Historical Fiction audiobooks

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

Seduced by a Prince

By: Tanya Anne Crosby

Narrated by: James Gillies

Length: 5 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Separated at birth - reunited at knifepoint!Merrick Welbourne never expected to discover a long-lost twin! Particularly one who'd rob him and leave him senseless on the road. Now living his brother's aristocratic life, he had new trials, tribulations...and temptations he'd never dreamed of. Not the least being Chloe Simon, she of rare mettle,... 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

The Hornet's Nest - Abridged

By: Jimmy Carter

Narrated by: Edward Herrmann

Length: 5 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The first work of fiction by a President of the United States—a sweeping novel of the American South and the War of Independence.

In his ambitious and deeply rewarding novel, Jimmy Carter brings to life the Revolutionary War as it was fought in the Deep South; it is a saga that will change the way we think about the conflict. He reminds us that... Read more

The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour: Unabridged Selections from The Frontier Stories: Volume 1

By: Louis L'Amour

Narrated by: John Bedford Lloyd

Length: 3 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

No one more vividly captures the rugged majesty and enduring spirit of the American West than Louis L'Amour. Now, collected for the very first time, here are seven unabridged frontier tales from a legendary master of the genre. Volume One celebrates this remarkable voice in American fiction with a captivating blend of some of his ... Read more

By Sorrow's River

By: Larry McMurtry

Narrated by: Alfred Molina

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

In this tale of high-spirited and terrifying adventure, set against the background of the West that Larry McMurtry has made his own, By Sorrow’s River is an epic in its own right with the return of the formidable, young Tasmin Berrybender.

At the heart of this third volume of his Western saga remains the beautiful and determined Tasmin... Read more

Tomorrow, When the War Began

By: John Marsden

Narrated by: Suzi Dougherty

Length: 7 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

While Ellie and her friends are away in the bush, the world changes. Suddenly they are in the toughest situations humans can confront, facing life and death decisions. They are thrown into a world where they find courage, initiative, spirit and wisdom, or they die... Read more

The Dead of the Night

By: John Marsden

Narrated by: Suzi Dougherty

Length: 7 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

When their country is invaded and their families are taken, eight high-school teenagers band together to fight. Seventeen-year-old Ellie and her friends have survived the invasion, but two of their band are captured: Kevin is imprisoned and Corrie is alive, but in a coma. Homer and Ellie are determined to get them back and to continue their... Read more

Burning for Revenge

By: John Marsden

Narrated by: Suzi Dougherty

Length: 6 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

When you're on your knees there's only one thing to do ... stand up again! Ellie and her friends have stared defeat in the face. They have felt its hot breath. They have been bashed and battered by it, brought to breaking point. Now it's time to hit back. Now it's time to come out fighting. Now they really are burning for revenge ... Read more

Smoky Joe's Cafe

By: Bryce Courtenay

Narrated by: Humphrey Bower

Length: 5 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Thommo returns from Vietnam to an Australia that regards him as a mercenary guilty of war crimes. He begins to develop all kinds of physical and mental problems, and thinks it must only be him until he finds he is not alone. Ten mates, all who remain of his platoon who fought and died in the Battle of Long Tan, are affected the same way. Now... Read more

The Other Side of Dawn

By: John Marsden

Narrated by: Suzi Dougherty

Length: 9 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

With a roar like a train in a tunnel, the war enters its final days. Ellie has to be on that train. There's no more sitting around, no more waiting. There's only fast decisions, fast action, fast thinking. And she'd better get it right. With all their being, Ellie and her friends want to stay alive. But there's a war out there. And it has to be... Read more

The Last Mile Home

By: Di Morrissey

Narrated by: Bruce Kerr

Length: 6 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

It is 1953 in a small country town in Australia, a time of post-war prosperity and hope. The Holtens are wealthy austere graziers who have lived on the land for generations. The McBrides are a large and loving shearers family who are new arrivals to the district. When the McBrides eldest daughter falls in love with the Holtens only son and heir,... Read more