Gothic Historical Fiction

Finally available as an audiobook, Joyce Carol Oates' lost classic: a satirical, often surreal, and beautifully plotted Gothic romance that follows the exploits of the audacious Zinn sisters, whose 19th-century pursuit of adventurous lives turns a lens on contemporary American culture.

Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London.

In the first of a brand-new series set in Victorian England, a young woman returns home from India after the death of her family to discover her identity and inheritance are challenged by the man who holds her future in his hands.

The year is 1901, and Ada Byrd―spinster, schoolmarm, amateur naturalist―accepts a teaching post in isolated Lowry Bridge, grateful for the chance to re-establish herself where no one knows her secrets. She develops friendships with her neighbors, explores the woods with her students, and begins to see a future in this tiny farming community. Her past―riddled with grief and shame―has never seemed so far away. But then Ada begins to witness strange and grisly phenomena: a swarm of dying crickets, a self-mutilating rabbit, a malformed faun.

Dick Young is lent a house in Cornwall by his friend Professor Magnus Lane. During his stay he agrees to serve as a guinea pig for a new drug that Magnus has discovered in his scientific research. When Dick samples Magnus' potion, he finds himself doing the impossible: traveling through time while staying in place, thrown all the way back into Medieval Cornwall. The concoction wears off after several hours, but its effects are intoxicating and Dick cannot resist his newfound powers.

While on routine patrol in the tinder-dry Topanga Canyon, environmental scientist Rafael Salazar expects to find animal poachers, not a dilapidated antique steamer trunk. Inside the peculiar case, he discovers a journal, written by the renowned Robert Louis Stevenson, which divulges ominous particulars about his creation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It also promises to reveal a terrible secret - the identity of Jack the Ripper.

1813. Lizzie's beloved older sister Esme is sold in marriage to the ageing Lord Blountford to settle their father's debts. One year later, Esme is dead, and Lizzie is sent to take her place as Lord Blountford's next wife. Arriving at Ambletye Manor, Lizzie uncovers a twisted web of secrets, not least that she is to be the fifth mistress of this house. Marisa. Anne. Pansy. Esme. What happened to the four wives who came before her? In possession of a unique gift, only Lizzie can hear their stories, and try to find a way to save herself from sharing the same fate.

After nearly two years and with one token left to hide, a powerful magical event hits Talohna and causes the failure of the most important spell Kael has ever cast. The horrific results leave him a wanted man and all of his efforts to form an alliance against the Ri’Tek fall apart. With the tokens hidden at last, Kael wants nothing more than to forget the past and to spend time with his family, but knowing they will never be safe no matter where they hide, he recruits Treach in a bid to scour the Arcane Library catacombs for an answer.

1115 A.D. A time when things were still straightforward and unadulterated, when evil had been cast out. Good prevailed on Earth and all the devils were imprisoned in Hell, or so they thought. Lucifer had been defeated and imprisoned in the underworld for all of eternity, but there were flaws in the system, and the evil being was determined to take advantage of every opportunity to enjoy his spoils, no matter the price. When Darkness Falls and the monsters of myth are released, will the innocent be able to remain pure and unaffected by their allure? Do they really want to, or is the ...

In an eruption of dust and women’s tears, the young nobleman rode off to fight against Colonel Napoleon. Signorina Isabella, standing within the family circle yet separated by modest clothing, watched him gallop away down the southern slopes of Vesuvius, chastising herself for the silly ache in her heart...

Rumor said the powerful Nicolai DeMarco could command the heavens, that the beasts below did his bidding... and that he was doomed to destroy the woman he took as wife. It was whispered he was not wholly human - as untamed as his tawny mane and slashing amber eyes. Impoverished aristocrat Isabella Vernaducci would defy death itself to rescue her imprisoned brother. She’d even brave the haunted, accursed lair of the lion - the menacing palace of legendary, lethal Don Nicolai DeMarco.

In the spring of 1912, American writer Arthur Pearce is reeling from the wounds inflicted by a disastrous marriage. But his plans to travel abroad, write a new novel, and forget about his ex-wife are interrupted by a young woman he encounters on a London-bound train. Her name is Sarah Coyle, and the tale she tells him chills his blood. Sarah’s younger sister has been entranced by Count Richard Dunning, who is rumored to dabble in bizarre religious rites and experimental medicine. Arthur agrees to help, but he has no idea of what awaits him at Altarbook, Sarah’s ancestral mansion

The Winter Rose of Northumberland A love tested by scandal. A past shrouded in whispers. A place she never truly belonged—until now. When Eleanor Whitmore’s father, the village parson, dies, she is left with nothing but a tarnished name and a town full of whispers. Langmere has never fully claimed her as its own, and when rumors of her mother’s mysterious past resurface, Eleanor is faced with a choice: stay and fight for her place, or leave behind the only home she has ever known. Nathaniel Grahame is a man forged in war, tasked with rebuilding the estate of a noble family that has ...

Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king. But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realises that her beloved is capable of terrible things. Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husband's dark secrets.

Bringing 16th century Languedoc vividly to life, Kate Mosse's The Burning Chambers is a gripping story of love and betrayal, mysteries and secrets; of war and adventure, conspiracies and divided loyalties....

Bram Stoker kept secret a tale even more terrifying than Dracula. It begins among the Carpathian peaks, when an intrepid explorer discovers a mysterious golden box. She brings it back with her to the foggy streets of Victorian London, unaware of its dangerous power…or that an evil beyond imagining has already taken root in the city. Stoker, a successful theater manager but frustrated writer, is drawn into a deadly web spun by the wealthy founders of a mission house for the poor. Far from a safe haven, the mission harbors a dark and terrifying secret.

In the dying days of 1850, the young detective Charles Maddox takes on a new case. His client? The only surviving son of the long-dead poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his wife Mary, author of Frankenstein. Charles soon finds himself being drawn into the bitter battle being waged over the poet's literary legacy. When a chance discovery raises doubts about the death of Shelley's first wife, Harriet, he starts to question whether she did kill herself—or whether what really happened was far more sinister…

Browsing an antiques shop in Wiltshire, Alison Bannister stumbles across a delicate old portrait - identified as the doomed Tudor queen Anne Boleyn. Except Alison knows better. The subject is Mary Seymour, the daughter of Katherine Parr, who was taken to Wolf Hall in 1557 and presumed dead after going missing as a child. And Alison knows this because she, too, lived at Wolf Hall and knew Mary...more than 400 years ago.

Paris, 1866: When Baroness Sylvie Devereux receives a house call from Charlotte Mothe, the sister she disowned, she fears her shady past as a spirit medium has caught up with her. But with their father ill and Charlotte unable to pay his bills, Sylvie is persuaded into one last con. Their marks are the de Jacquinots: dysfunctional aristocrats who believe they are haunted by their great aunt, brutally murdered during the French Revolution.

1798, France. Nuns move along the dark corridors of a Versailles hospital where the young Sister Perpetué has been tasked with sitting with the patient who must always be watched. The man, gaunt, with his sallow skin and distended belly, is dying: they say he ate a golden fork, and that it’s killing him from the inside. But that’s not all—he is rumored to have done monstrous things in his attempts to sate an insatiable appetite…an appetite they say tortures him still.