Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Historical Fiction

Enter the Jazz Age and the lives of the Manfords of New York. A family caught in the rush to enjoy life, regardless of reality. Only Nona Manford can see through the veil of the feigned joie de vivre that everyone around her cloaks themselves in. Twilight sleep was actually a medical procedure...

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?

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.

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.

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.

Sally Meredith's young life has been full of adventure. As a suffragist, she fought for women's right to vote. She drove an ambulance in France during the war. And she's already had a proposal and a broken engagement. But the past few years have been deadly dull, taking care of a cranky relative and now living alone in a quiet village. So when her eccentric uncle Fritzi arrives with the tale of his most recent invention - a deadly gas that nations are striving to get hold of - she's intrigued.

Jenny is the story of Jenny Winge, a talented Norwegian painter who lives a free and independent life in Rome. Betraying her own ideals, she has an affair, resulting in a child out of wedlock, and decides to raise the child on her own. Undset gives a gripping portrayal of a woman struggling towards fulfillment and independence, who at the same time wrestles with mental problems. It is written with unflinching honesty, which makes her story as compelling today as it was nearly a century ago.

It's the Philippines in the 1800s. The Filipino gentleman Crisostomo Ibarra returns from his studies abroad and finds the city of Manila changed, especially after he learns of his father's mysterious death. After a violent encounter with a monk, Ibarra is excommunicated. Maria Clara has to choose between being a dutiful daughter and the love of her life. Poor Sisa searches for her children, while municipal guards try to capture her for the alleged gold coins that have gone missing from the church. Elias wrestles with a mysterious crocodile in the dark waters of the Pasig.

Immediately after the death of the aunt who raised her, Joyce Radway's cousins treat her like a servant. They even attempt to block her from taking exams to qualify as a teacher and earn her own living. Angered by their constant demands, she impulsively grabs her hat and purse and runs to her aunt's grave to weep and rest. But she's not alone; thieves are using the cemetery to hide stolen goods, and she's heartsick to discover their leader is a man she once knew and admired.

Casey Clemens is having a bad day. And it’s going to get worse. It’s the day before Casey’s fortieth birthday and Hollywood doesn’t want her anymore (not that it ever did). Her career and personal life are a disaster. Frantic to escape her own emptiness, she hops on a plane to England and heads to the countryside to hide. But she can’t hide from herself. A lightning strike, a skidding car, and a horse that might be magical send her through a gap in time to the Dark Ages, where she inadvertently saves King Arthur from Saxon warriors.

Audie-nominated narrator Deepti Gupta shares a classic love story set among the fires of India's struggle for independence. Bimala is torn between her commitment to her husband, Nikhil, who holds Western beliefs, and the radical Sandip, a leader of the Swadeshi movement under the British Raj. Bimala finds herself asking what freedom truly means for herself and for her country.

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.

Scorned by her 17th century New England Puritan village, Hester Prynne struggles to raise her precocious daughter, Pearl, who is the result of an affair and whose father is unknown. Despite being forced to wear a scarlet letter A as a brand for her adultery, Hester tries to live a life of repentance and dignity. Pearl's father comes forward as he is struggling under the weight of his own shame and sin.

Ruth and John, who were school chums in their childhood, reconnect after many years when John is leaving to join the Army during the Great War. They are both on a search for meaning and answers, and for God, during this desperate world war. Through their search they again find each other, their God, and love.

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.

The Return of the Soldier is the powerful debut novel of the prolific English novelist Rebecca West. First published in 1918, the novel opens with the return of the shell-shocked Captain Chris Baldry from the trenches of the First World War, and grapples with the devastation of mental trauma from that war and its effects on families. Recounted from the perspective of his cousin Jenny, the story examines the relationship between Chris and the three women in his life.

Mansfield Park is the third published and perhaps most subtle of Jane Austen's novels. It tells the story of Fanny Price, who, at the age of 10, is sent from her impoverished household to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle and be raised alongside her cousins. Fanny grows up as a misfit, not truly a member of the Bertram family, but too genteel to feel comfortable with her parents.

In this final book of Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna Ferber's series featuring the indomitable Emma McChesney, Emma's newly married son Jock has relocated to Chicago, leaving Emma an empty-nester. Her secret romance and pending nuptials stall when their company is thrown into an uproar at the height of the selling season. To defeat her long-time nemesis and take the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company international, the always-competitive Emma sails off on a whirlwind tour of South America.

Strong-minded, irrepressible Miranda Griscom is content working as a live-in housekeeper for the young Spafford family. Here she is loved and appreciated in contrast to her lonely childhood as an unwanted granddaughter. When a wealthy neighbor proposes marriage so that she can care for his motherless children, she is delighted to show him the door, proud that she is “a free and independent woman who can earn her own living”.