turned into a puppet and wants to marry the arrogant rogue, Monty nonetheless steps in to make her dreams come true. But no good deed goes unpunished and soon he faces more pressing problems, including the temptation to upend Vanessa's wedding plans so he can marry her himself!
©2019 Johanna Lindsey (P)2019 Recorded Books
After the War Is Over
Summary
The internationally best-selling author of Somewhere in France returns with her sweeping second novel - a tale of class, love, and freedom - in which a young woman must find her place in a world forever changed. After four years as a military nurse, Charlotte Brown is ready to leave behind the devastation of the Great War. The daughter of a vicar, she has always been determined to dedicate her life to helping others. Moving to busy Liverpool, she throws herself into her work with those most in need, only tearing herself away for the lively dinners she enjoys with the women at her boardinghouse. Just as Charlotte begins to settle into her new circumstances, two messages arrive that will change her life. One is from a radical young newspaper editor who offers her a chance to speak out for those who cannot. The other pulls her back to her past, and to a man she has tried, and failed, to forget. Edward Neville-Ashford, her former employer and the brother of Charlotte's dearest friend, is now the new Earl of Cumberland - and a shadow of the man he once was. Yet under his battle wounds and haunted eyes Charlotte sees glimpses of the charming boy who long ago claimed her foolish heart. She wants to help him, but dare she risk her future for a man who can never be hers? As Britain seethes with unrest and postwar euphoria fattens into bitter disappointment, Charlotte must confront long-held insecurities to find her true voice... and the courage to decide if the life she has created is the one she truly wants.
©2015 Jennifer Robson (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence
Summary
The film Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on this true account of Doris Pilkington's mother, Molly, who as a young girl led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1,600 kilometre walk home. Under Western Australia's invidious removal policy of the 1930s, the girls were taken from their Aboriginal families at Jigalong on the edge of the Little Sandy Desert, and transported halfway across the state to the Native Settlement at Moore River, north of Perth. Here Aboriginal children were instructed in the ways of white society and forbidden to speak their native tongue. The three girls - aged 8, 11, and 14 - managed to escape from the settlement's repressive conditions and brutal treatment. Barefoot, without provisions or maps, they set out to find the rabbit-proof fence, knowing it passed near their home in the north. Tracked by Native Police and search planes, they hid in terror, surviving on bush tucker, desperate to return to the world they knew.
©1996 Doris Pilkington-Nugi Garimara (P)2002 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
The Old Drift
Summary
"A dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage." (Salman Rushdie, The New York Times Book Review) Named one of the Best Books of the Year by: Dwight Garner, The New York Times The New York Times Book Review Time NPR The Atlantic BuzzFeed Tordotcom Kirkus Reviews BookPage Winner of: The Arthur C. Clarke Award The Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction The Windham-Campbell Prizes for Fiction The year 1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (Black, White, Brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. As the generations pass, their lives - their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes - emerge through a panorama of history, fairy tale, romance, and science fiction. From a woman covered with hair and another plagued with endless tears, to forbidden love affairs and fiery political ones, to homegrown technological marvels like Afronauts, microdrones, and viral vaccines, this gripping, unforgettable novel is a testament to our yearning to create and cross borders, and a meditation on the slow, grand passage of time. Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize "An intimate, brainy, gleaming epic.... This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade." (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) "A founding epic in the vein of Virgil’s Aeneid...though in its sprawling size, its flavor of picaresque comedy and its fusion of family lore with national politics it more resembles Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children." (The Wall Street Journal) "A story that intertwines strangers into families, which we'll follow for a century, magic into everyday moments, and the story of a nation, Zambia." (NPR)
©2019 Namwali Serpell (P)2019 Random House Audio
The Source
Summary
In the grand storytelling style that is his signature, James Michener sweeps us back through time to the very beginnings of the Jewish faith, thousands of years ago. Through the predecessors of four modern men and women, we experience the entire colorful history of the Jews, including the life of the early Hebrews and their persecutions, the impact of Christianity, the Crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition, all the way to the founding of present-day Israel and the Middle East conflict.
©2013 James A. Michener; 2015 Random House Audio
Euphoria
Summary
From New England Book Award winner Lily King comes a breathtaking novel about three young anthropologists of the '30s caught in a passionate love triangle that threatens their bonds, their careers, and ultimately, their lives. English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband, Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell's poor health, are hungry for a new discovery. When Bankson finds them a new tribe nearby - the artistic, female-dominated Tam - he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone's control. Set between two World Wars and inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is an enthralling story of passion, possession, exploration, and sacrifice fromaccomplished author Lily King.
©2014 Lily King (P)2014 Blackstone Audiobooks
The Heart Mender
Summary
Can natural enemies make peace? Actually…can they fall in love? The Heart Mender is a story of life, loss, and reconciliation, reminding us of the power of forgiveness and the universal healing experience of letting go. In his classic storytelling style, New York Times best-selling author Andy Andrews delivers an adventure set sharply against the warm waters and white sands of the Gulf of Mexico in WWII America. Saddened and unable to abandon her resentment toward the Nazi war machine that took her husband’s life, the young and attractive Helen Mason is living a bitter, lonely existence. Betrayed and left for dead, German U-boat officer Lt. Josef Landermann washes ashore in a sleepy town along the northern gulf coast, looking to Helen for survival. Released in a previous edition as Island of Saints
©2010 Thomas Nelson, Inc. (P)2010 Thomas Nelson, Inc.
Sidroc the Dane: A Circle of Ceridwen Saga Story
Summary
How the boy became a Viking. How the man became a legend. A discarded child fated to become a powerful Jarl - here is the story of Sidroc. Fate guides the path of his father, Hrald, to his meeting with the woman whose son would help change the face of ninth-century Angle-land. An ever-growing rivalry between Sidroc and his cousin Toki defines the boys' early years. Their young uncle, Yrling, knows success as a raider in far-off Angle-land, and trains his nephews in the ways of the warrior. Ahead of them is the perilous crossing of the North Sea, which stands between them and the plunder they seek. Once on the great island of Angle-land, hard fighting awaits, through which Sidroc rises to second in command in the war-band headed by Yrling. Then, at their captured Saxon stronghold, comes the young woman for whom Sidroc will one day change his life... Dovetailing into Book One, Sidroc the Dane is a new stand-alone entry point into the world of The Circle of Ceridwen of Saga, a book to be savoured at any point on the journey. Enter the Circle here. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2018 Octavia Randolph (P)2018 Octavia Randolph