Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Historical Fiction

R. D. Blackmore’s enduring masterpiece Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor is renowned for its beautifully descriptive writing, the cleverly woven plot, and the powerfully drawn portrait of true love. Set in Devon in the late 17th century, it is an enduring masterpiece. First published in 1869, the novel revolves around the story of Devonshire farmer, John Ridd, his family, friends, and community. John tells the story in the first person beginning when he is just a boy and his father is murdered by the Doones.

Hoping to win the hand of lovely Cleone Charteris, Philip Jettan discovers that wealth and country manners are not enough. Cleone has been exposed to the gallantries of London society and finds Philip too blunt and boorish. His sophisticated father agrees and the frustrated young man departs for Paris and an education.

Ninety-Three is the story of the Marquis de Lantenac, an exiled French nobleman snuck back into France to raise a Royalist army which will make the English invasion possible, Gauvain, Lantenac's great-nephew leading the Republican army to thwart him, and Cimourdain, a former priest and Gauvain's teacher and mentor, tasked to keep Gauvain on the right path. And in the end, who will face the guillotine?

In the summer of 1994, a workman at the historic mansion of railroad baron James J. Hill in St. Paul, Minnesota, stumbles on a long-hidden wall safe. When experts arrive to open the safe and examine its contents, they make an astonishing discovery. There, inside, is a handwritten manuscript bearing the signature of John H. Watson, MD. The manuscript contains the story of how Sherlock Holmes and Watson traveled to Minnesota to track a murderous arsonist - known only as the Red Demon - who is threatening both Hill and his Great Northern Railway.

Lady Chatterley's Lover is D. H. Lawrence's last novel. First published privately in 1928, Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned from wider publication in the UK until 1960 and was the subject of censorship and book banning in the United States and elsewhere. Its erotic subject material, colorful language, and discussion of interclass relations were deemed obscene.

Orphaned cousins Jane and Lucilla, both 19, receive the exciting news that their guardian is at last allowing them to leave boarding school. But their rosy future is thwarted when they find he has made some bad investments and fled, leaving them with a cottage in the English countryside and a modest bank account.

Dogged by depression, doubt, and - as a trip to the Mayo Clinic has revealed - emphysema, 66-year-old Sherlock Holmes is preparing to return to England when he receives a shock: a note slipped under his hotel room door, from a vicious murderer he'd nearly captured in Munich in 1892. The murderer, known as the Monster of Munich, announces that he has relocated to Eisendorf, a tiny village near the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

The year is 1896, and the magnificent winter carnival is under way in St. Paul, Minnesota, when Holmes and Watson are summoned by the city's most powerful man, railroad magnate James J. Hill. A wealthy young man has disappeared on the eve of his wedding - and his fiancée suspiciously discards her wedding dress. After a grisly discovery in the carnival's ice palace leads to a flurry of clues, Holmes is on the case.

The only survivors of a shipwreck off a Pacific island are Cambridge professor Edward Bowden and an orphaned baby girl. When Valentine Ryven is discovered 20 years later, Edward has recently died, and she is relieved and excited to be taken to England, where she believes her loving family awaits. Valentine is sure of a warm welcome because among the papers retrieved from the wreck is a letter from her Aunt Helena saying so. But in 20 years things change ... especially when money is involved.

Twelve-year-old Peter Waring is an orphan with an assortment of relatives who don't quite know what to do with him. But Peter's concern is for Rose Ellen, the little girl his mother took in before she died, and for whom none of his relations feel any responsibility. They are however intrigued by Peter's legacy. His father had hidden The Annam Jewel, a mysterious and priceless object that Peter will inherit on his 25th birthday. But Peter's first task is to rescue Rose Ellen from the wretched institution where she has been sent.

A young widow arrives at Wildfell Hall with her son, Arthur. Clouded in mystery, Helen Graham soon becomes the object of much scandalous gossip. Refusing to believe any of it, Gilbert Markham eventually discovers her dark past.

Like many mysteries, this one begins with a murder. But in this case, the victim happens to be the detective, on the verge of revealing the culprit in an earlier crime. Had Shadwell Rafferty identified his own murderer? When news of Rafferty’s death reaches Sherlock Holmes, in Chicago on the last leg of an American speaking tour, the world’s most famous detective and his redoubtable companion Watson rush to Minnesota to hunt for their friend’s killer.

Euripides's play follows the fates of the women of Troy after their city has been sacked, their husbands killed, and their remaining families taken away as slaves. It serves as an anti-war narrative as it highlights the suffering of the women left behind. The tragedy also calls attention to how women were treated as commodities in the past by showing how they were divided among the remaining men as spoils of war.

Vietnam veteran and award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti takes you into the mind of a trained sniper doing his job during the Irish Civil War. He faces a shocking turn of events, after killing an enemy.

The Beetle tells the tale of an evil, ancient Egyptian spirit seeking revenge on an up-and-coming British politician, Paul Lessingham. The shape-shifting creature that pursues Lessingham is possessed of hypnotic powers and takes different forms, both male and female, as well as morphing into a beetle - a figure that induces terror in its victims.

Mark Ablett is hosting all his friends at his English country house when he receives a letter from his estranged brother, Robert, announcing Robert's intention to arrive from Australia. Not long after his arrival, Robert turns up dead, his body found with a bullet wound to the head, and Mark is nowhere to be seen. Antony Gillingham and his friend Bill Beverly play Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson to solve this whodunnit mystery. This is Milne's only mystery novel.

Conquering Passion introduces us to Rambaud, Antoine, and Hugh de Montbryce, brothers from a noble Norman family with a long and illustrious military history. The eldest brother, Ram de Montbryce, is an ambitious warrior, greedy for glory and power in the service of his friend, William the Conqueror. His heroism at the Battle of Hastings helps secure the Norman victory and earns him an earldom in newly conquered England.

Romantic comedy, light and slightly awkward by Henry James with his characteristic observations of character, motivations and relationships. Two young men, best friends, deeply interested in the same woman. The background is Europe at the turn of the century and the world of ex-pats. With time and several countries, they each discover love.

Laura Temple faces the predicaments of many British middle-class wives and mothers living in country villages between the World Wars. Her too-large house, inherited by her husband Alfred, requires three servants to keep it running: generally unsatisfactory servants whom she is perpetually concerned will leave her employ for greener pastures, which they inevitably do. Her modest success as a short story writer helps augment their income but still, there is never enough money. She is a devoted mother to her two sons, although she shamelessly prefers one over the other. And she is deeply unhappy.

Shirley Hollister is desperate. She, her ailing mother, and her four siblings are being forced out of their cramped city apartment. Where to go on her meager stenographer's salary? On a whim, she takes a trolley ride into the countryside and spies a barn: spacious, full of light, and surrounded by God's wondrous nature. Her new landlord, Sidney Graham, is intrigued by this lovely young woman and her plans to turn his abandoned barn into a home.