Historical Fiction Girl

Sarah, Plain and Tall, Skylark, and Caleb's Story, all unabridged and all performed beautifully by Academy Award-winning actress Glenn Close, make up this exquisite audio collection.

Sunderland, 1942: Polly's heart and her future are hanging in the balance. Polly’s sweetheart Tommy has been declared missing while serving overseas, and although there is no certainty that he is dead, there is no guarantee that he will return home. Now Polly needs her friends more than ever, and the other women welders are ready to rally around her while she waits for news. The only one not showing support is shipyard manager Helen.

With her brother, Thomas, injured on the battlefront in the colonies, orphaned Cecilia Harcourt has two unbearable choices: move in with a maiden aunt or marry a scheming cousin. Instead she chooses option three and travels across the Atlantic, determined to nurse her brother back to health. But after a week of searching, she finds not her brother but his best friend, the handsome officer Edward Rokesby.

The Industrial Revolution has escalated into all-out warfare. Sixteen years have passed since the Heterodyne Boys, benevolent adventurers and inventors, disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Today, Europe is ruled by the Sparks, dynasties of mad scientists ruling over - and terrorizing - the hapless population with their bizarre inventions and unchecked power, while the downtrodden dream of the Heterodynes’ return. At Transylvania Polygnostic University, a pretty, young student named Agatha Clay seems to have nothing but bad luck.

Charity Steane has nothing in the world but hope. Escaping a miserable life under her tyrannical aunt, she decides to take her chances with her estranged grandfather in London. Now it's just a matter of finding him.... And as a 'charity girl' with no dowry and no options, hope can only get her so far. But with the help of the dashing and kind-hearted Desford and his dearest friend Hetta, it seems like Charity's fortunes might be about to change. That is, until the surprise appearance of a long-lost relative throws things into chaos.

Mrs. Sookie Poole of Point Clear, Alabama, has just married off the last of her daughters and is looking forward to relaxing and perhaps traveling with her husband, Earle. The only thing left to contend with is her mother, the formidable Lenore Simmons Krackenberry. Lenore may be a lot of fun for other people, but is, for the most part, an overbearing presence for her daughter. Then one day, quite by accident, Sookie discovers a secret about her mother's past that knocks her for a loop and suddenly calls into question everything she ever thought she knew about herself, her family, and her future.

When Rosie Frost was jilted on her wedding day, she didn’t think life could get any worse. But six years later in the throes of the Second World War, she is unceremoniously dismissed from her dream job after they discover her illegitimate child. Thankfully, top secret war office Bletchley Park recognises Rosie’s talent and recruits her to decipher their Italian naval signals. Happy to be doing her bit for the war effort, Rosie settles into her new life.

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents captures the vivid lives of the Garcia sisters, four privileged and rebellious Dominican girls adapting to their new lives in America. In the 1960s, political tension forces the Garcia family away from Santo Domingo and toward the Bronx. The sisters all hit their strides in America, adapting and thriving despite cultural differences, language barriers, and prejudice.

He's a rake, a scoundrel, a duke, and a former soldier...and he'll fight to the death for the woman he loves.

Brighton, 1950. The body of a girl is found cut into three pieces. Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is convinced the killer is mimicking a famous magic trick—the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old war friend of Edgar’s. They served together in a shadowy unit called the Magic Men, a special ops troop that used stage tricks to confound the enemy. Max is on the traveling show circuit, touring seaside towns with ventriloquists, sword-swallowers and dancing girls.

In 1950s Dublin, life is hard and jobs are like gold dust. Nineteen-year-old Nell Flynn is training to be a nurse and planning to marry her boyfriend, Liam Connor, when her mother dies, leaving her younger sisters destitute. To save them from the workhouse, Nell returns to the family home - a mere two rooms at the top of a condemned tenement. Nell finds work at a biscuit factory and, at first, they scrape through each week.

When the Berlin Wall goes up, Karin is on the wrong side of the city. Overnight, she’s trapped under Soviet rule in unforgiving East Berlin and separated from her twin sister, Jutta. Karin and Jutta lead parallel lives for years, cut off by the Wall. But Karin finds one reason to keep going: Otto, the man who gives her hope, even amidst the brutal East German regime.

Ricardo ve cumplido, a una edad muy temprana, el sueño que en su Lima natal alimentó desde que tenía uso de razón: vivir en París. Pero el rencuentro con un amor de adolescencia lo cambiará todo. La joven, inconformista, aventurera, pragmática e inquieta, lo arrastrará fuera del pequeño mundo de sus ambiciones.

It's 1945. Surviving the brutality of a Nazi prison camp, Marta Nederman is lucky to have escaped with her life. Recovering from the horror, she meets Paul, an American soldier who gives her hope of a happier future. But their plans to meet in London are dashed when Paul's plane crashes. Devastated and pregnant, Marta marries Simon, a caring British diplomat, and glimpses the joy that home and family can bring. But her happiness is threatened when she learns of a Communist spy in British intelligence.

Virginia, 1852: Seventeen-year-old Josephine Bell decides to run from the failing tobacco farm where she is a slave and nurse to her ailing mistress, the aspiring artist Lu Anne Bell. New York City, 2004: Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in an elite law firm, is given a difficult, highly sensitive assignment that could make her career: she must find the "perfect plaintiff" to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.

Sunderland, 1941. With a brief break in air raids providing some much-needed respite from the war, things are looking up for head welder Rosie, who has fallen head over heels for Detective Sergeant Miller. But how long can their romance last in such uncertain times? Life remains full of challenges for Gloria, who must face her abusive ex-husband and confront her own guilty conscience about baby Hope’s real father. The secret is tearing her apart but if she admits the truth, she will risk losing everything.

Russia, 1905: Thirteen-year-old Ruth dreams of growing up to marry the boy next door and living peacefully ever after. But when he and her father are forced to flee to America after the Bloody Sunday Massacre, Ruth and the other female members of the family are left behind amid the violence and chaos of revolutionary Russia.

Portland, 1888. Amid the subterranean labyrinth of the notorious Shanghai Tunnels, a woman awakens in an underground cell, drugged and disguised. Celia soon realizes she’s a “Shanghaied” victim on the verge of being shipped off as forced labor, leaving behind those she loves most. Although well-accustomed to adapting for survival—being half-Chinese, passing as white during an era fraught with anti-Chinese sentiment—she fears that far more than her own fate hangs in the balance.

Nineteen-year-old Libby moves to Berlin to escape her suffocating family - but instead of offering freedom, the city is under siege by the Nazis. Jewish books are burned, storefronts smashed and every day innocent people vanish into thin air. Libby cannot - will not - turn a blind eye. When Libby meets Harro, she knows there’s more to him than his dazzling smile and cornflower-blue eyes. The whip marks on his back, scars from the SS, tell his true story: He is a resistance fighter.

Lucinda McFarlane is engaged to be married to dashing Sir David Melcome, but their society wedding has to be scaled right down when war is declared. Will David even live to see their baby born? Mabel Oakley, once a maid for the McFarlanes, has inherited Thomas Clarke’s printing works, but an unexpected turn of events leaves her at the mercy of her father’s old enemy, solicitor John Sheridan, just as she is beginning to fall for his son. What can she do?