New Reviews: Historical Fiction

A tour-de-force performance by Gemma Whelan makes listening to this audiobook worthwhile. Jane Boleyn--Lady Rocheford--is a canny observer. She watches, she waits, she gathers information, and she reveals secrets to her spymaster, Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell then uses the damaging particulars against his enemies. Whelan portrays each character with enthusiasm, growling... Read More

English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald took a mostly undocumented half-year sojourn to Mexico in the 1950s, and this new story by Jessica Francis Kane is a fictional account of that visit. Cerris Morgan-Moyer narrates as Fitzgerald and her young son become guests of two capricious spinsters who are distant relatives in small-town Fonseca. Their ambiguous invitation implied the... Read More

Andrew Miller narrates his newest audiobook, which was a finalist for this year's Booker Prize. Set during England's great winter freeze of 1962-1963, this ambitious story focuses on two married couples who are neighbors in a village. Eric is a doctor married to Irene, a former society girl, while Bill, an inexperienced farmer, is with Rita, a working-class girl with a... Read More

Kristin Atherton narrates the story of Grace, a young woman who is isolated at her unpleasant aunt's rambling English mansion at the close of the Victorian era. Grace's obsession with secretly painting perfect copies of famous works of art is interrupted when a man claiming to be her long-lost cousin Charles arrives to claim his inheritance. Atherton portrays the self-possessed... Read More

The compelling voice of skilled narrator Almarie Guerra transports listeners to the physical and spiritual world of a Taino village in early 1500s Cuba, where the supernatural is ever present in daily life. After Spanish forces attack the village, four young survivors undertake a grueling quest to preserve the Tainos' sacred heritage. Three are from different Indigenous... Read More

John Ridge, son of a Cherokee leader, finds himself at odds with the Christian values he's learned at a New England school. They don't align with the realities he's come to observe: racism and attempts at sowing tribal division. The strength and hope in narrator Cameron DelGrosso's voice gradually fades when Ridge returns home and the brutal seizure of Cherokee lands begins.... Read More

In a soft, melodic voice, Saskia Maarleveld breathes life into this novel set in 1895 London. Lady Duxbury, a three-time widow who survived an abusive marriage, shelters three vulnerable young women under the guise of a book club. Eleanor, a physically and emotionally abused mother; Rose, an American dollar princess; and Lavinia, a bullied young woman with a domineering father,... Read More