Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Historical Fiction

Alexias, a young Athenian of good family, grows up just as the Peloponnesian War is drawing to a close. The adult world he enters is one in which the power and influence of his class have been undermined by the forces of war, and more and more Alexias finds himself drawn to the controversial teachings of Sokrates.

After her husband becomes violent, Frederica Potter flees with her young son to London. There, she secures a teaching position in an art school and finds herself surrounded by painters and poets with dreams of rebellion. Then Frederica meets Jude Mason, the strange and charismatic author of a wildly controversial novel. When her husband files for divorce and Jude becomes the target of a high-profile court case, Frederica’s life threatens to spiral out of control.

The Duke of Malmesbury’s daughters discover that passion can derail even the best-laid matrimonial plans. Lady Cecily is known as the “Ice Princess” because of her cool blond beauty and her refusal to wed any of her several eligible suitors. She has no choice but to obey her father, the Duke, who wants Cecily to marry the one man who can assure the family’s social and financial positions: The arrogant and infuriating Viscount Ravenwood, who has been her enemy since childhood.

October 1772, Portsmouth. Sixteen-year-old Richard Bolitho waits to join the Gorgon, ordered to sail to the west coast of Africa and to destroy those who challenge the King's Navy. For Bolitho, and for many of the crew, it is a severe and testing initiation into the game of seamanship.

After the War of the Gods, the demons were cast out and fell to the world. Mankind was nearly eradicated by the seemingly unstoppable beasts until the gods sent the great hero, Ramrowan, to save them. He united the tribes, gave them magic, and drove the demons into the sea. Ever since, the land has belonged to man, and the oceans have remained an uncrossable hell, leaving the continent of Lok isolated.

Jack Aubrey returns from his duties protecting whalers off South America and is persuaded by a casual acquaintance to make investments in the City on the strength of supposedly certain information. This innocent decision ensnares him in the London criminal underground and in government espionage - the province of his friend Stephen Maturin. Is Aubrey's humiliation and the threatened ruin of his career a deliberate plot?

Two years have passed since the emperor's loyal Praetorian guardsman Gnaeus Marcius Rustius Rufinus foiled Lucilla's great assassination plot. Plagued by the ghosts of his past, Rufinus has enacted his own form of justice upon the Praetorian cavalrymen who murdered the imperial agent Dis two years earlier. But the Fates will not let Rufinus rest. Rome is beginning to seethe with rumour and conspiracy as Perennis, the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, and Cleander, the imperial chamberlain, continue to play their ‘great game'.

When Fitzwilliam Darcy comes to Hertfordshire as a service to his best friend Charles Bingley, who has recently let the Netherfield Park estate, Darcy assumes the locals will possess "vulgar" country manners. So, when the opportunity arises, he refuses to dance with Elizabeth Bennet at the Meryton Assembly; however, from that moment, the woman's charms possess his every waking and sleeping minute.

There will never be another Western writer like Louis L’Amour. A legendary author and indisputably the greatest storyteller in his genre of all time, L’Amour captivated millions of readers and has sold well over three hundred million copies of his works, which includes nearly ninety novels and countless short stories. Mistakes Can Kill You highlights an essential selection featuring nine of L’Amour’s earlier short stories, sometimes written under the pen name Jim Mayo, that exemplify the rugged morality of the best Western writing.

For the first time we discover what really happened between his sister and the dastardly Wickham. How did he distract his friend Bingley from pining for his beloved Jane? Why did he propose to another young woman? Only to his diary does he tell his true story. At last we see Darcy as he really is; and, beneath his polite facade, we find a sensitive, private and passionate man.

Set in the Dorset landscape familiar to Hardy novels, The Woodlanders concerns the fortunes of Giles Winterborne, whose love for the well-do-do Grace Melbury is challenged by the arrival of a dashing and dissolute doctor, Edred Fitzpiers. When the mysterious Mrs Charmond further complicates the romantic entanglements, marital choice and class mobility become inextricably linked.

Despite the title, Dickens's portrayal of early industrial society is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Times weaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love and to have no empathy, their lives completely devoid of beauty, culture, or imagination. Only after a series of crises does their father realise that the manner in which he raised his children has ruined their lives.

The youngest captain in His Majesty's Navy, with a reputation for landing impossible assignments, Lord Ramage is dispatched to the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Diamond Rock. The mission seems humdrum: barricade the French within Fort Royal. But sent to sea in the Juno with a crew grown restless and undisciplined under the prior commmand of a drunk, Ramage realizes his vessel may not be up to battle with the French.

The first volume of Gene Wolfe's powerful story of Latro, a Roman mercenary who received a head injury that deprived him of his short-term memory. In return it gave him the ability to converse with supernatural creatures, gods, and goddesses who invisibly inhabit the ancient landscape.

It's 1922 in the Manhattan of gin, jazz and prosperity. Women wear makeup and hitched hemlines - and enjoy a new freedom to vote and work. Not so for Evelyn Lockhart, who is forbidden from pursuing her passion to become one of the first female doctors. Chasing her dream will mean turning her back on her family: her competitive sister, Viola; her conservative parents; and the childhood best friend she is expected to marry, Charlie.

In this, the final Horatio Hornblower adventure, C.S. Forester throws his hero into one of the most challenging missions yet. Upon discovering highly confidential papers dispatched by Bonaparte, Hornblower sets off to enlighten the Admiralty about his game-changing, new findings. Troubled after having been informed of Pierre-Charles Villeneuve's escape into Spain, they welcome Horatio's news and send him off on a high-priority assignment that they believe will lead to England's victory over Napoleon.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains." So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem.

In the year 1689, a cabal of Barbary galley slaves, including one “Half-Cocked Jack” Shaftoe, devises a daring plan to win freedom and fortune. A great adventure ensues that will place the intrepid band at odds with the mighty and the mad, with alchemists, Jesuits, great navies, pirate queens, and vengeful despots across vast oceans and around the globe.

East Sussex, 1914. It is the end of England's brief Edwardian summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful. Hugh Grange, down from his medical studies, is visiting his aunt Agatha, who lives with her husband in the small, idyllic coastal town of Rye. Agatha's husband works in the Foreign Office, and she is certain he will ensure that the recent sabre rattling over the Balkans won't come to anything.

The third novel in Amanda Scott’s best-selling Highland series introduces an unforgettable Scottish beauty caught between two men vying for her hand.