Showing results by narrator "Ralph Cosham" in All Categories

The Fifth Queen is Ford Maddox Ford’s masterful trilogy of historical fiction centered on Katharine Howard, a young girl of a proud, noble, and impoverished family who catches the jaded eye of Henry VIII and becomes his controversial fifth Queen.

The August heat has driven the residents of Florence to the hills and beaches of the countryside, leaving a corpse lying unnoticed amid the shrubbery of a normally busy roundabout. Sandro Cellini, meanwhile, will not be joining the crowds of holidaymakers this year. The former policeman turned private detective has a case: a man who seems to have vanished into thin air, leaving his pregnant young wife alone in the city.

First published in 1865, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland was an immediate success. Carroll's sense of the absurd and his amazing gift for games of logic and language have made the Alice books popular with both adults and children, and they have remained some of the best-known children's books written in English.

Ten superbly narrated stories that help explain America by America's best writers.

Go down the rabbit hole with one of the best loved heroines in children's literature. Alice's remarkable adventures begin when she follows the White Rabbit down his hole into a peculiar world populated with strange and absurd creatures. Meet the Mock Turtle, the Mad-Hatter, the March Hare, the hookah-smoking Caterpillar, and the Queen of Hearts. This story was originally read aloud, and Ralph Cosham's engaging narration brings the magic to life. Adults may be surprised at what they find as they rediscover this beloved classic that the whole family can enjoy.

Young David Balfour is the rightful heir but his uncle has other plans. This story recounts Master Balfour's escape on the high seas and his adventures making his way back across Scottish Highlands.

"At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world." In H.G. Wells's classic tale, a time traveler journeys to the distant future and finds the earth a lush Eden, populated by the gentle, pacifistic Eloi. However, he soon sees the dark side of this paradise when his time machine is stolen, trapping him in the future. To recover it, he must confront the Eloi's dreaded cousins and masters of the underworld, the Morlocks. Ralph Cosham's excellent performance of this classic distopian novella was the key in earning it AudioFile's Earphones Award.

When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, there were many who proclaimed that a new Elizabethan Age had begun. Few could have any inkling, however, of the stupendous changes that were going to take place, in Britain and around the world. The collapse of British power in the world and the near-evaporation of its wealth were established facts, but few people had even begun to understand them.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of many dreadful murders, but the one which astonished and distressed readers the most was when the author, anxious to try something new, killed off Sherlock Holmes. Trapped in mortal combat with the dastardly Professor Moriarty, Holmes and his opponent plunged to their deaths in the Reichenback Fall. For 10 long years, Baker Street was without its most revered resident. Then, in 1903, Doyle took pity on his readers and brought the sagacious sleuth back to life.

With amazing insight, Anton Chekhov wrote of the lives of the Russian common man as well as the landowner. He established the style of the modern short story and influenced many great writers, including George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born December 30, 1865 in Bombay, India. The name Rudyard was taken from a lake in Staffordshire, England. At the age of six, he and his younger sister were sent back to England where they lived with separate families that took in children for hire. He returned to India at age sixteen. Rudyard knew literary success at a young age and was able to travel. He married Carrie Balestier, an American, and moved to the United States. The Jungle Books were written in Vermont. He died January 18, 1936 in Middlesex, England during an operation.

Kimball O'Hara is an Irish orphan, but he runs free in the streets of India. As a boy, he shows self-reliance and resourcefulness, running errands for Mahbub Ali, who works for the British Secret Service. Kim also meets a Tibetan lama who is on a quest to be freed from the Wheel of Life and becomes his disciple. Together they have wonderful adventures on the exotically colorful Grand Trunk Road through the Indian countryside.

Dead Man's Chest, written as a sequel to Treasure Island, begins with Long John Silver's escape from the merchantman ship Hispaniola at Puerta Plata and culminates with the American Revolution more than a decade later. It describes in rich detail the unholy alliance between this softhearted cutthroat, his teenage nephew, David Noble, and Captain John Paul Jones. Together, they work to retrieve a king's ransom of Spanish gold and jewels from a dead man's chest.

Settle in for an unsettling listen with this duo of two horror classics: Dracula by Bram Stoker and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. These two books are staples of the Gothic horror genre and are sure to excite, mystify, and maybe even spook listeners.