Best Historical Fiction Audiobooks

The night after Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son is buried, the dead of a Georgetown graveyard talk over each other about the grieving father who keeps returning to the crypt. On the page it is a collage of voices and quotations; in audio it is a cast of more than a hundred and sixty readers, one per voice, and the form stops being difficult and becomes obvious.

One caveat: The first twenty minutes are disorienting by design. Tell the recipient to stay with it.

A 1970s Los Angeles rock band breaks up at the height of its fame, and the whole novel is the oral history assembled decades later. A full cast takes one interviewee each, so the contradictions between their accounts land as people disagreeing rather than as text on facing pages.

A foster child in a German town outside Munich steals books through the war years, and the narrator of the novel is Death, who tells you what is coming and then tells it anyway. A book written in a speaking voice, and the one title here that almost nobody dislikes.

One caveat: The ending is signposted early and still lands hard.

A Russian count is sentenced in 1922 to live out his life in an attic room of the Metropol hotel, and makes a world of a staircase, a barbershop and a restaurant. The comedy is carried entirely by register, which is exactly what a good reader does best.

Two French sisters take opposite paths through the German occupation: one hides people in a village house, the other runs escape routes. The chapters alternate between them, which in audio does the work a reader does with a bookmark.

One caveat: Occupation-era violence, including sexual violence, is on the page.

In 1596 Stratford a glover's son has gone to London and his eleven-year-old boy is dying at home, and the novel belongs to the boy's mother. Present tense, close to the skin, and written with a cadence that a narrator can hold for ten hours.

Four generations of a Korean family in Japan, beginning with a pregnant teenager in a boarding house in 1910s Busan. Audio solves the name problem that stops many readers on page one, because a Korean and Japanese cast of names is pronounced for you rather than guessed.

One caveat: Long, and the generational jumps are easier to track in print.

Two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana — one sold into slavery, one married to a slaver — and then one chapter per descendant down seven generations on two continents. Each chapter is a complete story, which makes it unusually good for listening in single sittings.

One caveat: Fourteen protagonists in fourteen chapters. Keep the family tree in the ebook sample open if that matters to them.