Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Historical Fiction

The third volume in the best-selling Wideacre trilogy. Set in the 18th century, they launched the career of Philippa Gregory, the best-selling author of The Other Boleyn Girl and Three Sisters, Three Queens. Meridon, a desolate Romany girl, is determined to escape the hard poverty of her childhood. Riding bareback in a travelling show while her sister, Dandy, risks her life on the trapeze, Meridon dedicates herself to freeing them both from danger and want.

This delightful novel describes the post-war summer of 1946 - and follows the growing-up of three young women in the months between leaving school and taking up their scholarships at university. Una Vane, whose widowed mother runs a hairdressing salon in her front room, goes bicycling with Ray, the boy who delivers the fish and milk. Hetty Fallowes struggles to become independent of her possessive, loving, tactless mother. And Lieselotte Klein, uncovers tragedy in the past and magic in the present.

It is the 1870s, and twin brothers Sean and Garrick Courtney are born into the wilds of Natal. They could not be more different, and fate, war and the jealous schemes of a woman are to drive them even further apart. But as history unfolds, a continent is awakening. And on the horizon is the promise of fortune, adventure, destiny and love.... When the Lion Feeds is the best-selling novel that launched Wilbur Smith's stellar career and the first in the riveting saga of the Courtney brothers.

In this concluding volume of Neal Stephenson’s epic work, “Half-Cocked Jack” Shaftoe must escape the noose of Jack Ketch; the rivalry between Newton and Leibniz comes to a head; and Daniel Waterhouse pursues his dream to build the Logic Mill

Thea Knight loves a spot of mischief. She especially loves her current mischief: masquerading as her sister, while finalizing her scheme to expose the dastardly knaves whose lies ruined her life. Then big, bad-tempered Lord Luxborough upends her game by maneuvering her into marriage. But it's her sister’s name on the license, so the marriage won’t be valid. Thea’s idea? Keep pretending to be her sister until she can run away.

Maeve, daughter of Lord Sean of Sevenwaters, was badly burned as a child and carries the legacy of that fire in her crippled hands. After ten years, she’s returning home, having grown into a courageous, forthright woman with a special gift for gentling difficult animals. But while her body’s scars have healed, her spirit remains fragile, fearing the shadows of her past.

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home by despatch vessel to bring the news of their latest victory to the government. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the attentions of two privateers soon become menacing. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks is as thrilling, as tense and as unexpected in its culmination as anything Patrick O'Brian has written.

Marvellously atmospheric tale of strangers summoned to a grand but neglected villa on the Italian coast. Each of them has been named in a will, but nobody knows their benefactress.... Four very different people are named in a will. Delia, an opera singer robbed of her voice by illness; George, an idealistic scientist who cannot face what his skills have created; Marjorie, desperately poor and unable to dislodge her writer’s block; and Lucius, ostensibly in control but whose personal life is in chaos.

Summer 1939 and five cousins gather at the house with the camomile lawn for what, for many of them, will be the last summer of their youth.

Lord Crane has never had a lover quite as elusive as Stephen Day. He knows Stephen's job as justiciar requires secrecy, but the magician is doing his disappearing act more than seems reasonable - especially since Crane will soon return to his home in China. Then a blackmailer threatens to expose their illicit relationship. And as Stephen investigates a plague of giant rats sweeping London, his sudden increase in power, boosted by his blood-and-sex bond with Crane, is rousing suspicion that he's turned warlock.

In the first novel of an explosive new series from K. J. Charles, a young gentleman and his elegant mentor fight for love in a world of wealth, power, and manipulation. When he learns that he could be the heir to an unexpected fortune, Harry Vane rejects his past as a radical fighting for government reform and sets about wooing his lovely cousin. But his heart is captured instead by the most beautiful, chic man he’s ever met: the dandy tasked with instructing him in the manners and style of the ton.

Napoleon, escaped from Elba, pursues his enemies across Europe like a vengeful phoenix. If he can corner the British and Prussians before their Russian and Austrian allies arrive, his genius will lead the French armies to triumph at Waterloo. In the Balkans, preparing a thrust northwards into Central Europe to block the Russians and Austrians, a horde of Muslim mercenaries is gathering.

Everyone deserves to get away for a bit. Even the miscreants at St Mary's. Astonishingly, Dr. Bairstow has declared a holiday. Even more astonishingly - he's paying for it. Needless to say, there are strings attached. They have to record the 1601 performance of Hamlet, with Shakespeare himself in the role of the Ghost. It doesn't go well, of course.

An orphan leaves Dark Ages London, taking a dangerous journey and posing as a Jew to study medicine in Persia, in "an adventurous and inspiring tale" (Library Journal). A child holds the hand of his dying mother and is terrified, aware something is taking her. Orphaned and given to an itinerant barber-surgeon, Rob Cole becomes a fast-talking swindler, peddling a worthless medicine. But as he matures, his strange gift - an acute sensitivity to impending death - never leaves him, and he yearns to become a healer.

The scandal would rip through English society - but how can they resist falling recklessly, irreversibly in love? A series of disasters in Eleanor Lindale’s well-to-do family kept her out of the social whirl where she might have attracted suitors. Now, at age 25, she believes she is irretrievably on the shelf. But her quiet life in Brighton abruptly changes when she’s asked to chaperone her beautiful seventeen-year-old niece, Lady Aurora Crossways, for a brief season before Aurora’s wedding to Philip Radford, Earl of Huntley.

From the master of dystopia, comes his heartrending story of a British boy’s four-year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Based on J. G. Ballard’s own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy’s life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai - a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.

Declan Sinclair is a Highlander who believes his dreams never lie. When he spots Caya at a public house, he knows instantly she is the woman in his dreams - his future wife. Though her brother had promised never to gamble again, he engages Declan in a card game - and the prize is the lovely Caya.

When Lady Henrietta Sedley declares her 29th year her own, she has plans. Plans to inherit her father's business, to make her own fortune and to live her own life. But first, she has plans to experience a taste of the pleasure she'll forgo as a confirmed spinster. She does not, however, plan to find the most beautiful man she's ever seen tied up in her carriage and threatening to ruin The Year of Hattie before it's even begun.

Fantasy, love and an exuberant celebration of English life and literature, Orlando is a uniquely entertaining story. Originally conceived by Virginia Woolf as a playful tribute to the family of her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, Orlando's central character, a fictional embodiment of Sackville-West, changes sex from a man to a woman and lives throughout the centuries, whilst meeting historical figures of English literature.

Agatha Award-winning author Rhys Bowen’s charming combination of intrigue and romance blended with a touch of humor shines when performed by Audible Hall of Fame narrator Katherine Kellgren, whose deft range and impeccable accent work make it hard to believe this isn’t a multicast performance.