Historical Fiction Classics

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT? To the age-old question, Penthouse has the answer: Great sex--lots of it--in every variation! Here, in this audiobook, you'll meet women of all ages and from all walks of life, with one thing in common. They're all open to erotic exploration with its infinite possibilities...

Struggling manufacturer Robert Moore has introduced labour saving machinery to his Yorkshire mill, arousing a ferment of unemployment and discontent among his workers. Robert considers marriage to the wealthy and independent Shirley Keeldar to solve his financial woes, yet his heart lies with his cousin Caroline, who, bored and desperate, lives as a dependent in her uncle’s home with no prospect of a career. Shirley, meanwhile, is in love with Robert’s brother, an impoverished tutor - a match opposed by her family.

Set before Tales of the Otori begins, Heaven's Net recounts the life of Lord Otori Shigeru, the series' spiritual warrior-godfather and the adoptive father of the Tales' Takeo. We learn about Shigeru's training; his relationship with the Tribe of mysteriously powerful assassins; his fateful meeting with Lady Maruyama, who would become his secret lover; the battle of Yaegahara, where his father is killed; and other turning points that shaped the Tales.

From the Nobel Prize winner, a coming-of-age story that illuminates the harshness and beauty of an Africa on the brink of colonization Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “breakthrough”...

The Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning novel from Elizabeth Hay. Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real...

In this hilarious second installment of a Regency romance series, a single lord is forced to settle down...and when a houseparty brings a happy-go-lucky lady's companion his way, his grumpy heart is unexpectedly warmed. Nine years ago, Lord Guy Harrowby, Viscount Wennington, was publicly...

Named for the fictional community in which it is set, Middlemarch is George Eliot's rich and teeming portrait of provincial life in Victorian England. In it, a panoply of complicated characters attempt to carry out their destinies against the various social expectations that accompany their classes and genders.

Now a major motion picture starring Mia Wasikowska, Paul Giamatti, Laura Carmichael, Ezra Miller, and Rhys Ifans, and directed by Sophie Barthes Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of...

The course of true love never did run smooth.... When Fitzwilliam Darcy departs Hunsford after his disastrous proposal to Elizabeth Bennet, he does not expect their paths to cross again. Indeed, knowing the lady's true feelings for him, he makes every effort to see that they do not. But when a chance encounter leaves him stranded in an abandoned cottage with the one woman he can never have, Darcy quickly realizes there is more at risk than just Elizabeth's reputation.

Lyman Frank Baum was an American children's book writer best-known for creating the popular Wizard of Oz series. Baum was a prolific writer who wrote 14 novels in the Oz series, plus 41 other novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems, and about 42 scripts. He often wrote under pseudonyms. Of all the books, the one that made Baum a household name was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

PASSION, MENSONGES, TRAHISONS, DUELS, MEURTRES : UN EXCELLENT ROMAN DE CAPE ET D'ÉPÉE ! Paris, une nuit de février 1578. Six ans ont passé depuis le massacre de la Saint-Barthélémy. Dans une ruelle sombre des abords de la Bastille, Bussy d'Amboise, gentilhomme courageux et loyal, tombe dans l'embuscade que les mignons du roi Henri III lui ont tendue. Seul contre cinq, il ne doit la vie sauve qu'à l'intervention providentielle d'une belle inconnue blonde comme un ange : Diane de Méridor.

On the eve of a popular rebellion, the Chinese government starts to crack down in cities across the country. Fleeing the turmoil, Wang Yuan, the son of a famous general and grandson of the patriarch of The Good Earth, leaves for America to study agriculture. When he returns to China six years later, he encounters a nation still in the grip of violent uprisings. Unprepared for the social upheaval, Wang is torn by the tensions between old traditions and new ways and by his formidable family, whose struggles he hopes to solve.

《金瓶梅》借《水浒传》中武松杀嫂一段故事为引子，通过对兼有官僚、恶霸、富商三种身份的封建时代市侩势力的代表人物西门庆及其家庭罪恶生活的描述，揭露了明代中叶社会的黑暗和腐败…… 《金瓶梅》借《水滸傳》中武松殺嫂一段故事為引子，通過對兼有官僚、惡霸、富商三種身份的封建時代市儈勢力的代表人物西門慶及其家庭罪惡生活的描述，揭露了明代中葉社會的黑暗和腐敗……

The Crusaders, led by Richard I of England, are encamped in the Holy Land, and torn by the dissensions and jealousies of the leaders, including, besides Coeur de Lion himself, Philip of France, the duke of Austria, the Marquis of Montferrat, and the Grand Master of the Templars. The army's impotence is accentuated by the illness of Richard.

In this exciting tale, the legend of Amy Robsart and her secret marriage to the earl of Leicester comes alive in a blend of historical fact and fanciful fiction.

In Clea, the concluding part of the Alexandria Quartet, Darley returns to Alexandria now caught by war-fever. The conflagration has its effect on his circle - on Nessim and Justine, Balthazar and Clea, Mountolive and Pombal - and a clarity of purpose emerges as the story moves toward its cadence.

An amateur production of The Tempest provides a colorful backdrop for a hilarious look at unrequited love. Mathematics teacher Hector Mackilwraith, stirred and troubled by Shakespeare's play, falls in love with the beautiful Griselda Webster. When Griselda shows she has plans of her own, Hector despairs on the play's opening night.

ABSALOM, ABSALOM! tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, the enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson township in the early 1830s. With a French architect and a band of wild Haitians, he wrung a fabulous plantation out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. Sutpen was a man...

“The first English translation in more than fifty years of Alessandro Manzoni’s masterpiece, a work of foundational Italian literature on par with the Divine Comedy and the Decameron.”—The Wall Street Journal “An exemplary historical novel” (The New Yorker) from the father of modern...

Hopalong Cassidy has received a message from the dead. Answering an urgent appeal for help from fellow cowpuncher Pete Melford, he rides in only to discover that his old friend has been murdered and the ranch Pete left to his niece, Cindy Blair, has vanished without a trace. Hopalong may have...