Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Historical Fiction

The brooding, illegitimate son of a duke meets his match in the determined woman hired to transform him into a gentleman.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza, read by Deepti Gupta and Sunil Malhotra. A Place for Us catches an Indian Muslim family as they prepare for their eldest daughter’s wedding. But as Hadia’s marriage - one chosen of love, not tradition - gathers the family back together, there is only one thing on their minds: can Amar, the estranged younger brother of the bride, be trusted to behave himself after three years away?

As Rome's war with Carthage continues, two friends - now on opposing sides - confront each other in one of the most brutal sieges of all time. A new Hannibal novel by the Sunday Times best-selling author of The Forgotten Legion series. 213 BC, Syracuse: Under the merciless Sicilian sun, a city is at war. Outside the walls, a vast Roman army waits. Yet the city’s incredible defences, designed by Archimedes, mean that Syracuse will not be taken easily.

Versailles, 1682: a city of the rich, a living fairy-tale, Louis XIV's fever dream. It's a place of opulence, beauty, and power. But strip back the lavish exterior of polite society, and you'll find a dark undercurrent of sexual intrigue and vicious gossip. Nobody is safe here - no matter how highly born they are. No one knows this better than Madame Marie d'Aulnoy. Each week, a rogue group of intellectuals gather at her Parisian home to debate, flirt and perform Contes de Fées - fairy tales - that challenge the status quo, at a salon that will change the course of literature forever.

The discreet advertisement in The Times, addressed 'To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine', offers a small medieval castle for rent, above a bay on the Italian Riviera. Four very different women - the dishevelled and downtrodden Mrs Wilkins, the sad, sweet-faced Mrs Arbuthnot, the formidable widow Mrs Fisher and the ravishing socialite Lady Caroline Dester - are drawn to the shores of the Mediterranean that April. As each, in turn, blossoms in the warmth of the Italian spring and finds their spirits stirring, quite unexpected changes occur.

I met Reda on Christmas Eve 2012. I was going home after a meal with friends, at around four in the morning. He approached me in the street, and finally I invited him up to my apartment. He told me the story of his childhood and how his father had come to France, having fled Algeria. We spent the rest of the night together, talking, laughing. At around six o'clock, he pulled out a gun and said he was going to kill me. He insulted me, strangled and raped me. The next day, the medical and legal proceedings began.

July, 1943.With North Africa secured, the Allies launch an invasion of Sicily, and the 2nd Battalion, King’s Own Yorkshire Rangers are in the van of the assault on the Italian beaches.But promotion to Company Commander has brought him fresh trouble for Jack Tanner. Not only has his new Battalion Commander decided to make his life as difficult as possible, they soon find themselves battling against some of the toughest, most determined troops in the Wehrmacht.

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison.

The life of a Bomb Girl isn't usually glamourous. But Maggie is getting married, so she is going to make sure her wedding day is - even if she does have to spend every other day slaving on the factory floor. This blasted factory was not what Julia had in mind either. She had always dreamed of attending Oxford University rather than getting her hands dirty, and the easy laughter of the other women intimidates her terribly. But they are all here together in this munitions factory in a Lancashire mill town, sharing firsts, pitching in and getting on. These Bomb Girls are going to do their best at work and in love.

Marianne Clifford, 15, only child of a peppery army colonel and his vain wife, Lal, falls helplessly and absolutely for Simon Hurst, 18, whose cleverness and physical beauty suggest that he will go forward into a successful and monied future, helped on by doting parents. But fate intervenes. Simon's plans are blown off course, and Marianne is forced to bury her dreams of a future together. Narrating her own story, characterising herself as ignorant and unworthy, Marianne's telling use of irony and smart thinking gradually suggest to us that she has underestimated her own worth.

It's 1852 and Margaret Lennox, a young widow, is offered a position as governess at Hartwood Hall. She quickly accepts, hoping this isolated country house will allow her to leave her past behind. Cut off from the village, Margaret soon starts to feel there's something odd about her new home, despite her growing fondness for her bright, affectionate pupil, Louis. There are strange figures in the dark, tensions between servants and an abandoned east wing. Even stranger is the local gossip surrounding Mrs Eversham, Louis's widowed mother, who is deeply distrusted in the village.

The compelling new Second World War novel from Sunday Times Top Ten bestselling author of Some Lucky Day. It is1942, and England is at war. Mary Jones has just celebrated her eighteenth birthday and said good-bye to her childhood sweetheart, Jack, when she learns her house has taken a direct hit during a tip-and-run raid. With both her parents dead and her home destroyed, a distraught Mary moves in with Jack’s parents.

Despite a hero’s return to England from the Napoleonic Wars, Wesley Audley isolates from the ton. Deep wounds from the horrors of combat—and the despair of a broken heart—left him scarred. As he struggles to cope and resume his place in Polite Society, Wesley is quick to cut himself off from everyone…except for Ellie Balfour.

How to Be Both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.

Diana Boyle, a wealthy young widow, has no desire to ever marry again. Particularly not to someone who merely wants her for her fortune. So when she discovers that she’s listed in a directory of rich, single women she is furious, and rightly so. She confronts Maxwell Dean, the man who published the Bachelor’s Directory, and is horrified to find he is far more attractive than his actions have led her to expect. However, Diana is unmoved by Max’s explanation that he authored the list to assist younger sons like himself who cannot afford to marry unless it’s to a woman of means.

February 1941. Julie Harris is working in London’s East End as a midwife when a bombing raid destroys her family and the house she grew up in. All she has left is her motherless baby nephew William. Determined to uphold her promise to her sister to keep William safe until his father, Bill, returns from the war, she accepts a post as a midwife in Cliffehaven on the south-coast of England.

March 1912: Twenty-four-year-old Elspeth Dunn, a published poet and a fisherman’s wife, has never seen the world beyond her home on Scotland’s bucolic Isle of Skye. So she is astonished when a fan letter arrives from an American college student, David Graham. As the two strike up a correspondence - sharing their favourite books, wildest hopes, and deepest secrets - their exchanges blossom into friendship, and eventually into love. But as World War I moves across Europe and David volunteers as an ambulance driver on the Western front, Elspeth can only wait for him on Skye, hoping he comes back alive.

Dispossessed of crown and kingdom, crushed and routed at the grim Battle of Worcester, the young Charles II is forced to flee for his life. Out of the heat of battle, the outlaw king and his tiny party must journey across Cromwell's England to a Channel port and a ship bound for France and safety. But the king, with his love of adventure, his irrepressible humour and his unmistakeable looks, is no easy man to hide.

May 1942: Kitty Pargeter loves the life she’s leading as a talented young pilot, serving her country. But tragedy strikes when she is forced to crash-land and is badly injured. She is taken to a specialist hospital in Cliffehaven, where she must come to terms with the disabling injury that threatens her career. Then comes the shattering news that her beloved brother has been shot down and presumed dead. And she wonders if she’ll be able to find the courage and fortitude to carry on.

A CALLOUS MURDER. A DEVASTATING SECRET. A CRIME OF PASSION.Bishopthorpe Palace, York. September 1373: John Thoresby, the Archbishop of York, lies dying. One of the most powerful men in the country, his imminent demise has the dominant families of the north vying to influence his succession.Owen Archer, Thoresby’s master of the guards, is one of the few men Thoresby trusts