Ugly Duckling

Ugly Duckling

a memoir By Ivory F Wild
Michael Caine
Listen with Sir Michael Caine™ and 1,000+ voices
Length13h 22m

About this audiobook

A man arrives in London with a knowledge of languages, a forged identity, and a secret. He becomes a respected antiquarian bookseller—honest, meticulous, known worldwide for his expertise in medieval manuscripts. But for decades, he's been planning something: the creation of a document that doesn't exist. When he "discovers" it in a villa outside Rome, the world believes him. The document enters museums, exhibitions, academic study. It becomes one of the greatest mysteries of medieval literature—a language no one can read, written in a hand no one recognizes, with an origin story that holds just enough truth to be believable. But the real story—the three years in a back room, the six batches of ink, the Spanish illustrator creating images of plants that don't exist, the deliberate choices made at every stage—that story can never be told. A the gap between what things appear to be and what they actually are. It's the story of a man who created something real by making something false

Audiobook details

GenreHistorical Fiction
Length13 hrs 22 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateApr 4, 2026
LanguageEnglish

Table of contents

1Introduction
11Chapter Six — London, 1890–1905
2Before — New Haven, 2024
12Interlude — Amsterdam, one week before Boston
3Prologue — New Haven, 2024
13Chapter Seven — Florence, 1903–1911
4Chapter One — Telšiai, 1873
14Chapter Eight — London, 1909–1912
5Chapter Two — Suwałki, 1879–1882
15Chapter Nine — Castel Gandolfo and London, 1912
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6Interlude — Boston, 2024
16Interlude — Boston, 2am
7Chapter Three — Moscow, 1882–1885
17Chapter Ten — America, 1914–1921
8Chapter Four — The Warsaw Citadel, 1885–1887
18Chapter Eleven — New York, 1921–1930
9Chapter Five — The March East, and Tunka, 1887–1890
19Chapter Twelve — The Missing Pages
10Interlude — Amsterdam, three weeks after Boston
20Chapter Thirteen — The World Looks

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