Showing titles in Historical Fiction

Good deeds build good character, and good character is what the Haverleigh School for Young Ladies is all about. Lady Phoebe - with the tireless assistance of Eva - has organised a luncheon at the school to benefit wounded veterans of the Great War, encouraging the students to participate in the cooking and the baking. But too many cooks do more than spoil the broth - they add up to a recipe for disaster when the school’s headmistress, Miss Finch, is poisoned.

It's 1925, and Patricia, Tara and Aideen couldn't be more excited to be starting a new life in Liverpool. Yet it soon becomes clear that all is not as it seems, for the girls are hastily swept onto a huge ocean liner heading to New York. When their father vanishes midway across the Atlantic, the grieving sisters prepare themselves for a new life in the big city. For whatever their father was running from has every chance of catching up with them....

The story of a young illegitimate son of a Norman noble and the daughter of an English housecarl. Forced to be little more than a servant Robert fitz Malet shows the world and his half brothers that he has qualities which mark him as different. When he meets the famous troubadour, Taillefer, he becomes one of the most skilled swordsmen in Duke William's army as they prepare to invade England and claim the crown promised to him by King Edward.

The gripping new novel from internationally bestselling master of historical fiction Bernard Cornwell!

A sweeping, multigenerational saga for fans of Downton Abbey, set around the stately home of Cavendon Hall as the roaring '20s change the family's fortunes forever. It's 1926. One stately home's future lies with four very different young women.... On a summer weekend in 1926, the Ingham family gathers at Cavendon Hall, the great house in Yorkshire that has been their family home for centuries, summoned by the earl.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on the true story of Lale and Gita Sokolov, two Slovakian Jews who survived Auschwitz and eventually made their home in Australia. In that terrible place, Lale was given the job of tattooing the prisoners marked for survival - literally scratching numbers into his fellow victims' arms in indelible ink to create what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust.

Persuasion, Jane Austen's last novel, is a tale of love and marriage told with irony and insight. Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth have met and seperated years before. Their reunion, after the passage or irrecoverable years of their youth, forces a recognition of the false values that drove them apart.

Sharing lodging in the sleepy English village of Walmsley Parva has eased some of the financial strain on the two old school chums, but money is still tight in these years following the Great War. So when the local vicar - and pigeon-racing club president - approaches them with a private inquiry opportunity, the ladies accept. There's been a spot of bother: The treasurer has absconded with the club's funds and several prized birds. But when they visit the man's loft, they find their elusive quarry lying in white feathers and a pool of crimson blood - the only witnesses cooing mournfully.

A posthumous recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, Marion Zimmer Bradley reinvented - and rejuvenated - the King Arthur mythos with her extraordinary Mists of Avalon series. In this epic work, Bradley follows the arc of the timeless tale from the perspective of its previously marginalized female characters: Celtic priestess Morgaine, Gwenhwyfar, and High Priestess Viviane.

This epic novel by master writer James Clavell, loosely based on the Namamugi Incident and Anglo-Satsuma War that took place in the late 1800s, is a richly researched, panoramic view of Japan’s budding relationship with the Western powers, its sweeping societal changes, and the political upheaval that followed.

In the sobering yet hopeful years following the First World War, Lady Phoebe Renshaw and her lady’s maid, Eva Huntford, find their summer plans marred by an instance of murder.... Phoebe and her sister Julia are eager for a summer getaway at High Head Lodge, the newly purchased estate of their cousin Regina. But they are not the only houseguests. Regina's odd friend, Olive, is far from friendly, and Regina's mother and brother - bitter over the unequal distribution of her father's inheritance - have descended on the house to confront Regina.

Set in a lovingly evoked Brooklyn just after the end of World War I, The Haunted Bookshop cleverly juxtaposes a pair of middle-aged bookshop owners and two young lovers with a nest of German saboteurs, complete with mysterious clues, red herrings, blushing romance, derring-do, a desperate race to the rescue, and an explosion. More important, the novel is an eloquent hymn to the bookseller’s trade and a fervent plea for the revivifying and redemptive power of literature.

It began in a women's club in London on a February afternoon. A discreet advertisement in The Times, addressed to "Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine..." lures four very different women away from the dismal British weather to San Salvatore, a castle high above a bay on the sunny Italian Riviera. There, the Mediterranean spirit stirs the souls of Mrs Arbuthnot, Mrs Wilkins, Lady Caroline Dester, and Mrs Fisher, and remarkable changes occur.

The work tells the story of Jane's early life, her experience at Lowood School and as a governess. Her refusal to accept Rochester's love on any but her own strictly moral terms is a passionate cry for independence.

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing. But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant Nobel-prize-nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'; so the recording begins and ends with some of Dickens's best-known words, and between those lines is every Briton's view of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. Set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, the audiobook tells the story of a French doctor who is imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille in Paris. Upon his release, he moves to London with his daughter, Lucie, whom he had never met.

It is 1537, a time of revolution that sees the greatest changes in England since 1066. Henry VIII has proclaimed himself Supreme Head of the Church. The country is waking up to savage new laws, rigged trials and the greatest network of informers ever seen. And under the orders of Thomas Cromwell, a team of commissioners is sent throughout the country to investigate the monasteries.

Renowned as much for her wit and satirical social commentary as for her stories of love and romance, Jane Austen remains unfailingly relevant and one of Britain’s best loved authors. In this Audible Original collection, an all-star list of narrators (Billie Piper, Claire Foy, Emma Thompson, Florence Pugh and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) capture Austen’s pin-sharp humour and tone in these dramatisations of her six beloved novels accompanied by a full cast.

Hugh of Singleton, fourth son of a minor knight, has been educated as a clerk, usually a prelude to taking holy orders. However, feeling no certain calling despite a lively faith, he turns to the profession of surgeon, training in Paris and then hanging out his sign in Oxford. A local lord asks him to track the killer of a young woman whose bones have been found in the castle cesspit. She is identified as the impetuous missing daughter of a local blacksmith, and her young man, whom she had provoked very publicly, is in due course arrested and sentenced at the Oxford assizes.

Despite being the granddaughter of an earl, Julia Renshaw is under pressure to marry for money - and has settled for the wealthy, and older, Gilbert Townsend. It’s clear to her sister Phoebe and lady’s maid Eva that this is not a love match. At the reception aboard the groom’s yacht, there is tension between Gil and several guests: his best man, his spinster sister and his younger cousin and current heir. Moreover, the bride has discovered that Gil’s pretty secretary, among others, will be joining them for the honeymoon.