Résultats Éditeur "Naxos AudioBooks" dans Classiques

Forced by her parents to take holy orders, 16-year-old Suzanne is trapped in a monastic life and endures harrowing physical, sexual and emotional abuse. The depiction of her struggle for autonomy is coated in the mysticism and madness of her environment, as the overwhelming effects of power are laid bare. Diderot, a key figure of the Enlightenment, uses the novel to question the moral authority of the Church and pour scorn on its complicity in oppression and intolerance.

In the heart of rural Yorkshire at the turn of the 20th century, 28-year-old Mary runs her farm while trapped in a loveless marriage. Her world is upended by the arrival of David Rossitur, a charismatic young socialist who challenges her beliefs and tries to unionise the farmers. As Mary grapples with her attraction to David’s fiery idealism, the novel explores the simmering tensions between tradition and progress in a small farming community.

First published in 1876, Wilkie Collins’s The Two Destinies follows the lives of childhood friends George and Mary. George is the son of a nobleman, while Mary is the daughter of the nobleman’s bailiff. As the friends grow older and closer, George’s father, determined to end their affair, dismisses the bailiff and moves George to America. Years later, George returns to his native Suffolk to track down his former love. Although she has long gone, he remains determined to find Mary at all costs. But are the two lovers destined to find each other again?

Self-absorbed Sir Willoughby Patterne seeks a bride. After being jilted by his first fiancée he settles on the spirited Clara Middleton; but she starts to realise that he only wants a mirror for himself and his opinions. As she becomes desperate to disengage, and he becomes desperate to hold on to her, so a series of farcical, labyrinthine misunderstandings ensues.

Vincentio di Vivaldi has fallen in love with Ellena Rosalba. However, his proud and noble family vehemently oppose the match: they cannot allow him to wed someone with no money or social standing. Thus, his mother, the mean-spirited Marchesa, and her minion, the evil monk Father Schedoni, set in motion a malign plot that has Ellena kidnapped and imprisoned in a convent, to prevent a hasty marriage.

Opportunistic, shrewd and beautiful, Ethelberta resolves to disguise her humble beginnings and elevate her position in society. Crafting her career as a society poet and staging her family as her servants, she proves admirably adept at sustaining her own web of deceit as she reinvents herself and navigates the attentions of four different suitors. The wealthiest is not the one she loves... what will she do? This is a light-hearted urban tale, offering a different side of Thomas Hardy.

Above all, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) is concerned with the nature of happiness. Rasselas and his companions remove themselves from the pleasure of the ‘happy valley’ so that they can make their ‘choice of life’. In the course of their travels they come across scholars, astronomers, shepherds, hermits and poets, explore their way of life. Rasselas finds that complete happiness is elusive and, in the words of his mentor Imlac, ‘while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live’.

One of the great novels in the Irish comic tradition, The Crock of Gold (1912) consists of six parts. Bringing together pagan gods, policemen, prisoners, leprechauns and animals, the narrative concerns a philosopher and his quest to find the most beautiful woman in the world, Cáitilin Ni Murrachu, who has been abducted by the god Pan. His journey takes him from dark forests to the spectacular heights of pagan gods, as he experiences encounters that will change him forever.

Published in 1884, Against Nature (À rebours) concerns the attempts of its cultured and neurotic anti-hero, Des Esseintes, to escape contemporary Parisian life. At his rural retreat he is able to indulge his particular artistic tastes as he muses on a range of topics including literature, religion and painting.

Zola’s La Terre (The Earth) proved highly controversial on publication in 1887 and still retains the power to shock. It follows the fortunes of the Fouan family in the years leading up to the Franco-Prussian War. Old Fouan, the patriarch, draws up a legal contract to divide his farmland between his three children in exchange for an allowance that will support him and his wife through a comfortable retirement.

Lucy Entwhistle and Everard Wemyss, both recovering from recent unhappiness, meet and quickly fall in love. However, over their new-found bliss looms the spectre of Vera, Wemyss’s first wife who died in mysterious circumstances. After their wedding the couple return home and Lucy really does begin to be troubled by what happened to Vera. Considered a high-water mark by the author, the story is an extraordinarily black vision of a young wife who gradually begins to understand that her husband will accept nothing less than total intellectual and emotional servitude.

In Moscow an unknown author approaches a publisher (the narrator), asking him to read and publish his manuscript. The narrator agrees to read it before the author returns three months later. At the heart of the story in the manuscript is a love triangle and themes of corruption, concealed love, and fatal jealousy. When one of the central characters is discovered dead, the narrative becomes a murder-mystery as the search for the culprit begins.

Rejto Jeno (1905-1943) a magyar szórakoztató irodalom egyik legnépszerubb képviseloje, aki felejthetetlen karaktereivel és a szellemes, jellegzetes aforizmáival megkerülhetetlen alakjává vált a mufajnak.

Deep in the grounds of Welland House lies an ancient memorial tower, surrounded by a prehistoric wilderness that isolates it from the rest of the land. When one day Viviette Constantine, the wife of the estate's owner, investigates the tower, she there discovers Swithin St. Cleeve, a young astronomer who introduces her to the majesty and wonders of the night sky. Instantly drawn to Swithin, and with her husband abroad, Viviette offers him use of the tower and becomes a kind of apprentice to him, and then, eventually, a lover.

Following a violent and messy divorce, young Maisie Farange floats back and forth between her parents, Beale and Ida, who use her as a weapon to torment each other in their ongoing, internecine war. Eventually the parents both remarry, and it becomes clear that the new spouses care more for Maisie than her own parents. Beale and Ida soon embark on a series of extramarital affairs, leaving Maisie in the care of the new step-parents, who begin their own affair with each other.

With the Reign of Terror at its peak, and the death toll mounting, France's violent revolutionists suddenly find themselves frustrated by a mysterious vigilante. Known as the Scarlet Pimpernel, the enigmatic hero rescues the country's ill-fated aristocrats from the doom of the guillotine and whisks them away to safety, with a band of gallant cohorts at his aid.

Subtitled 'A Story of To-day', A Laodicean occupies a unique place in the Thomas Hardy canon. Departing from pre-industrial Wessex, Hardy brings his themes of social constraint, fate, chance and miscommunication to the very modern world of the 1880s - complete with falsified telegraphs, fake photographs, and perilous train tracks. The story follows the life of Paula Power, heiress of her late father's railroad fortune and the new owner of the medieval Castle Stancy. With the castle in need of restoration, Paula employs architect George Somerset, who soon falls in love with her.

Daisy Miller is a young American girl travelling Europe with her mother and younger brother. While in Vevey, Switzerland, she becomes acquainted with Frederick Winterbourne, an idle expatriate, of well-to-do Americans. Winterbourne, who observes and critiques young Daisy through their brief acquaintanceship, is infatuated with her irreverent behavior. Daisy flaunts society's rules and uncompromising standards; she is charming, spontaneous, and unpretentious, and her audacity shocks the Europeans, who consider her an uncultivated flirt. The sophisticated Winterbourne remains smitten with Daisy, but his classical values stand in his way.

After the collapse of her marriage to an illustrious German prince, Baroness Eugenia Münster arrives in America with her brother, in search of wealthy New England relatives. The duo have an immediate impact on their American cousins, the Wentworths. The Baroness captures the eye of young Clifford Wentworth, and his girlfriend's older brother Robert; meanwhile, Felix falls for his American cousin Gertrude. The Wentworths are overawed by their European cousins and their frivolous lifestyle. What unfolds is a delightful comedy of manners.

After the untimely death of their parents, Cytheria and Owen Graye must go out into the world and fend for themselves. Cytheria's journey leads her to the dark and mysterious household of Miss Aldclyffe, a capricious and eccentric woman, who steers Cytheria into a love affair with her charismatic steward, Aeneous Manston. All is not what it seems, and Cytheria finds herself entangled in a violent web of lust, murder, deception, and blackmail.