History Audiobooks | LoveReading

Island Refuge: A History of Refugees in Britain

A sweeping and intimately told history of exiles and refugees. How have those who arrived on Britain’s shores shaped its history? For most of its history, Great Britain cherished its outward image as a safe haven for those displaced by religious persecution, political violence or economic crisis – an island of stability in the midst of a cruel, chaotic world. Today, however, refugees seeking to reach Britain most often face perilous journeys, impossible bureaucracy and acidic public opinion. In Island Refuge, migration scholar Matthew Lockwood overturns many of today’s misconceptions by revisiting both our history of migrants and the way British attitudes have flexed and changed over time. This is a profoundly moving and illuminating history, woven together through the stories of individuals: Frederick Douglass and the formerly enslaved men who followed in his footsteps, fleeing America on the hopes of kinder cultures. Little girls like Liesl Ornstein, who discovered they were Jewish only when Hitler took Austria, who were sent to England and told to call themselves ‘Elizabeth’. Sun Yat-sen, who found sanctuary in London – a brief abduction aside – before becoming the Father of modern China. The writers who chronicled their fallen cities from the safety of the British Library. The patriots who found statelessness a gnawing, restless type of despair. Karl Marx, who lived penniless yet arrested the nation’s thinking. Freddie Mercury, who at every turn tried to shake Zanzibar from his bones. What makes a home? What makes a refugee? As allegedly record-breaking numbers of migrants attempt to reach Britain and public conversation becomes, often, poisonous, Island Refuge is a powerful account of what has come before and what has been learned by it. Almost every time, we see when we look back, Britain has not been an island refuge from the world, but an island refuge for the world. Not a country burdened by refugees, but instead transformed and strengthened by them.

Matthew Lockwood (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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History in the House: Is British Best?

Richard Davenport-Hines (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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The Endless Country: A Personal Journey Through Turkey's First Hundred Years

The Endless Country takes a journey through Turkey's past - the nation the author's father left decades ago and he returns to as a young man. It is not about Erdogan or Atatürk, the two towering Presidents who have book-ended that history, and at times have appeared impossible to escape. Instead Sami Kent's book goes deep beyond them, revealing a history as rich, layered and absurd as his family's favourite dessert, künefe: a shredded wheat pastry with a core of melted cheese, a topping of pistachios, and a drowning of syrup. From tiny weightlifters to the world's biggest prison, from a failed socialist commune to a wildly successful orchid ice cream, the book is a tribute to the sheer bewildering diversity of Turkey's past: its people, their ideas and their struggles.

Sami Kent (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Take My Grief Away

Brought to you by Penguin. In the darkest of times, in the midst of it all, a journalist has one single task: to document everything that is happening. It is time to slow down and listen to the voice of a human being. On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Since that day, prize-winning independent journalist Katerina Gordeeva has travelled to refugee centres across Europe to record the human voice and cost of war. Take My Grief Away reveals twenty-four raw, heartbreaking first-person accounts from people united in grief and their first-hand experiences of the brutality and senselessness of war. These twenty-four voices will transform what you think you know about war, grief and human nature. 'Read this book. Don't put it off until you'll supposedly be strong enough and ready for the reading. If you put it off, you'll find yourself defenseless in the face of evil.' - Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Chernobyl Prayer ©2024 Katerina Gordeeva (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Katerina Gordeeva (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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I Don't Want to Go Home: The Oral History of the Stone Pony, the House That Springsteen Built

A captivating oral history of the iconic music venue the Stone Pony and of the rise, fall, and rebirth of Asbury Park, New Jersey—featuring interviews with Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt, Southside Johnny, members of the E Street Band and Asbury Jukes, the Ramones, the Jonas Brothers, Jack Antonoff, and other legendary musicians. In 1970, Asbury Park, New Jersey, was ripped apart by race riots that left the once-proud beach town an hour away from Manhattan smoldering, suffering and left for dead. Four years later, a few miles down the coast in Seaside Heights, two bouncers, Jack Roig and Butch Pielka, tired of the daily grind, dreamt of owning their own place. Under-prepared and minimally funded, the two bought the first bar they considered, in a city where no one wanted to be, without setting one foot in the place. They named it the Stone Pony, and turned it into a rock club that Bruce Springsteen would soon call home and a dying town would call its beating heart. But the bar had to fight to survive. Despite its success in launching and attracting rockers like Stevie Van Zandt, “Southside” Johnny Lyon, and Springsteen, the Stone Pony—like everything in Asbury Park for the past half century—could only weather the drags of a depressed city for so long. How did the Stone Pony beat the odds to survive? How did it become an international rock pilgrimage site, not just for fans of Springsteen, but for punk rockers, jam bands, pop, indie, alternative and many other musicians as well? And how did it continue to inspire and influence a hall-of-fame list of New Jersey and national rock stars? The story of the Stone Pony—thrillingly charted in this detailed oral history—is the chronicle of a proud and unique cultural mecca blooming in a down-but-not-yet-out tough town. As Nick Corasaniti reveals, the stories of Asbury Park and the Stone Pony are that of modern America itself—a place of battered hopes, big dreams, and dogged resilience.

Nick Corasaniti (Author), Jim Meskimen, Nicol Zanzarella, TBD (Narrator)

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Hip-Hop Is History

Questlove (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Kinky History: A Rollicking Journey through Our Sexual Past, Present, and Future

A provocative journey through human sexual history, packed with fun factoids and forgotten stories, from the historian and storyteller behind Kinky History, @esme.louisee on TikTok Contrary to popular belief, our predecessors had all sorts of obscene hobbies long before Christian Grey hit the scene. In this enlightening romp, learn about the first instances of homosexuality on record from the ancient world and the diverse history of nonbinary gender; encounter a thousand years' worth of hilarious and horrifying contraceptive methods; consider the positive and negative effects of the widespread availability of pornography in the digital age-and how our relationship to it changed during the pandemic; take a sneaky riffle through centuries of bedside drawers; and discover the dirty little secrets of luminaries such as Julius Caesar, James Joyce, Albert Einstein, and Virginia Woolf. Esmé Louise James also identifies the key tipping points that directly inform current beliefs around sex to place the past in conversation with the present. By educating ourselves about the weird, wonderful, and varied spectrum of human sexuality and experience, we can normalize and destigmatize sex, write people of marginalized sexual identities back into the pages of history, and build toward a more liberated future.

Esmé Louise James (Author), Esmé Louise James (Narrator)

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Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women

"A LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN THAT ALL WOMEN WHO LOVE RUNNING AND SPORT SHOULD READ." -KARA GOUCHER For women runners, the race has only just begun...In this groundbreaking work, award-winning journalist Maggie Mertens uncovers the little-known story of how women broke into competitive running and how they are getting faster and fiercer every day¾and changing our understanding of what is possible as they go. More than a century ago, a woman ran in the very first modern Olympic marathon. She just did it without permission. Despite women proving their abilities on the track time and again, men in the medical establishment, media, and athletic associations have fought to keep women (or at least white women) fragile-and sometimes literally tried to push them out of the race (see Kathrine Switzer, Boston Marathon, 1967). Before there were running shoes for women, they ran barefoot or in nursing shoes. They ran without sports bras, which weren't invented until 1977, or competed disguised as men. They faced down quack science, doctors who put them on bedrest, and newspaper reports that said women simply collapsed if they ran a mere 800 meters, just half a lap around the track. Still today, women face relentless attention to their physical bodies: Is she too strong, too masculine; is she even a woman? Mertens transports us from that first boundary-breaking marathon in Greece, 1896, which Stamata Revithi successfully finished, to the earliest "officially" sanctioned women's races of the 20th century, to the most intense running a person can participate in today, the ultra-marathons¾like the infamous Spine Race, whose current record holder is a woman. By a lot. For readers of Good and Mad, Born to Run, and Fly Girls, Better Faster Farther takes us inside the lives, the races, and the victories of the women who redefined society's image of strength and power.

Maggie Mertens (Author), Lauren Fleshman, Maggie Mertens, TBD (Narrator)

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Bad Girls of Ancient Greece

THE guide to the baddies that started it all… Bad Girls of Ancient Greece contains profiles of wayward wives, mad mothers, scandalous sisters and damsels, that quite frankly, caused others A LOT of stress in the ancient world. With the ever-growing popularity of mythological retellings, Lauren McInnes has written THE guide to all of the baddies of ancient Greece. This book stands as a reminder that us women really have been badasses since the start. Written with humour and sass, Lauren profiles the women in Greek myth and legend covering: mortals, goddesses, titans, nymphs (you name it, she’s done it). Here you’ll find the weird and wonderful escapades of the women we’re often lead to believe were minor characters. Bad Girls of Ancient Greece is an accessible, intelligent, hilarious (sometimes spicy) guide to the women we love and know – Athena, Medusa, Aphrodite – and also those we may not, like Polyphonte, who was cursed with burning hot lust for a wild bear… imagine! So dive into the stories you thought you knew with Bad Girls of Ancient Greece as your illuminating guide…

Lizzy Tiffin (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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The Roads To Rome: A History

Brought to you by Penguin. Brimming with life and drama, this is the first book to explore two thousand years of European history through one of the most important imperial networks ever built 'All roads lead to Rome.' It's a medieval proverb, but it's also true: today's European roads still follow the networks of the ancient empire and continue to grip our modern imaginations as a physical manifestation of Rome’s ‘extraordinary greatness’. Over the two thousand years since they were first built, the roads have been walked by crusaders and pilgrims, liberators and dictators, but also by tourists and writers, refugees and artists. As channels of trade and travel, and routes for conquest and creativity, Catherine Fletcher shows how the roads forever transformed the cultures, and intertwined the fates, of a vast panoply of people across Europe and beyond. The Roads to Rome is a magnificent journey into a past that remains intimately connected to our present. Travelling from Scotland to Cádiz to Istanbul and back to Rome, we meander and march through a series of nations and empires that have risen and fallen. Along the way, we encounter spies and bandits, scheming innkeepers, a Byzantine noblewoman on the run, young aristocrats on their Grand Tour, a conquering Napoleon, Keats and the Shelleys, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and even Mussolini on his motorbike. Reflecting on his own walk on the Appian Way, Charles Dickens observed that here is ‘a history in every stone that strews the ground.’ Based on outstanding original research, this is the first book to tell the full story of life on the roads that lead to Rome. ©2024 Catherine Fletcher (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Catherine Fletcher (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Great Britain?: How To Get Our Future Back

Brought to you by Penguin. We all want to know what on earth is going on. Why real wages are flatlining but taxes are rising, and public services are still collapsing. Why our children can’t afford a house and our neighbours are using foodbanks. We are all yearning for a way out of the repeated economic crises, generational divisions and political dysfunction that dominate our lives. Most of all we want our – and Britain’s – future back. Great Britain? is a much-needed antidote to the pervading sense that Britain is going backwards rather than forwards. It is both a clear-eyed and rigorous diagnosis of the problems facing our country – a unique toxicity of huge inequality and stagnant economic growth – and a hopeful case for reclaiming a different future: by building an investment nation of good work, resilient communities and secure homes, a society in which both burdens and prosperity are shared. As Torsten Bell shows in his bold vision for the alternative, the Britain of today contains the raw materials to build a better Britain for tomorrow. In this treasure trove of analysis, Bell argues that our era of crisis and cynicism needs neither utopia nor nostalgia, but a practical patriotism of radical incrementalism to raise the living standards of middle- and lower-income households. He expertly and passionately points us towards a Britain that we can actually build – a future worth fighting for. ©2024 Torsten Bell (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Torsten Bell (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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D-Day: The Unheard Tapes: The Battle for Normandy 1944, told through powerful eye-witness accounts

Geraint Jones (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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