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The epic story of this hero’s battle against dragons, monsters, and their mothers is particularly suited to being recorded as an audiobook given that for the first 300 years of its existence it was only ever spoken. The first known (and indeed the only surviving manuscript) of the poem was written in AD 1,000. It survived Henry VIII’s attempts to destroy it (as a religious artifact) and a catastrophic fire that destroyed many other historical British documents.

A collection of Rosetti's most well known and loved poetry. Alongside the famous beauty of Rosetti's 'In the Bleak Midwinter', 'Goblin Market' is a deceptively simple poem. The story of two sisters and their temptation, punishment and redemption, written in Christina Rosetti's characteristically songlike poetry, is easily passed over as a fable or fairy story. But there are several layers more to discover in this most intriguing of poems.

The three tales that make up Edgar Allan Poe's The Dupin Mysteries introduce us to the cracking character of Chevalier Auguste Dupin. As a rationalist and practitioner of brilliant deduction, he was to become the template for most of the detective fiction that followed speedily in his wake. The first tale, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", details a form of murder solving that was to become only too familiar.

Written as the letters of the five members of Squire Bramble's household sent as they journey around Britain, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker is a grouchy, very funny examination of how one story varies depending on who's doing the telling. The tale is centered around the arrival of Mr. Clinker into the otherwise uneventful household, who never speaks and does not even enter the novel until a third of the way through.

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done...." With these words and a superb act of bravery and sacrifice, one of the most badly behaved heroes of all time ends Charles Dickens' great tale of the French Revolution. This is a firework display of a book, a crackling picture of the ravages and excesses of starving, furious men and the astonishing acts of heroism that usually accompany them.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is an exploration of the nature of evil and how far a man can go towards it when released from the constraints of what can be called civilisation. Before beginning his life as a writer at the age of 36, Conrad spent 16 years as a merchant seaman. In 1889 he became captain of a steamboat in the Congo Free State, and the atrocities he witnessed there, perpetrated by the representatives of the Belgian colonial powers, led him to write what he called his Congo Diary.

Rudyard Kipling's short stories of life in the British Raj began in 1888 as journalistic snippets written to supplement his more serious factual output when he was employed as the assistant editor, at the meagre age of 20, of the Lahori-based Civil and Military Gazette.

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without A Christmas Carol. At the time Dickens was writing it, many of the time-honoured customs linked with Christmas were beginning to disappear. It is largely due to this book that we carry with us much of the imagery that is now associated with the traditional celebration and spirit of Christmas.

The tale of Dr. Frankenstein and the horrendous monster he unleashes on the world when he tinkers with the laws of nature had almost as strange a birth as the monster itself. It was the product of one of the most famous ghost story telling sessions in history. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and several others were stranded on the shores of Lake Geneva during a particularly sodden summer.

This is Jane Austen's lighthearted lesson in what you get for reading too many gothic novels. It is a mark of the astonishing talent of the woman, however, that even a flippant swipe at the trashy reading of the day turned out to be an elegant if extremely funny classic. Catherine Morland is another one of those Austen girls who, in spite of her gloriously ironic portrait as a romantic heroine in training, ends up being someone whose story you'd follow to the end of the world, or at least until the end of the book.

The most personal of Oscar Wilde's works, The Picture of Dorian Grey was also one of the earliest. It was published in 1891 and caused immediate controversy and great notoriety for its writer. The story of an immensely beautiful and hedonistic boy whose conscience becomes separate from his body and housed in a portrait which slowly and hideously ages and decays in keeping with his increasing depravity whilst the boy himself remains untouched plays with all of Oscar Wilde's theories of art and life.

Framed for a theft he didn’t commit and expelled from the church which has been his life, Silas Marner, the weaver, exiles himself to the remote rural village of Raveloe to bury himself in making money with his loom. The arrival of a golden-haired orphan toddler at his door, however, drags the recluse back into the world and away from his obsession with his hoard.

Written in 1911, The Card is the story of Edward Henry (Denry) Machin, who rises from washerwoman's son to the Mayor of Bursley (Burslem in the Potteries town of Stoke-on-Trent) via a mixture of gentle deceit and personal hype. He is literally a trickster of confidence. His rise to fame is begun at an exclusive ball to which he has got himself invited, where he has the audacity to claim a dance with the glamourous but imposing Countess of Chell.

The stabbing of an antique dealer on Christmas Day leads the murderer, Markheim, to try to justify his life to the devil in an in-depth discussion about the nature of good and evil. His evening ends quite differently from how he'd planned it and results in him making an admission of guilt for the killing.... Author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Edinburgh into a prestigious family of lighthouse designers and engineers on his father's side and moral philosophers on his mother's.

Eustacia Vye's great desire in life was to be loved to madness, and in this, one of Thomas Hardy's best-loved novels, one of his most superb female characters conducts her wild and lethal campaign against her rival - the innocent, rather conventional Thomas - against the backdrop of Egdon Heath, the equally wild and lethal Dorset moorland on which Hardy grew up.

Attraction, desire and sex were not proper subjects for a 19th-century novel, and Charlotte Brontë's clear and open handling of all three in Jane Eyre was shocking, exciting and revolutionary. Jane Eyre - a small, plain-faced, intelligent and honest English orphan - is abused by her aunt and cousins as a child; acquires role models during her education at Lowood Academy; and becomes the governess of Thornfield Manor, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester.

This is the story of Alice's second visit to Wonderland, where again every idea Alice has of logic and reason is logically and rationally challenged by her adventures. From the classic Red Queen, with her manic racing to enable her to stay exactly where she is, to the highly meaningful nonsense of the Jabberwocky, Alice's trip through the looking glass has provided us with a host of now familiar but no less teasing puzzles which somehow manage to give us a whole new reflection on 'normal' life.

Anthony Trollope’s The Warden was the first of Trollope’s hugely successful Barchester Chronicles, appearing in 1855 and reversing the rather unfortunate sales of his previous three novels. It concerns the story of Mr. Septimus Harding, Warden of Hiram's Hospital almshouses and Precentor of Barchester Cathedral.

Alice's rather wild adventures in Wonderland begin on an unadventurous picnic, when her attention, wandering off from the lesson it was supposed to be glued to, is caught by a passing white rabbit who happens to be wearing a waistcoat and muttering to himself, "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" As he disappears down a rabbit hole and Alice, for want of anything better to do, follows him, a tale of almost hallucinogenic wildness unfolds as she finds herself in Wonderland.

Three Men in a Boat was intended to be a serious travel guide. It failed dismally in this respect but succeeded in becoming an hilarious account of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The three men were based on the author and two of his friends. The holiday was a typical boating holiday of its time, carried out on what was known as a Thames camping skiff. The dog, Montmorency, however, was entirely fictional, but, as Jerome remarked, 'had much of me in it'.