Showing results by publisher "Hachette Audio" in Historical Fiction

Meet Ottie Lee Henshaw, a startling, challenging beauty in small-town Indiana. Quick of mind, she navigates a stifling marriage, a lecherous boss, and, on one day in the summer of 1930, an odyssey across the countryside to witness a dark and fearful celebration.

Molly and Gene Myers were happy, until tragedy blighted their hopes of children. During the years of darkness and despair, they each put their marriage in jeopardy, but now they are starting to rebuild their fragile bond. This is the year of Woodstock and the moon landings; war is raging in Vietnam and the superpowers are threatening each other with annihilation. Then the Meteor crashes into Amber Grove, devastating the small New England town - and changing their lives for ever.

The year is 1972, and the beaches of Los Angeles are the center of the world. Dropping into the embers of the drug and surf scene is Suzy Whitman, who has tossed her newly minted Vassar degree aside to follow her older sister into open skies and the borderless adventures of stewardessing for Grand Pacific Airlines. In Sela del Mar, California - a hedonistic beach town in the shadow of LAX - Suzy skateboards, suntans, and flies daily and nightly across the country.

Impossibly beautiful, disarmingly witty, and completely self-absorbed: Meet Lady Susan Vernon, both the heart and the thorn of Love & Friendship. Recently widowed, with a daughter who's coming of age as quickly as their funds are dwindling, Lady Susan makes it her mission to find them wealthy husbands - and fast.

Vocho and Kacha are brother and sister, and between them they've got quite a reputation. They were once known for the finest swordplay in the city of Reyes. The only problem is ever since they were thrown out of the Duelist's Guild for accidentally killing a man they were sworn to protect, it seems everyone wants them dead. Including a dark magician whose plans they recently thwarted....

Uprooted from Shanghai with her father and twin brother, young Cassandra finds the Black Isle's bustling, immigrant-filled seaport, swampy jungle, and grand rubber plantations a sharp contrast to the city of her childhood. And she soon makes another discovery: the Black Isle is swarming with ghosts. Haunted and lonely, Cassandra at first tries to ignore her ability to see the restless apparitions that drift down the street and crouch in cold corners at school. Yet despite her struggles with these spirits, Cassandra comes to love her troubled new home.

One night in autumn 1944, a gunshot echoes through the alleyways of a small town in occupied Poland. An SS officer is shot dead by a young Polish Jew, Margarita Ejzenstain. In retaliation, his commander orders the execution of 37 Poles - one for every year of the dead man's life. First hidden by a sympathetic German couple, Margarita must then flee the brutal advance of the Soviet army with her newborn baby. So begins a thrilling panorama of intermingled destinies and events that reverberate from that single act of defiance.

Post-war Boston is down on its luck and looking for change. A year after the Great Brink's Robbery - the largest robbery in the history of the United States - Boston is known more for its seedy underbelly than for its rich, historical past. The winter of 1951 is the worst in recent memory, and the Bruins are suffering another losing season.Like Boston itself, lifelong residents Cal O'Brien and Dante Cooper are struggling to find their identities after World War II.

It's 1988 at the University of Sussex, where kids sport Mohawks and light up to the otherworldly sounds of the Cocteau Twins, as conversation drifts from structuralism to Thatcher to the bloody Labour students. Hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, David Heller has taken a job as a live-in aide to current quadriplegic and former playboy Hans Bromwell - in part to extend his stay studying abroad, but, in truth, he's looking to escape his own family, still paralyzed by the death of his younger sister 10 years on.

What if our homes could tell the stories of others who lived there before us? Set in a small village near Paris, The Balcony follows the inhabitants of a single estate - including a manor and a servants' cottage - over the course of several generations, from the Belle Époque to the present day, introducing us to a fascinating cast of characters. A young American au pair develops a crush on her brilliant employer. An ex-courtesan shocks the servants, a Jewish couple in hiding from the Gestapo attract the curiosity of the neighbors, and a housewife begins an affair.

When Russian tanks roll into the public squares of Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution, brothers Robert and Attila Beck flee with their family to the Paris townhouse of their great-aunt Hermina. The year is 1956, and as their country changes forever, these two boys transform as well, confronting danger and wonders previously unknown. As they travel through minefields both real and imagined, Robert and Attila grapple with sibling rivalry, family secrets, and incalculable loss.

In 1907 Wisconsin, seventeen-year-old Marie Reehs is determined: She will not marry a violent man, as did her mother and grandmother before her. Day after day, Marie toils at the local laundry, watched by an older man who wants to claim her for his own. Night after night, she is haunted by the memory of her mother, who died in a mysterious accident to which her father was the only witness. She longs for an independent life, but her older sister wants nothing more than to maintain the family as it was, with its cruel rules and punishments.

Russell's Knob is not paradise. But already in 1863 this New Jersey highlands settlement is home to a diverse population of blacks and whites and reds who have intermarried and lived in relative harmony for generations. It is a haven for Dossie Bird, who has escaped north along the Underground Railroad and now feels the embrace of the Smoot family: Duncan (so much older than Dossie; could he expect her to be his helpmeet?), his reticent sister, his exuberant nephews, and a circle of friends that includes the local spirit woman, Noelle.

Maggie Gleason is looking toward the future. Part of a midcentury wave of young women seeking new lives in New York City, Maggie works for legendary Port Authority public relations maven Lee K. Jaffe - affectionately known to her loyal staff as Mrs. J. Pauline Moreau is running from the past - and a shameful secret. She arrives in the city on the brink of despair, saddled with a young daughter who needs more love, attention, and resources than Pauline can ever hope to provide. Mrs. J tasks Maggie with befriending and looking after Pauline.

When the eldest daughter of a whaling family in New South Wales sets out to write about the particularly difficult season of 1908, the story she tells reveals itself to be far larger than she ever expected. As her family struggles to survive, and as she attempts to navigate sibling rivalries and all-consuming first love, 19-year-old Mary will soon discover a shocking side to these men who hunt the seas and the truth of her own place among them.

Beginning in 1962 with a shocking loss, Shining Sea quickly pulls us into the lives of 43-year-old Michael Gannon's widow and offspring. Brilliantly described and utterly alive, the Gannon clan find themselves charting paths they never anticipated for decades to come.

Investigator Lom returns to Mirgorod and finds the city in the throes of a crisis. The war against the Archipelago is not going well. Enemy divisions are massing outside the city, air raids are a daily occurrence and the citizens are being conscripted into the desperate defense of the city. But Lom has other concerns. The police are after him, the mystery of the otherworldly Pollandore remains and the vast Angel is moving, turning all of nature against the city. But will the horrors of war overtake all their plans?

In 1920s Munich, the body of Anna Gross, a young society wife, has been found in the English Gardens, still clothed in finery. Soon a second body is discovered, also a woman of high society. When a third body is found, homicide detective Axel Berg realizes he's dealing with unprecedented evil. Is the murderer politically motivated? Is he a lone madman? Or worse, is the killer possessed by both political and personal demons?

It's July 1940, and 11-year-old Lydia has just run away from life as a child evacuee in Wales. She arrives in her English village, gas mask in tow, only to find it abandoned. Her family's house is shuttered and empty, the windows covered by black-out blinds - but Lydia settles in, determined to wait there until they return.

Set against the seductive world of 1960s Rio de Janeiro, an exquisite debut novel about family secrets, divided loyalties, and what we're willing to do to save ourselves. This mesmerizing first novel follows a glamorous family as they prepare to leave the seeming paradise of Brazil for Canada in the wake to the mysterious disappearance - and presumed drowning - of their eldest daughter a year earlier.