Historical Fiction audiobooks

Love in a Dry Season

By: Shelby Foote

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 8 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Shelby Foote’s magnificently orchestrated novel anticipates much of the subject matter of his monumental Civil War trilogy, rendering the clash between North and South with a violence all the more shocking for its intimacy. Love in a Dry Season describes an erotic and economic triangle, in which two wealthy and fantastically unhappy Mississippi... Read more

Bone of Contention

By: Roberta Gellis

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 11 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Magdalene la B├ótarde obeys William of Ypres, her great patron, as a vassal obeys his overlord—even though William would laugh if he knew how she felt. However, when King Stephen summons his barons to a great council in Oxford, William can smell the stink of treason—and he has enemies who might spread that stink over him. He needs a safe place... Read more

Winesburg, Ohio

By: Sherwood Anderson

Narrated by: various narrators, Bruce Blau, David Thorn, Jim...

Length: 7 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

This timeless collection charted a new stylistic path for modern fiction. Through twenty-two connected short stories, Sherwood Anderson looks into the lives of the inhabitants of a small town in the American heartland. These psychological portraits of the sensitive and imaginative of Winesburg's population are seen through the eyes of a young... Read more

Last Boat to Cadiz

By: Barnaby Conrad

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 5 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Europe, 1945: Hitler is dead; the Third Reich is an open wound. Amid the chaos, a man like no other makes his way south through France and into Spain. No one will stand in his way and live. Only idealistic young Wilson Tripp, American vice consul in the city of Seville, stands to discover the man’s true identity and the stunning threat he... Read more

An Unpardonable Crime

By: Andrew Taylor

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 15 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

Edgar Allan Poe is an American boy in England, a child standing on the edge of mysteries. In 1819, two Americans arrive in London. Soon afterward a bank collapses, a man is found horribly mutilated on a building site,another goes missing in the teeming stews of the city's notorious Seven Dials district, a deathbed vigil ends in theft,and an... Read more

Jordan County

By: Shelby Foote

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 10 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Before Shelby Foote undertook his epic history of the Civil War he wrote this fictional chronicle—“a landscape in narrative”—of Jordan County, Mississippi, a place where the traumas of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are as tangible as rock formations.The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the... Read more

The Book of Kings

By: James Thackara

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 35 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

While Europe drifts toward Nazism, four students share an apartment on the Rue de Fleurus. Thackara’s epic novel brilliantly forges the stories of these four men whose lives mirror the large picture of events around the world.The title alludes to God’s prophetic warning to Samuel about the rise of man-made kings. James Thackara, as John Walsh... Read more

A Mortal Bane

By: Roberta Gellis

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 10 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

Roberta Gellis, acclaimed author of The Roselynde Chronicles, brings medieval London to life—and death—with this tale of splendor and squalor.Magdalene la Batarde is the madam of the Old Priory Guesthouse in Southwark. She and her women are expected to engage in a number of sinful activities, but bloody murder isn't one of them—until Baldassare,... Read more

Mozart’s Wife

By: Juliet Waldron

Narrated by: C. M. Hébert

Length: 14 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Giddy sugarplum? Calculating shrew? Mozart's biographers show disdain for his Konstanze, and she aroused strong feelings among her contemporaries. Her in-laws loathed her; his friends, more than forty years after his death, remained eager to gossip about her “failures” as wife to the world’s first superstar. Maturing from child, to wife, to... Read more

Vicksburg

By: James Reasoner

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 11 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

Vicksburg is the fifth in a ten-book series spanning the Civil War and describing its effects on one Southern family.In the waning months of 1862, as the Union army advances closer and closer, Cory Brannon must abandon the supply train in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to undertake a vital mission for Confederate General John Pemberton, the commander... Read more

Matador

By: Barnaby Conrad

Narrated by: Barnaby Conrad

Length: 5 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

It is the morning of Pacote’s last fight, the finale of one of the greatest careers in Spain. The posters are up, the great black bulls are waiting, and a heavy air of expectancy hangs over the city. Pacote, alone in his dressing room, feels the heavy ball of fear pressing against his heart. For he knows that he has been falling off, that he... Read more

Manassas

By: James Reasoner

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 9 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Manassas is the first book in Reasoner’s ten-volume series spanning the Civil War and describing its effects on one Southern family.Storm clouds are approaching Culpeper County, Virginia, in early January 1861. The troublesome Fogarty brothers have been raising havoc across the countryside, and when the local lawman, Will Brannon, returns from... Read more

Chancellorsville

By: James Reasoner

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 11 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

In this fourth book of Reasoner's ten-book Civil War series, as Cory Brannon has a chance to assist the South with supplies brought in by blockade-runners and discovers his sweetheart Lucille Farrell, a sense of obligation and duty stirs in the hotheaded Titus back home in Virginia, and the Confederate cause claims another Brannon son, this one... Read more

To Ruin a Queen

By: Fiona Buckley

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 10 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

As the thrilling adventures continue for Ursula Blanchard, secret agent for Queen Elizabeth I, she finds herself in France, reunited with her husband, Matthew de la Roche, in a passionate but flawed relationship. But when Ursula learns that her daughter, Meg, has mysteriously disappeared, she immediately sets out on a frantic and dangerous... Read more

Odysseus

By: Charles Rowan Beye

Narrated by: Mark Bramhall

Length: 6 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

In this highly unusual and entertaining book, acclaimed classicist Charles Beye imagines a biography of the fictional Bronze Age hero and puts his unique spin on Odysseus’ strange and adventuresome existence. With wit and insight, Beye portrays the character’s life, beginning as a young prince, as warrior and hero of the war with Troy, as... Read more

Queen’s Ransom

By: Fiona Buckley

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 9 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Lady-in-waiting Ursula Blanchard has a mandate from the secretary of state to spy on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I. Although she has already proven herself worthy of the Queen's gratitude, Ursula now must travel to France, where civil war may break out at any moment, to hand carry a letter from Elizabeth to the Queen Mother and Regent, Catherine.... Read more

Shiloh

By: James Reasoner

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 10 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

Shiloh is the second book in a ten-book series spanning the Civil War and describing its effects on one Southern family.As the Civil War sweeps across the country, it finds the most wayfaring member of the Brannon family of Culpeper County, Virginia, working as a wharf rat at a port on the Mississippi River. Cory Brannon, caught up in a bar... Read more

Promise of Glory

By: C. X. Moreau

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 11 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

This is the story of the battle of Antietam and the events leading up to the single bloodiest day in the entire Civil War, in which Union casualties topped 12,000 and Confederate casualties topped 11,000. It is also the story of such memorable figures of military history as Lee and McClellan, Burnside, Longstreet, Hooker, and Jackson, who took... Read more

Antietam

By: James Reasoner

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 10 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

In early 1862, the Civil War comes within view of the Brannon family farm in Culpeper County, Virginia. The din of drilling soldiers sweeps over the quiet county seat, and another Brannon son, Mac, answers the call to arms.The long-anticipated spring offensive pitches the Union and Confederate armies against each other on the Virginia Peninsula,... Read more

Pasadena

By: David Ebershoff

Narrated by: Lorna Raver

Length: 20 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

This sweeping, richly imagined novel charts the rapid transformation of Southern California from frontier to suburb during the first half of the twentieth century. At the story's center is Linda Stamp, a fisher girl born in 1903 on a coastal farm in San Diego's North County, and the three men who upend her life and vie for her affection: her... Read more

Havana Heat

By: Darryl Brock

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 9 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Set in the golden age of baseball, Havana Heat transports readers to 1911 America, where real-life pitcher Luther "Dummy" Taylor is trying to work his arm back into fighting shape. Though deaf, Taylor helped lead John McGraw's New York Giants to the pennant, winning 115 games between 1900 and 1908. But an injury relegates him to the minors, and... Read more

The Desert of Wheat

By: Zane Grey

Narrated by: Jim Gough

Length: 13 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

The Desert of Wheat is a thrilling and romantic tale of sabotage in the wheat fields of the Pacific Northwest during World War I.Young farmer Kurt Dorn is torn between going to France to fight the Germans or staying in America to be with the woman he loves and to protect his wheat crop against saboteurs who question his loyalties. He struggles... Read more

Tournament

By: Shelby Foote

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 9 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

This debut novel by Shelby Foote, a major Southern writer whose masterpiece is The Civil War: A Narrative, introduces Hugh Bart, a farmer confronting life’s problems in the postbellum South. Hugh’s story is told through a clever blend of rich language and flashbacks that bring to life Jordan County, Foote’s fictional Mississippi Delta community.... Read more

Turncoat

By: Aaron Elkins

Narrated by: Christopher Lane

Length: 10 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Pete Simon's all-American life was everything he had ever wished for: a good home, a satisfying career, and a marriage still strong and loving after nearly twenty years. But in the days following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, everything was about to change. It begins with the appearance of a stranger at his door. The next day his wife... Read more