Historical Fiction audiobooks

Cold Mountain

By: Charles Frazier

Narrated by: Charles Frazier

Length: 14 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished American in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor.

Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at... Read more

The Intelligencer - Abridged

By: Leslie Silbert

Narrated by: Jan Maxwell & Alfred Molina

Length: 6 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: Yes

On May 30, 1593, London's most popular playwright was stabbed to death. The royal coroner ruled that Christopher Marlowe was killed in self-defense, but historians have long suspected otherwise, given his role as an "intelligencer" in the queen's secret service.
In sixteenth-century London, Marlowe embarks on his final intelligence assignment,... Read more

Pirates!

By: Celia Rees

Narrated by: Jennifer Wiltsie

Length: 8 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

It is the dawn of the eighteenth century, when girls stay home and sew while men sail the high seas finding adventure, danger, and gold. But two unusually adventurous girls--a rich merchant's daughter, Nancy Kington, and her former plantation slave, Minerva Sharpe--take to the high seas from Jamaica on a shop the crew renames Deliverance. Not... Read more

The Commodore

By: Patrick O'Brian

Narrated by: Patrick Tull

Length: 11 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

For years, critics have hailed Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring adventure series as “the best historical novels ever written”(New York Times). With elegant language, eccentric characters, and authentic period atmosphere, the series transportsyou to the high seas of the Napoleonic era.After a dangerous tour of duty in the Great South Sea, Jack and... Read more

Victorine

By: Catherine Texier

Narrated by: Josephine Bailey

Length: 11 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

In this lush, lyrical, and marvelously evocative novel, Catherine Texier takes a mystery from her family’s past and draws from it a portrait of a remarkable woman—her great-grandmother Victorine. A young schoolteacher in a quiet province in France, Victorine had married and had two children. But when she falls desperately in love, she makes a... Read more

The Railway Detective - Railway Detective, Book 1 (Unabridged)

By: Edward Marston

Narrated by: Peter Walters

Length: 8 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

THE THRILLING FIRST CASE FOR THE RAILWAY DETECTIVE London 1851. With the opening of the Great Exhibition at hand, interst in mounting in the engineering triumphs of the railways, but not everyone feels like celebrating ... In an audacious attack, the London to Birmingham mail train is robbed and derailed, casuing many casualties. Planned with... Read more

The Lady and the Unicorn

By: Tracy Chevalier

Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld & Terry Donnelly

Length: 7 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

A tour de force of history and imagination, The Lady and the Unicorn is Tracy Chevalier’s answer to the mystery behind one of the art world’s great masterpieces—a set of bewitching medieval tapestries that hangs today in the Cluny Museum in Paris. They appear to portray the seduction of a unicorn, but the story behind their making is... Read more

The Forest Lover

By: Susan Vreeland

Narrated by: Karen White

Length: 14 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

In her acclaimed novels, Susan Vreeland has given us portraits of painting and life that are as dazzling as their artistic subjects. Now, in The Forest Lover, she traces the courageous life and career of Emily Carr, who—more than Georgia O'Keeffe or Frida Kahlo—blazed a path for modern women artists. Overcoming the confines of Victorian culture,... Read more

Retreat, Hell! - Abridged

By: W.E.B. Griffin

Narrated by: James Naughton

Length: 5 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: Yes

It is the fall of 1950. The Marines have made a pivotal breakthrough at Inchon, but a roller coaster awaits them. While Douglas MacArthur chomps at the bit, intent on surging across the 38th parallel, Brigadier General Fleming Pickering works desperately to mediate the escalating battle between MacArthur and President Harry Truman. And somewhere... Read more

A Midsummer Night's Dream - Abridged

By: William Shakespeare

Narrated by: Paul Scofield & (Null) Cast

Length: 2 hours 1 minute

Abridged: Yes

""How shall we beguile the lazy time,if not with some delight?""

Features a unique cover illustration by Maurice Sendak (Where the WildThings Are), specially commissioned for the Shakespeare on Compact Discseries. An introductory essay by Harvard scholar Harold Bloom accompanies the CD. Read more

Romeo and Juliet - Abridged

By: William Shakespeare

Narrated by: Claire Bloom & Albert Finney

Length: 2 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: Yes

A pair of star-cross'd lovers   -PrologueRomeo and Juliet was Shakespeare's first great tragedy, a richly lyrical love story that has long been one of the author's most popular plays for performer and audience alike. Romeo and Juliet is a simple but dramatic cautionary tale about the blindness that both love and hate can engender. As performed... Read more

The Mauritius Command

By: Patrick O'Brian

Narrated by: Patrick Tull

Length: 13 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

Captain Jack Aubrey is ashore on half pay without a command - until Stephen Maturin arrives with secret orders for Aubrey to take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope under a commodore's pennant, there to mount an expedition against the French-held islands of Mauritius and La REunion. But the difficulties of carrying out his orders are compounded... Read more

Blue at the Mizzen

By: Patrick O'Brian

Narrated by: Patrick Tull

Length: 9 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

With his swashbuckling adventures, best-selling novelist Patrick O'Brian transports you to the high seas of old where privateers lurk in the mist, and great ships fight to control the waterways. Blue at the Mizzen hoists the excitement to new heights as British frigate commander Jack Aubrey stakes everything on a desperate raid against the... Read more

The Fortune of War

By: Patrick O'Brian

Narrated by: Patrick Tull

Length: 13 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

En route home, Aubrey and Maturin find themselves in deep trouble when their ship engages the U.S.S. Constitution in battle-and loses. Aubrey, now a POW in Boston, waits for word of a prisoner exchange, while Maturin renews a most cherished friendship. Read more

H.M.S. Surprise

By: Patrick O'Brian

Narrated by: Patrick Tull

Length: 15 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Third in the series of Aubrey-Maturin adventures, this book is set among the strange sights and smells of the Indian subcontinent, and in the distant waters ploughed by the ships of the East India Company. Aubrey is on the defensive, pitting wits and seamanship against an enemy enjoying overwhelming local superiority. But somewhere in the Indian... Read more

The Princes of Ireland

By: Edward Rutherfurd

Narrated by: Richard Matthews

Length: 26 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

From the bestselling author of London and Sarum, a magnificent epic about love and battle, family life and political intrigue in Ireland over the course of eleven centuries.  The Princes of Ireland brilliantly weaves impeccable historical research and mesmerizing storytelling in capturing the essence of a place and its people.
 
Edward Rutherfurd... Read more

Sunset and Sawdust

By: Joe R. Lansdale

Narrated by: Deborah Marlowe

Length: 13 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

He has been called “hilarious . . . refreshing . . . a terrifically gifted storyteller with a sharp country-boy wit” (Washington Post Book World), and praised for his “folklorist’s eye for telling detail and [his] front-porch raconteur’s sense of pace” (New York Times Book Review). Now, Joe R. Landsdale gives us a fast-moving, electrifying new... Read more

Anna Karenina

By: Leo Tolstoy

Narrated by: Davina Porter

Length: 36 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This is the famous opening sentence of Tolstoi's epic love story between Anna Arkadyevna Karenina and her Count Vronsky. Anna Karenina (1877) by Leo Tolstoy is a classic story of love and tragedy against the backdrop of pre-revolutionary Russia. The extravagant and... Read more

A Great and Terrible Beauty - Abridged

By: Libba Bray

Narrated by: Joanna Wyatt

Length: 4 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The first book in the critically acclaimed New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestselling Gemma Doyle trilogy, the exhilarating and haunting saga from the author of The Diviners series and Going Bovine.

It’s 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence,... Read more

Sacred Time

By: Ursula Hegi

Narrated by: Annabella Sciorra, Mercedes Ruehl & Bobby Canna...

Length: 8 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

The bestselling author of Stones From the River delivers her most ambitious and dramatic novel yet -- the unforgettable story of an endearing, but flawed, Italian American family.
In December 1953 Anthony Amedeo's world is nested in his Bronx neighborhood, his parent's Studebaker, the Paradise Theater, Yankee Stadium -- and in his imaginatin,... Read more

The Touch - Abridged

By: Colleen McCullough

Narrated by: Jenny Sterlin

Length: 6 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Not since The Thorn Birds has Colleen McCullough written a novel of such broad appeal about a family and the Australian experience as The Touch.

At its center is Alexander Kinross, remembered as a young man in his native Scotland only as a shiftless boilermaker’s apprentice and a godless rebel. But when, years later, he writes from Australia to... Read more

The Book of God

By: Walter Wangerin Jr.

Narrated by: Walter C. Kaiser Jr. & Walter Wangerin Jr.

Length: 27 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

Experience the Bible as a singular, powerful story and prepare to be swept away by Scripture as never before! Wangerin's "Bible storybook for adults" features brilliant settings, dramatized scenes, and added dialogue—all gleaned from extensive research.The Book of God reads like a novel, dramatizing the sweep of biblical events, bringing to life... Read more

Pompeii - Abridged

By: Robert Harris

Narrated by: Michael Cumpsty

Length: 5 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Ancient Rome is the setting for the superb new novel from Robert Harris, author of the number one bestsellers Fatherland, Enigma and Archangel.

Where else to enjoy the last days of summer than on the beautiful Bay of Naples. All along the coast, the Roman Empire’s richest citizens are relaxing in their luxurious villas. The world’s largest navy... Read more

The Birth of Venus

By: Sarah Dunant

Narrated by: Kathe Mazur

Length: 13 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities.

But their... Read more