Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Historical Fiction

Ambrose Bierce is a wordsmith who paints with a marvelous portrait with words. This short story with its surprise ending draws you in like a month to the flame. The story itself is entertaining, but with a surprise ending one is drawn to rethinking the story, and re-reading again. The American Civil War where brother fought brother father fought son is well represented in this story. After the Civil War Pierce became a journalist in San Francisco, and was a prolific producer of short stories.

It’s 1753, and troubling news comes to Russell’s Ridge. Susanna Russell longs to escape her valley home. When war breaks out, she gets her wish to study in fabulous Williamsburg. But she realizes she’s lost something important along the way. Something - and someone. James Paxton is studying for the ministry. But when violence threatens the valley, his path becomes clouded. What is God’s will for his life? The answer is alarming - and impossible.

Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel takes place over the course of a single June day in the lives of some very different Londoners: wealthy society hostess Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing for a party; her old friend Peter Walsh, recently returned from India, whose proposal of marriage Clarissa rejected years ago; Septimus Warren Smith, a WWI veteran suffering from shell shock; and his Italian-born wife, Rezia, who is trying to care for him as best she can. Woolf's beautiful prose captures the minds and souls of these vivid characters.

Born on a farm outside Edinburgh in the mid-19th century, Agnes Watt is embraced by family, community, and tradition. Her youthful hopes and dreams are quashed but she falls in love and marries William Miller, a Gordon Highlander. Life spirals into dark places as the couple become ensnared in the nightmare that descended on the Scottish working class during the industrial revolution. The triumphs of the great Victorian era came at an appalling human cost and Agnes fights against disease and grinding poverty.

New York City, 1832. Clarissa Tanner is carefree and lighthearted until the sudden death of her parents. Forced to pay off family debts or lose her horse farm, she’s given one choice: auction off her beloved horses or reluctantly enter 1830s New York Society social season to face the dreaded marriage market. Nicholas is a man on a mission, searching for his missing brother. Fearing Liam may be the victim of foul play, Nicholas needs to keep a low profile while conducting his search.

Isobel MacNeil has grown up a simple village Lass and craves adventure, knowledge, and love. Laird Jamie Murray is looking for a woman who will bring a strong alliance and run his keep. Love is not required. When the two encounter each other in a loch, her bathing and him grievously wounded, sparks fly and passions ignite.

I don't know if Jack London intended for this to be a didactic tale, but it certainly is. When the Yukon experts say don't go out when it's 50 degrees below zero it's best to pay attention. The man, he is never given a name, Sally's forth when it is actually 75 degrees below zero. London takes us into the mind of the man and the dog as the man heads to his doom. Read by award-winning audiobook narrator and producer Mike Vendetti, make sure you are in a warm room when you listen to this tale of the North because at 75 degrees below zero, it is cold.

Time spent in the country was determined the best remedy for the severe case of nerves afflicting Mr. Framton. As he visited with a young lady waiting for the owner of a cottage in the country where he would be staying she shared a story that seemed unbelievable, but convinced him that the matron of the house might have lost her mind. Yet one final event rattled Framton to the core. Did he have all the details needed to react with such fear or was he in the midst of a great storyteller?

This suspenseful novella focuses on the dark secret that haunts the aristocratic Trevlyn family since the untimely death of Sir Richard Trevlyn. His widow keeps the key to the mystery inside a locket, which she never takes off. When a charming stranger with ulterior motives gains access to Lady Trevlyn and her young daughter, will he unlock the family secrets along with their hearts? Fans of Alcott’s Little Women and her heroine Jo March’s racy stories will delight in this Victorian sensation novel.

Alexander MacNichol, the epitome of a hot-blooded Highland warrior, loyal to Scotland, lover of women, and a merry time. The last thing he expected from his King, Robert the Bruce, was an order to marry a whey-faced English lass from the wrong side of the border. Lady Grace Worthington, one moment betrothed to an Englishman she fears and the next, thrust into the arms of a Scottish brute named MacNichol. All the while, battling her own inner demons. Yet, life in the Highlands is not at all what Grace expects.

Cakes and Ale is the novel that William Somerset Maugham said he wished to be remembered for. Published in 1930 and written in the first person singular, Maugham's narrator (and alter-ego) Ashenden exposes the disapproving, moral judgement made by conservative society on the character of Rosie Driffield and opines that it is unjustified.

When Mr. Lepel and his friend Mr. Rothsay return from travels abroad, a half-forgotten play witnessed in Italy lingers uneasily in their memories. A subsequent visit to a quiet country estate draws Mr. Lepel into the lives of those around him, as a young woman at the gate becomes the unknowing centre of rival affections. As illness, friendship, and good intentions begin to intersect, events unfold that will test loyalty and conscience, and lead toward consequences no one has foreseen.

Constance Reid marries Sir Clifford Chatterley, Baronet, who comes home from the Great War grievously injured. He is paralyzed from the waist down and must rely on Constance for all his needs. Constance finds living in mining country formidable and depressing until she meets Sir Clifford's gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. They enter into an affair which makes Constance realize living with the mind alone is only half a life.

The year is 1980. On a former French Plantation east of Chanthaburi, a very exclusive gathering brings together five extraordinary women. Stories were their business, and Gilda was at the top of the heap. There wasn’t a war she hadn’t reported, a scandal she hadn’t uncovered or a bestseller list she hadn’t topped. The Whisky & Ink Ladies Drinking Society numbered only five at any one time, no boys allowed. Its meetings took place every two years. And Claude, daughter of the late Ava Wood, wants in. If things go right, she’ll be initiated into WILDS at the end of the visit.

This gripping thriller takes listeners on an adrenaline-filled journey through the shadowy world of sabotage in 1942 America. Ric Dymond is an inexperienced young FBI agent on a mission to bring a covert and deadly sabotage plot hatched by the German Abwehr to justice. Ric is forced to go undercover and rely on his wits and intuition to uncover the unknown saboteurs, aware that another uncover agent was brutally murdered. But the mission is further complicated when Ric meets an old flame, throwing his resolve and focus into question.

In pursuit of her dream to be a writer, Nora journeys from her family in Canada after she accepts a job as a journalist in Jamaica and then later, the United States. In the autobiography, the young author recounts her early life and writing career. Only seventeen years old and with just ten dollars in her pocket, Nora sets sail for Jamaica west Indies, and when this new career as a newspaper writer takes an unwelcome turn, Nora ends up in Chicago, where she struggles to find a good job and make it as a journalist and storyteller.

Suzanne Morse, a midwife in Watertown, moves to a remote frontier town with her husband and two children in 1666. A hands-on, practical woman who needs people, she bonds with the first two women she meets. The minister's new wife, Abigail Willard, wants to learn Suzanne's trade. At the same time, Dancing Light, a medicine woman across the river, calls her to heal her sister, dying of a white man's disease, with white medicine. In no time, Suzanne becomes known as an effective healer among Groton settlers. However, her friendship with Dancing Light arouses the town's approbation.

Letitia Carberry is not your ordinary spinster aunt. Letitia, Tish to her friends, entangles her friends Aggie and Lizzie into all sorts of adventures and scrapes from solving a murder, car races and camping, and horse trekking. Letitia Carberry is a force to be reckoned with.

It has the beginnings of a romance novel that are now so prevalent. Our heroine goes on a European tour with her papa and brother to take her away from a glorious Irish love object. It is light and amusing. In it, you can see the beginnings of modern Regency romance novels, and the language used is of its age and so very subtle.

Set in a fairy-tale version of medieval Spain, the story follows Ramon Alonzo's initiation to the "Dark Arts" with a magician in order to procure the gold necessary for his sister's dowry. He befriends his master's charwoman, an old, despairing figure who has given up her shadow in exchange for immortal life. Ramon vows to help her while staying true to his initial purpose of helping his sister who, as it turns out, is willing to embrace her shadows in order to choose her own destiny...