Historical Fiction

Ugly Duckling

a memoir By Ivory F Wild

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

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

About the author

Ivory F Wild

I have been many things to many people. A soldier. A linguist. A ghost. Born in Puerto Toro, at the edge of the Amazon, where the river decides whether you live or disappear. Raised in Königsberg, where the cold teaches you that history is not the past — it is the ground beneath your feet. I served with the French Foreign Legion. I worked in signals intelligence. I learned that every transmission contains two messages — the one that is sent, and the one that is hidden. I speak what the dead spoke. Medieval Latin. Aramaic. Sumerian. Caló.View all by Ivory F Wild