Great Literature

Caspien Deveraux was poison. It took me years to realise that he hadn't been born like that. He'd been cultivated and nurtured by a careful hand and a bitter heart. When I first met him, he was a bud. One primed to bloom beautifully and deadly. One I should have torn out at the root.

H. E. Marshall’s classic children’s chronicle of Britain, Our Island Story, includes all the best-loved (and most infamous!) stories from history: King Alfred and the cakes, King John and the Magna Carta, Lord Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar, Queen Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada, and many others. This recording contains the complete and unabridged text, released previously in separate volumes. It is read with aplomb by Anna Bentinck and Daniel Philpott.

Alone in a frontier town in the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest, Gentle Montgomery is grieving his best friend. Liam was an alchemist, killed when he tried to capture a creature that shouldn’t exist: a giant salamander that drives men mad. When Gentle’s nephew, Kitt, arrives at his doorstep, the two set out together to track the monster down so they can use its blood in an alchemical formula that will bring Liam back to life.

This collection brings together some of the most influential and beloved novels in the English literary canon. From dystopian futures to sweeping romantic tales, these works explore human nature, social class, morality, and the quest for identity. Spanning genres and centuries, The Essential British Classics Collection is a celebration of the best of British storytelling, offering profound insights into the human experience.

Under the Great British Baking Contest competition tent, there's more at stake than winning the title of Best Baker in All of Britain. For amateur baker Poppy Wilkinson, there are mysteries to solve, secrets and lies, even murder. As a fledgling witch, Poppy's having enough trouble controlling her sponge cake, never mind trying to control her powers.

Scorio thought victory was within his grasp. He had bested the Final Gauntlet and overcome the treachery of Chancellor Praximar. But the Rascor Plains are full of peril, and his quest for truth has only just begun. With his friends scattered and his reputation in tatters, Scorio must navigate a web of intrigue that stretches from the powerful House Hydra and the Fiery Shoals to the mysterious forces that govern the Plains. He will face foes, both human and inhuman, and confront the darkest secrets of his world.

No one - fictional or factual - embodies the Jazz Age as completely as F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. First published in 1925, this legendary novel continues to enthrall generations as it serves as a lens to view our not-so-distant past. Many of our notions about that period are taken from this book. Bathtub gin, flappers, and house parties that last all week enliven Fitzgerald's classic tale. Stylish and engaging, The Great Gatsby is also a startling literate portrait of Gatsby's search for meaning in his opulent world.

Two Bestselling Agatha Christie Novels in One Great Audiobook Murder on the Links In Agatha Christie’s class mystery Murder on the Links, Hercule Poirot attempts to unravel the grisly conundrum of not one, but two dead bodies discovered on a French golf course. An urgent cry for help brings...

London Labour and the London Poor is a rare and fascinating insight into the lives and struggles of the 19th-century poor. Written by journalist and reformer Henry Mayhew, a founder and editor of the satirical magazine Punch, it collects hundreds of testimonials from the lower strata of Victorian society. We encounter street entertainers, 'pure finders', cabinetmakers, gingerbread sellers, 'screeve-fakers', swindlers, and burglars. We hear accounts from toshers finding items in sewers, people attempting to train pigs to dance, and witness the sale of everything from gilt watches and chickweed to needles, dog collars, and eel soup.

Sanguinius is the Great Angel, most beloved of all the primarchs, his mighty exploits celebrated throughout the entire Imperium as the Crusade expands into the void. And yet the origins of his Legion are shrouded in mystery and rumour, his unique physical form is an enigma, and his perilous home world remains off-limits to all but his own secretive people. When a discredited remembrancer arrives with the expeditionary fleets to chronicle the primarch’s deeds, he has to work hard to uncover the truth behind the legends.

In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.

Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.

It was a strange, uncertain world that Harriet entered when she married Guy Pringle. Guy taught English at the university at Bucharest, a city of vivid contrasts, where professional beggars exist alongside the excesses of mid-European royalty and expatriate journalists with a taste for truffles and quails in aspic. Underlying this is a fitful awareness of the proximity of the Nazi threat to a Romania which is enjoying an uneasy peace.

Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe.

A Main Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club, Breakthroughs is the third installment of best-selling author Harry Turtledove’s The Great War series of remarkable alternate histories. As the frightening war to end all wars continues to spread with vengeance around the globe, the swiftly modernizing armies of the Confederacy and the United States battle for control of the North American continent.

With a dynamic spirit, these great English poets made a conscious return to nostalgia and spiritual depth. Each chose a different path, but they are united in a love of moods, impressions, scenes, stories, sights and sounds. In this collection of more than forty poems are some of the finest and most memorable works in the English language.

Two Bestselling Agatha Christie Novels in One Great Audiobook In Agatha Christie’s class mystery Murder on the Links, Hercule Poirot attempts to unravel the grisly conundrum of not one, but two dead bodies discovered on a French golf course. An urgent cry for help brings Hercule Poirot to...

In 1727, Stefan Silbermann is a grief-stricken 13-year-old, struggling with the death of his mother and his removal to a school in distant Leipzig. Despite his father’s insistence that he try not to think of his mother too much, Stefan is haunted by her absence, and, to make matters worse, he’s bullied by his new classmates. But when the school’s cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach, takes notice of his new pupil’s beautiful singing voice and draws him from the choir to be a soloist, Stefan’s life is permanently changed.

Fragrant blossoms herald spring, but the orchard is also a place of secrets and heartache. After the death of her husband Frank, Eliza is left with three young children and mounting debts. When a gentle stranger enters her orchard, she experiences a peculiar sensation of familiarity with the man. But will his unknown past jeopardize all that she has fought for?

This is the story of a close, loving family splintered by the violent ideologies of Europe between the wars. Jessica was a Communist; Debo became the Duchess of Devonshire; Nancy was one of the best-selling novelists of her day; the ethereally beautiful Diana was the most hated woman in England; and Unity Valkyrie, born in Swastika, Alaska, would become obsessed with Adolf Hitler.