Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Historical Fiction

For a thousand years, Concordia has been able to maintain peace between its provinces, protected by a wall known as the Bandage. To mark this incredible feat, the emperor's ship embarks upon a twelve-day voyage to the Goddess's mountain. Aboard are the heirs of the twelve provinces of Concordia, each graced with a unique and secret magical ability known as a Blessing. Except one: Ganymedes Piscero - class clown, slacker, and all-round disappointment. When a beloved heir is murdered, everyone is a suspect.

How do you find something that doesn't exist? It all begins with an egg. With a hungry child who risks her life for an omelette for tea - and finds a miracle. With thieves committing crimes against nature on the wild cliffs of Yorkshire. With a marvel that becomes a mystery...and then a myth. And 100 years later it begins again. With a strange robbery at a remote Welsh cottage. With two friends thrust from their gaming chairs into a real-life quest. And with dangerous men who will stop at nothing to get what they want. It all begins with an egg. But where will it end?

Romulus and Fabiola are twins, born into slavery after their mother is raped by a drunken nobleman on his way home from a good night out. At 13 years old, they and their mother are sold: Romulus to gladiator school, Fabiola into prostitution, where she will catch the eye of one of the most powerful men in Rome, and their mother into obscurity and death in the salt mines. Tarquinius is an Etruscan, a warrior and soothsayer, born enemy of Rome, but doomed to fight for the Republic in the Forgotten Legion.

Detective Isaac Bell's wife has said that he is always in the wrong place at the right time. This is certainly the case when Bell thwarts the attempted assassination of a United States senator shortly after meeting the man. This heroic rescue is just the start of the mystery for Bell, who suspects that the would-be assassins have a much larger and more dangerous agenda - one involving the nearly constructed Panama Canal. While the senator supports the building of the canal, there are many who never want to see the its completion.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Love Is Blind by William Boyd. Love Is Blind is William Boyd's sweeping, heart-stopping new novel. Set at the end of the 19th century, it follows the fortunes of Brodie Moncur, a young Scottish musician, about to embark on the story of his life. When Brodie is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist irrevocably changes his future - and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum.

When Jezebel learns she can't be a king like her father simply because she’s a girl, she vows never to become someone’s decorative wife, nameless and lost to history. At fifteen she’s married off, despite her protests, to Prince Ahab of Israel. There, she does what she must to gain power and remake the dry and distant kingdom in the image of her beloved, prosperous seaside homeland of Tyre, beginning by building temples to the gods she grew up worshipping. As her initiatives usher in an era of prosperity for Israel, her new subjects love her, and her name rings through the land.

It's been fifteen years since Belinda was convicted of her husband's murder. Now, she's ready for her life to begin again, and she's set on that happening at Sunnyside Home for the Young at Heart. The owner, Mabel, has spent her life here. First as an evacuee during the Blitz and now as the care home's oldest resident, Mabel has held the secrets of this house for as long as she can remember. Secrets that could kill if in the wrong hands. But history won't stay hidden forever and someone is onto them both.

Notting Hill, London. Lou Parker's famous mother walks out of their pink front door and doesn't return home by midnight, or the midnight after... Looking after her little brother, trying to piece together where their mother might be, Lou ventures into a different world - far from the fancy terraces - filled with ramshackle antique shops, shadowy figures. A place where time seems to have stopped. And Lou must protect her brother. At all costs. Twenty-one years - 7665 midnights - later. The new owner of a Notting Hill house starts excavating a basement, oblivious to what might lie beneath.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Wars of the Roses: Bloodline, the third instalment in Conn Iggulden's thrilling Wars of the Roses trilogy. Winter 1461 - Richard Duke of York is dead, his ambitions in ruins, his head spiked on the walls of York city. King Henry VI is still held prisoner. His Lancastrian queen rides south with an army of northerners, accompanied by warriors from the Scottish Highlands. Margaret and her army seem unstoppable.

The Aylward women of Nenagh, Tipperary, are mad about each other, but you wouldn't always think it. You'd have to know them to know—in spite of what the neighbours might say about raised voices and dramatic scenes—that their house is a place of peace, filled with love, a refuge from the sadness and cruelty of the world. Their story begins at an end and ends at a beginning. It involves wives and widows, gunrunners and gougers, sinners and saints. It's a story of terrible betrayals and fierce loyalties, of isolation and togetherness, of transgression, forgiveness, desire and love.

Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza's impassioned advances and married Dr Juvenal Urbino instead. During that half-century, Flornetino has fallen into the arms of many delighted women, but has loved none but Fermina. When Fermina's husband is killed trying to retrieve his pet parrot from a mango tree, Florentino seizes his chance to declare his enduring love. But can young love find new life in the twilight of their lives?

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Unicorn Hunt, by Dorothy Dunnett, read by John Banks. The fifth title in the House of Niccolo sequence, recreating the perilous world of trade, war and banking in Renaissance Europe. Niccolo has returned to Venice from Africa - richer, wiser yet ever unpredictable. He journeys to Scotland, closer at hand to the secrets of his birth.

In AD 533, the last King of the Vandals still rules in northern Africa - but a prophecy reveals that his reign is doomed. Years before, sacred scrolls had been stolen from a high priestess, who cast a curse on the kingdom unless they were returned. The Vandal kingdom falls before the scrolls are ever found - leaving their location a mystery - and their discovery is the perfect challenge for Sam and Remi Fargo. However, before they can hunt for the scrolls, the Fargos must tend to problems within their charitable foundation.

Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days.

1940. In a world newly burning with war, and in spite of her American family’s wishes, Virginia d’Albert-Lake decides to stay in occupied France with her French husband. She’s sure that if they keep their heads down, they’ll survive. But is surviving enough? Nineteen-year-old Violette Szabo has seen the Nazis’ evil up close and is desperate to fight them. But when she meets the man who’ll change her life only for tragedy to strike, Violette’s adrift.

Five long years have passed since the annihilation of three Roman legions in the wilds of Germania. Varus, the general who led the ill-fated army, is long dead, and the bones of his 15,000 legionaries moulder in the forests. But not all the Romans were slain in the ambush. Centurion Tullus, a seasoned veteran, survived, and now he lives for revenge upon the tribal chieftain Arminius, who masterminded the ambush. Tullus will stop at nothing to kill his bitterest enemy or to recover his legion's lost Eagle.

The mighty slave army, led by Spartacus, has carried all before it, scattering the legions of Rome. Three praetors, two consuls and one proconsul have been defeated. Spartacus seems invincible as he marches towards the Alps and freedom. But storm clouds are massing on the horizon. Crixus the Gaul defects, taking all his men with him. Crassus, the richest man in Rome, begins to raise a formidable army, tasked specifically with the defeat of Spartacus

The fabulously wealthy kingdom of Sambalpore: home to tigers, elephants, diamond mines and the beautiful Palace of the Sun. When the heir to the throne of Sambalpore is assassinated in Calcutta in the presence of Captain Sam Wyndham and his colleague 'Surrender-Not' Banerjee, Wyndham works to uncover the reasons behind Prince Punit's death, despite the opposition of his commanding officers. Travelling to Sambalpore, he discovers a kingdom riven with suppressed conflict.

Years have passed since the clash of shieldwalls echoed across the land. The Saxons are now the lords of Britain. And yet the bards still sing of Arthur - 'In our darkest time, when we need him most, shall he come again.' Yet old Beran has no love of bards' songs. Nor of people, unless they are paying him to steal or kill. He is a mercenary, in the employ of the cutthroat Nabor ap Nabor, and he has been ordered to murder a boy fleeing a burning city. No ordinary boy either. No, this boy is the son of King Constantine and the grandson of High King Ambrosius.

Fighting in Sweden for an ambitious warlord, Sigurd Haraldarson and his small but loyal band of oath-sworn warriors are winning fame and reputation. But Sigurd knows that to take on his hated enemy, the oath breaker King Gorm - the man who betrayed his father, a man Sigurd has vowed to kill - he must earn riches enough to build an army. Many believe Sigurd to be Óðin-favoured, but his exploits have drawn the eye of another god, too: Loki the Trickster.