Listen to Trending Full Audiobooks in Fiction, Historical

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/192467 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Rathbones

Author: Janice Clark

Narrator: Malcolm Campbell, Erin Spencer, Gabrielle De Cuir, Cassandra Campbell

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 14 hours 14 minutes

Release date: August 6, 2013

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Genres: Historical

Publisher's Summary:

A gothic, literary adventure set in New England, Janice Clark#039;s haunting debut chronicles one hundred years of a once prosperous and now crumbling whaling family, told by its last surviving member. Mercy Rathbone, fifteen years old, is the diminutive scion of the Rathbone clan. Her father, the last in the beleaguered dynasty, has been lost at sea for seven years - ever since the last whale was seen off the coast of Naiwayonk, Connecticut. Mercy#039;s memories of her father grow dimmer each day, and she spends most of her time in the attic hideaway of her reclusive uncle Mordecai, who teaches her the secrets of Greek history and nautical navigation through his collection of specimens and moldering books. But when a strange, violent visitor turns up one night, Mercy and Mordecai are forced to flee the crumbling mansion and set sail on a journey that will bring them deep into the haunted history of the Rathbone family, and the reasons for its undoing. As Mercy and Mordecai sail from island to island off the Connecticut coast, encountering dangers and mysteries, friends and foes, they untangle the knots of the Rathbone story, discovering secrets long encased in memory.  They learn the history of the family’s founder and patriarch, Moses Rathbone, and the legendary empire he built of ships staffed with the sons of his many, many wives. Sons who stumbled in their father’s shadow, distracted by the arrival of the Stark sisters, a trio of “golden” girls, whose mesmerizing beauty may have sparked the Rathbone’s decline. From the depths of the sea to the lonely heights of the widow’s walk; from the wisdom of the worn Rathbone wives to the mysterious origins of a sinking island, Mercy and Mordecai’s journey will bring them to places they never thought possible.  But will they piece together a possible future from the mistakes of the past, or is the once great  family’s fate doomed to match that of the whales themselves? Inspired by The Odyssey by way of Edgar Allan Poe and Moby Dick, The Rathbones is an ambitious, mythic, and courageous tour de force that marks the debut of a dazzling new literary voice.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/180174 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: One Sweet Quarrel

Author: Deirdre McNamer

Narrator: Nancy Pearl, Joyce Bean

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 40 minutes

Release date: July 30, 2013

Genres: Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Brother and sister Jerry and Daisy Lou Malone leave behind their provincial Midwestern upbringing to test their mettle in the big, beckoning world of 1920s America. For Jerry, the future lies west, with like-minded pioneer souls keen to play the “land game” as homesteaders on the Great Plains. Daisy, in turn, heads for the lights and luxe life of New York City, hoping to sing her way to stardom. But fate and failing fortunes reunite them in tiny Shelby, Montana—and draw them into the 1923 Dempsey-Gibbons World Heavyweight Championship, the faltering town’s grand scheme to save itself from economic ruin. And for a moment as fleeting and spectacular as Halley’s Comet, these American dreamers will savor the sweet taste of an extraordinary life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/180111 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The White Princess

Series: #5 of The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels

Author: Philippa Gregory

Narrator: Bianca Amato

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 19 hours 1 minute

Release date: July 23, 2013

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.36 of Total 94

Ratings of Narrator: 4.81 of Total 16

Genres: Historical

Publisher's Summary:

From “queen of royal fiction” (USA TODAY) Philippa Gregory comes this instant New York Times bestseller that tells the story of the remarkable Elizabeth of York, daughter of the White Queen, and mother to the House of Tudor. When Henry Tudor picks up the crown of England from the mud of Bosworth field, he knows he must marry the princess of the enemy house—Elizabeth of York—to unify a country divided by war for nearly two decades. But his bride is still in love with his slain enemy, Richard III—and her mother and half of England dream of a missing heir, sent into the unknown by the White Queen. While the new monarchy can win power, it cannot win hearts in an England that plots for the triumphant return of the House of York. Henry’s greatest fear is that somewhere a prince is waiting to invade and reclaim the throne. When a young man who would be king leads his army and invades England, Elizabeth has to choose between the new husband she is coming to love and the boy who claims to be her beloved lost brother: the rose of York come home at last.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/192470 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Suite Francaise

Author: Irene Nemirovsky

Narrator: Daniel Oreskes, Barbara Rosenblat

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 13 hours 14 minutes

Release date: July 16, 2013

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.67 of Total 3

Ratings of Narrator: 3 of Total 2

Genres: Historical

Publisher's Summary:

By the early 1940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity. Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/194230 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Butterfly Boy

Author: Tony Klinger

Narrator: James Whale

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 40 minutes

Release date: July 16, 2013

Genres: Historical

Publisher's Summary:

The Butterfly Boy takes the reader on a dramatic, sweeping journey through two World Wars in Germany and races on around the globe throughout that tumultuous century. The Butterfly Boy is the story of Arnie, who as a small boy loses the use of his arms through polio, yet conquers this to grow up to be the quot;greatest mouth painter in the world.quot; Born in a sleepy German town Arnie rises to become one of Hitler#039;s favourite artistes despite his handicap and his Jewish mother. Arnie risks his like to undertake covert activities for the allies and the Christian resistance movement. Arnie matures into a great handsome bull of a man, who, despite not having the use of his arms still manages to be a great womanizer and hell raiser. The conflict between Arnie and his childhood nemesis, now senior Nazi officer, Ratwerller, is a battle to the death that slashes through their lives like a sharpened razor. They stop at nothing to seek the destruction of one another. After the war Arnie, The Butterfly Boy builds the Mouth Painting Charity around the world from which he makes tens of millions of dollars whilst destroying anyone that stands in his way. But it is his own waywardness and his unresolved past that haunts him. This is the story of an extraordinary man, taking an extraordinary journey during extraordinary times. You will love and fear for Arnie, and be hypnotized by him.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/192025 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Lillian and Dash: A Novel

Author: Sam Toperoff

Narrator: Lorna Raver, Bernadette Dunne, Mark Bramhall

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 4 minutes

Release date: July 16, 2013

Genres: Historical

Publisher's Summary:

This exciting novel about Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, and Lillian Hellman, author of The Children#039;s Hour, reintroduces their larger-than-life personalities and the vicissitudes of their affair that spanned three decades. Toperoff reimagines the highs and lows of a fast-living, hard-drinking literary couple and their individual passions, projects, and literary creations. Hammett and Hellman#039;s relationship evolves during major artistic and political epochs—Hollywood#039;s heyday, the New York literary scene, the Spanish Civil War, McCarthyism, and both world wars—and each movement is captured with subjectivity and credible insight. Populated with writers, drinkers, filmmakers, and revolutionaries, Lillian and Dash chronicles the unusual affair of two prominent and headstrong figures.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/192011 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Tudor Conspiracy

Series: #2 of The Elizabeth I Spymaster Chronicles

Author: C. W. Gortner

Narrator: Steve West

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 21 minutes

Release date: July 16, 2013

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.14 of Total 7

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2

Genres: Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Hunted by a shadowy foe in Bloody Mary#039;s court, Brendan Prescott plunges into London#039;s treacherous underworld to unravel a dark conspiracy that could make Elizabeth queen—or send her to her death. England, 1553. Harsh winter encroaches upon the realm. Mary Tudor has become queen to popular acclaim, and her enemies are imprisoned in the Tower. But when she#039;s betrothed to Philip, Catholic prince of Spain, putting her Protestant subjects in peril, rumors of a plot to depose her swirl around the one person many consider to be England#039;s heir and only hope: the queen#039;s half sister, Princess Elizabeth. Haunted by his past, Brendan Prescott lives far from the intrigues of court. But his time of refuge comes to an end when his foe and mentor, the spymaster Cecil, brings him disquieting news that sends him on a dangerous mission. Elizabeth is held c

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/191223 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Poisoned Pilgrim

Series: #4 of A Hangman's Daughter Tale

Author: Oliver Pötzsch

Narrator: Grover Gardner

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 16 hours 28 minutes

Release date: July 16, 2013

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Historical

Publisher's Summary:

The Poisoned Pilgrim is the fourth book in Hangman’s Daughter, the million-copy bestselling series. 1666: The monastery at Andechs has long been a pilgrimage destination, but when the hangman’s daughter, Magdalena, her doctor husband Simon, and their two small children arrive there, they learn that the monks have far larger concerns than saying Mass and receiving alms. It seems that once again, the hangman’s family has fallen into a mysterious and dangerous adventure. Two monks at the monastery experiment with cutting-edge technology, including a method of deflecting the lighting that has previously set the monastery ablaze. When one of the monks disappears and his lab is destroyed, foul play is suspected. Who better to investigate than the famed hangman Jakob Kuisl? But as the hangman and his family attempt to solve the mystery of the missing monk, they must deal with both the eccentric denizens of the monastery and villagers who view the monks’ inventions as witchcraft that must be destroyed at all costs.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/179679 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel

Author: David Rakoff

Narrator: David Rakoff

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 2 hours 33 minutes

Release date: July 16, 2013

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 3

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 3

Genres: Historical

Publisher's Summary:

From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty, and wise novel in verse whose scope spans the twentieth century Through his books and his radio essays for NPR's This American Life, David Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor, sympathy, and tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the master of an altogether different art form. LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal.  The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles under the distinction between self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box—an image of pure and simple joy that unites the themes of this brilliantly conceived work. Rakoff's insistence on beauty and the necessity of kindness in a selfish world raises the novel far above mere satire.  A critic once called Rakoff 'magnificent,' a word that perfectly describes this wonderful novel in verse.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/179649 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Blood & Beauty: The Borgias; A Novel

Author: Sarah Dunant

Narrator: Edoardo Ballerini

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 17 hours 36 minutes

Release date: July 16, 2013

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 2

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1

Genres: Historical

Publisher's Summary:

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS The New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Italian Renaissance novels—The Birth of Venus, In the Company of the Courtesan, and Sacred Hearts—has an exceptional talent for breathing life into history. Now Sarah Dunant turns her discerning eye to one of the world’s most intriguing and infamous families—the Borgias—in an engrossing work of literary fiction.   By the end of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched by its brutality and corruption, nowhere more than in Rome and inside the Church. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy as Alexander VI, he is defined not just by his wealth or his passionate love for his illegitimate children, but by his blood: He is a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. If the Borgias are to triumph, this charismatic, consummate politician with a huge appetite for life, women, and power must use papacy and family—in particular, his eldest son, Cesare, and his daughter Lucrezia—in order to succeed.   Cesare, with a dazzlingly cold intelligence and an even colder soul, is his greatest—though increasingly unstable—weapon. Later immortalized in Machiavelli’s The Prince, he provides the energy and the muscle. Lucrezia, beloved by both men, is the prime dynastic tool. Twelve years old when the novel opens, hers is a journey through three marriages, and from childish innocence to painful experience, from pawn to political player.   Stripping away the myths around the Borgias, Blood & Beauty is a majestic novel that breathes life into this astonishing family and celebrates the raw power of history itself: compelling, complex and relentless. Praise for Blood & Beauty   “The Machiavellian atmosphere—hedonism, lust, political intrigue—is magnetic. . . . Readers won’t want the era of Borgia rule to end.” —People (four stars)   “Dunant transforms the blackhearted Borgias and the conniving courtiers and cardinals of Renaissance Europe into fully rounded characters, brimming with life and lust.” —The New York Times Book Review   “Like Hilary Mantel with her Cromwell trilogy, [Sarah] Dunant has scaled new heights by refashioning mythic figures according to contemporary literary taste. This intellectually satisfying historical saga, which offers blood and beauty certainly, but brains too, is surely the best thing she has done to date.” —The Miami Herald   “Compelling female players have been a characteristic of Dunant’s earlier novels, and this new offering is no exception. . . . The members of this close-knit family emerge as dynamic characters, flawed but sympathetic, filled with fear and longing.” —The Seattle Times   “Dazzling . . . a triumph on an epic scale . . . filled with rich detail and page-turning drama.” —BookPage