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  War and Peace Book 02: 1805

  Leo Tolstoy

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  War and Peace (Russian: ????? ? ???, Voyna i mir; in original orthography: ????? ? ????, Voyna i mir") is an epic novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869 in Russki Vestnik, which tells the story of Russian society during the Napoleonic Era. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy's two major masterpieces (the other being Anna Karenina) as well as one of the world's greatest novels.  War and Peace offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth, age and marriage. While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics of Tolstoy's time did not consider it as such. Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina (1878) to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense. (Summary by Wikipedia)Note: The novel is split up in 15 books. This is the recording of book two, which covers events in the year 1805. The recording of the next book can be found here. The recording of book one can be found here.

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  John Burnet of Barns

  John Buchan

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  A young man must fight for his land and the woman he loves in 17th-century Scotland, in this historical novel by the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps. The turbulent “Killing Times” of the Covenanters is the backdrop to a desperate struggle between lifelong rivals . . . John Burnet of Barns, the last of an ancient line of Border Reivers, returns home from abroad to find himself denounced as an agent of the Covenanters. Outlawed and deprived of his inheritance by his ruthless cousin, Captain Gilbert Burnet, John must now fight just to survive . . . John Buchan's first full-length work of fiction is a tale of adventure in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson.

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  In Freedom's Cause

  G. A. Henty

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  Another stirring tale from the master of historical fiction set in the time of Robert Bruce and William Wallace and their struggle for Scotland's independence. (Summary by Annise)

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  Misérables Les: Volume One

  Victor Hugo

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  This is book one of five of Les Misérables audiobook. One of the great classics of western literature, Les Misérables is a magisterial work which is rich in both character portrayal and meticulous historical description. 
  Characters such as the absurdly criminalised Valjean, the street urchin Gavroche, the rascal Thenardier, the implacable detective Javert, and the pitiful figure of the prostitute Fantine and her daughter Cosette, have entered the pantheon of literary dramatis personae. 
  The listener is also treated to the unforgettable descriptions of the Battle of Waterloo and Valjean’s flight through the Paris sewers.

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  Life and Death and Other Stories...

  Henryk Sienkiewicz

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  Henryk Sienkiewicz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905, but as he wrote in Polish many English-speakers are unfamiliar with his work. This short story collection is a sampler of five myths and legends which he collected. The "Life and Death" of the title is a Hindu legend, the rest of Polish stories. All are short and together form a little taste of this great author who is too often unknown to English readers. - Summary by Beth Thomas

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  Daddy Was a Number Runner - A Novel

  Louise Meriwether

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  This modern classic is “a tough, tender, bitter novel of a black girl struggling towards womanhood” in 1930s Harlem—with a foreword by James Baldwin (Publishers Weekly).   Depression-era Harlem is home for twelve-year-old Francie Coffin and her family, and it’s both a place of refuge and the source of untold dangers for her and her poor, working class family. The beloved “daddy” of the title indeed becomes a number runner when he is unable to find legal work, and while one of Francie’s brothers dreams of becoming a chemist, the other is already in a gang. Francie is a dreamer, too, but there are risks in everything from going to the movies to walking down the block, and her pragmatism eventually outweighs her hope; “We was all poor and black and apt to stay that way, and that was that.”   First published in 1970, Daddy Was a Number Runner is one of the seminal novels of the black experience in America. The New York Times Book Review proclaimed it “a most important novel.”

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