8 historical novels worth listening to

1. "Armored ships", Alexey Ivanov

• Duration: 28 hours 30 minutes.

In the new novel by Alexei Ivanov, the action takes place during the Civil War in Russia. The work touches on several storylines that develop far from Moscow and St. Petersburg - in Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Samara, Sarapul, Perm, Ufa, Omsk. Peaceful ships turn into the same armored ships, and dramas unfold on the decks where vacationers danced yesterday. The famous actor Sergei Burunov is reading the book.

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2. "In the monster garden. Love and Terror in Hitler's Berlin by Eric Larson

• Duration: 13 hours 35 minutes.

The new US ambassador and his socialite daughter arrive in Berlin in 1933 and watch the events leading up to World War II. The author of the book is a journalist, and in his narration he relies on memoirs, official documents and other sources that make the novel really historical.

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3. The Wind Runner Khaled Hosseini

• Duration: 13 hours 47 minutes.

The book is written from the point of view of a boy, and then a man, Amir, who was born in Kabul, along with his father emigrated in the United States and then temporarily returned to his homeland. The novel allows not only to observe the fate of a single person, but also to learn more about all the events that shook Afghanistan in the second half of the 20th century.

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4. The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

• Duration: 6 hours.

A fifteen-year-old boy unexpectedly begins an affair with a mature woman. All she asks is to read for her. Then she disappears from the city, and the hero meets her only eight years later - in the dock.

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5. "Peter the Great", Alexei Tolstoy

• Duration: 33 hours 6 minutes.

As it is easy to guess from the title, the first Russian emperor is in the center of the story. The storyline follows real historical events. With Peter, students will spend from 1682 to 1704.

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6. "Cocoon", Zhang Yueran

• Duration: 19 hours 46 minutes.

Classmates and best friends of Cheng Gong and Li Jiaqi investigate brutal crime and in the process learn terrible secrets that concern their families. What happened is closely connected with the events of Chinese history.

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7. "Notre Dame Cathedral", Victor Hugo

• Duration: 19 hours 55 minutes.

The history of the gypsy Esmeralda and the hunchback Quasimodo is well known to those who have not read the book. But musicals, films, cartoons show only part of the story. Notre Dame Cathedral is the first historical novel in French. Its popularity after its publication was so great that it made it possible to save the real cathedral from demolition or reconstruction.

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8. "The Benevolent Ones", Jonathan Littell

• Duration: 45 hours 2 minutes.

This is one of the most significant works of fiction about World War II. The protagonist is an SS officer who goes from human to monster. The horrors of war and the Holocaust are described from the perspective of someone who believes in the correctness of what is happening. Therefore, listening to a book is painful, but important. The novel helps to understand how people can change under the influence of propaganda, even if it carries cannibalistic ideas.

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