New Reviews: Historical Fiction

Saskia Maarleveld and Brittany Pressley team up to narrate a story with dual time frames, set in the Dakota, the famous New York City apartment building. Maarleveld performs the chapters that take place in the 1880s, when Sara arrives from London to help manage the new building. Pressley takes over when the audiobook jumps 100 years to focus on Bailey, an interior designer for... Read More

Kirby Heyborne is a wonderful narrator who is well suited to this first-person story of pioneer Daniel Boone's life. Brought up as a Quaker, he was twice captured by Indians and then participated in the Revolutionary War. Narrative on Boone's thoughts and actions as well as clever, well-written period dialogue, delivered in Heyborne's assured and gentle voice, provides richly... Read More

As is her exquisite habit, Cassandra Campbell immerses herself in her narration of this audiobook, re-creating the voice of Thomas Jefferson's daughter, Patsy, with pathos and verve. Campbell's use of a genteel Virginia accent suits the drama of this historical novel, but the overall experience can, at times, verge on the extreme. While the novel seems meticulously researched,... Read More

This audio experience is truly horrifying. It's not Wingate's writing, which is gripping, evocative, and colorful. The narration is, likewise, admirable. Emily Rankin and Catherine Taber are polished narrators who give us sympathetic, memorable characters whose voices are age appropriate and conventionally Southern. What's horrific is the story itself, which describes the... Read More

Narrator John Lee returns to Kingsbridge, the fictitious English city of Ken Follett's historical fiction epics based in the Middle Ages. Now in the shadow of Martin Luther's Reformation and Bloody Mary's persecution of heretics in the mid-sixteenth century, the Willard and Fitzgerald families find themselves on opposite sides of the struggle between Protestants and Catholics.... Read More

This audiobook has all the ingredients to be a rip-roaring fictional trip through ancient Rome--food, lust, murder, politics, and Simon Vance, one of the top narrators in the business. However, Vance's fine performance can't disguise the book's weaknesses, which make it a bit of a disappointment. Thrasius, a slave who is great in the kitchen, is purchased by Marcus Gavius... Read More

Katherine Kellgren narrates this romance of painting and painters, set in Norway, with a variety of brisk British accents. Twenty-year-old Johanne Lien, a young woman who is painter Edvard Munch's friend, is sent to work at the local admiral's house. When the admiral's daughter, Tullik, falls in love with Munch, the story begins to twist with secrecy and lies. Kellgren works... Read More

This fictional account of Eliza Lucas, who was left in charge of her family's South Carolina plantations in the 1700s, unfolds through Saskia Maarleveld's first-person narration. She portrays a 16-year-old young woman who quickly matures when she's given responsibilities that would normally fall to men. There are moments of girlishness that seep into Maarleveld's tone when the... Read More

Narrator Bianca Amato delivers another flawless performance as author Philippa Gregory reaches deep into history, using impeccable research to speculate on the hearts and minds of three Tudor women. While many listeners know the tragic story of Jane Grey, who was queen for nine days, before she was executed, fewer know of her sisters, Catherine and Mary, who were also rightful... Read More

Allyson Ryan and George Newbern alternate narrating this story, set in Nazi-occupied Austria and in California 50 years later. In 1989, Katie discovers an unsent, unopened Nazi-era letter from Austria in her elderly father's stamp collection, setting her on quest to find the recipient. In 1938, Kristoff, an apprentice to a Jewish stamp engraver, falls in love with his boss's... Read More

Elisabeth Rodgers gives a nuanced reading of this multilayered audiobook. She modulates her tone, and varies her cadence and delivery to effect the different voices of the men and women who populate the fascinating world of this novel, which moves from the 1930s and '40s to the present. Her understated approach works well to elucidate a complex plot that begins with a... Read More

Narrator Bruce Mann's voice commands attention from the first moments of Allison and Owen Pataki's carefully researched, if ponderous, novel of the French Revolution. French citizens shouting liberty, equality, and fraternity have overthrown the monarchy of the most reviled king, Louis XVI, and his detested queen, Marie Antoinette. Aristocrat André Valière's father is... Read More

Underdown's atmospheric historical novel follows Alice Hopkins through grief, warring loyalties, and difficult choices in seventeenth-century England, a period of witch-hunting. While narrator Roy McMillan drops in periodically to lend deep and somber tones as Alice's brother, Matthew, recites passages from his journal, the bulk of the narration is performed by Lucy Brownhill.... Read More