Historical Fiction

Early in The Women, a twenty-one-year-old nursing student named Frankie McGrath stands in her father’s study, looks at the “heroes’ wall” of men in her family, and asks a question no one wants to answer: why isn’t there a woman…

Edward Herrmann’s narration is all warmth and gravel, the kind of voice that makes you trust every word. A few spoiler-free thoughts on the Lincoln Highway audiobook, then. That’s exactly the gift The Lincoln Highway needs on audio, where Amor…

The first thing you notice is Miranda Raison’s poise. Settle in for my take on the Lessons in Chemistry audiobook. She reads Elizabeth Zott the way Elizabeth would want to be read — precise, unhurried, faintly amused at everyone who…

What happens to the women the old myths shove to the margins — the ones handed a single adjective, usually “witch,” and then written out of the story? Below is how the Circe audiobook actually plays out loud. Madeline Miller…

Madeline Miller took a myth roughly three thousand years old and made it feel like fresh news. This is the Song of Achilles audiobook, from one listener to another. On audio, The Song of Achilles turns Homer’s ancient story of…

There’s a particular unease that comes with a book everyone already has opinions about. Let me walk you through the Help audiobook. The Help has been a book-club staple, a hit film, and a lightning rod all at once, so…

You begin with two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana who never meet, and by the end you have followed their bloodlines across three hundred years and seven generations. Settle in for my take on the Homegoing audiobook. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing carries…

John Lee starts talking and you can almost hear the weather change. Settle in for my take on the Pillars of the Earth audiobook. His narration of The Pillars of the Earth opens on a hanging in the cold, and…

How does an eighteen-year-old who would rather chase girls and listen to Frank Sinatra records end up guiding refugees over the Alps on foot, then sliding into the passenger seat of one of the most powerful men in occupied Italy?…

Elsa Martinelli is a woman the world wrote off as plain and unlovable, right up until the Texas dust and the Great Depression demanded she become something far fiercer. Let me walk you through the Four Winds audiobook. The Four…