British Classics

Bestselling author Bernard Cornwell takes us back four thousand years, to a vibrant world of ritual and sacrifice that is at once timeless and wholly original. This historical novel unlocks the mystery of Britain's most haunting and puzzling structure, and tells a tale of three brothers—fierce...

This compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age when he created Sherlock Holmes. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship, to his often stormy...

*INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER* *NOW A LIMITED SERIES ON MASTERPIECE PBS* Meet Van Der Valk, Amsterdam’s best detective, in Nicolas Freeling’s classic novel A woman, Elsa, is brutally murdered in her Amsterdam apartment. Her ex-lover, Martin, is seen outside the building around the time of the...

Black Beauty is brought to life in this evenly paced, and easy to listen to audio drama. A subtle blend of music and sound effects immerses you into the atmosphere and many characterizations. Enjoy following the adventures of this noble young horse through a rich mix of 19th-century life in England, to happy endings in his last home.

In his early twenties now, Rusty finally leaves Dehra and books a passage to England, dreaming of writing and selling his novel abroad. First in Jersey, and then in in London, he works as a clerk by day and writes in the evenings. Eventually, the novel is finished and Rusty even finds a...

Throughout his life, Noel Coward the master songwriter, 'derived a considerable amount of private pleasure from writing verse.' Much of it is gathered in this first ever CD collection. From moving war-time encounters to satirical barbs at familiar Coward targets and personal reminiscences, this...

One of Ireland's best current novelists provides a thumbnail sketch of Ireland's greatest writer. A passionate and sensuous portrait, James Joyce is a return to the land of politics, history, saints, and scholars that shaped the creator of the twentieth century's groundbreaking novel Ulysses...

James Fenimore Cooper was America's first successful popular novelist. Son of the prominent federalist William Cooper, founder of the Cooperstown settlement, James was educated at Yale in preparation for a genteel life as a federalist gentleman. After his father's death in an 1809 duel, Cooper quickly squandered his inheritance, and at thirty was on the verge of bankruptcy. He turned to writing but his first book, Precaution (1820), was a failure.

Penguin Classics presents Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, adapted for audio and now available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by the actor David Timson. 'What! to come here a stranger, a young, unknown, and unfriended stranger, and tell us, in the...

The 1970s Middle East conflict is the setting for this high-octane thriller by the author of The Chill Factor. A crossed telephone wire causes a call from the President of the United States to his Ambassador in London to be overheard by geologist Tom Bartlett. Tom, preoccupied with thoughts of...

Iceland. In the winter it gets light at 10am and dark at 2pm. The daily announcement of the Chill Factor allows you to calculate how quickly you could die from exposure… Iceland is erupting – and not just its volcano. It is 1971, the height of the Cold War, and anti-American feeling among...

"A great story--how modernism brought down the regime of censorship--told as a great story. Kevin Birmingham's imaginative scholarship brings Joyce and his world to life. There is a fresh detail on nearly every page."--Louis Menand, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club For more...

A widow in her mid thirties, Alison has been in mourning for two years. She lives with her sister and brother-in-law in West Virginia, and they are urging her to get on with her life and move back home. Alison promises to leave--just as soon as she renovates a nearly-ruined 1976 Corvette rusting...

First published in 1915, The Voyage Out marked the literary debut of one of the great pioneers of the modern novel. Virginia Woolf's extraordinary narrative follows a group of lively, eccentric British tourists embarking on a sea voyage from London to South America. Among them is Rachel Vinrace, a shy, motherless young woman who has been taken along under the wing of her Aunt Helen, so that she may learn "how to live".

Of The Lion of St. Mark, G.A. Henty wrote: "I have laid my story in the time not of the triumphs of Venice but of her hardest struggle for existence, when she defended herself successfully against the coalition of Hungary, Padua, and Genoa, for never at any time were the virtues of Venice, her steadfastness, her patriotism, and her willingness to make all sacrifice for her independence more brilliantly shown.

Unaware that his life is about to change in ways he can't imagine, seventeen-year-old Jesse Matson ventures into the northern Minnesota woods with his father on a cold November afternoon. Perched on individual hunting stands a quarter-mile apart, they wait with their rifles for white-tailed deer...

In this exquisite debut novel, a host of characters confront their confusions in love. Claire, an art specialist at Sotheby's, lives in a world of glamour and achievement–but after attending an art opening, where she runs into the young man her husband had left her for five years earlier, she...

I'm a Fathead, Men! I Am the Deaf Man! Unscrambling the cryptic messages -- anagrams, Detective Carella called them -- delivered to the 87th Precinct confirmed that the master criminal who has eluded them time and again is not only alive and well, but may or may not be behind a deadly revenge...

The year is 1909, and Temperance O'Neil is a woman ahead of her time. At 29, she is happily married to her work helping single mothers on the streets of New York. Unfortunately, Angus McCairn -- her new stepfather -- controls the purse strings to her substantial inheritance. Angus insists she...

An eloquent debut novel set amid two historical hotbeds of racial tension, moral hypocrisy, and shifting sexual convention Miss Arabella Leeds, the high-spirited teenage daughter of a prominent New York family, and Aubrey "Brie" Paxton, the "high yellow" pampered house servant of wealthy...