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  French Leave

  Liz Ryan

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  It was when she realised she was spending twelve hours a week and five thousand euro a year commuting to work that Liz Ryan began to question how great life in boom-time Ireland really was - and reached a decision the day an enraged biker hurled a helmet at her windscreen. So she quit her job, sold her house and moved to a remote hamlet in coastal Normandy. Thus begins her French adventure, in which she gets picked up by the police, discovers the mixed pleasures of French homeownership - flooded basements, grim neighbours, surreal phone companies, busybody mayors - and embraces the challenges of creating a new life in a new country. Liz hilariously charts her gradual immersion into village life, the setbacks and the joys, the local political intrigue, the Gallic shrug and that famous French bureaucracy - and paradoxical French attitudes to food, politics, sport, dating, and shopping on the grand scale. But like any expat, even as she revels in new pleasures she also experiences the tug-of-war between fresh fields and the place of one's birth, the craic, the humour and the warm embrace of lifelong friends.

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  Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne

  Dorothy Osborne

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  A lively, interesting and important collection of 17th century love-letters written by an English lady, against the background of the Civil War and the Restoration [summary by hefyd]After refusing a long string of suitors put forth by her family, including her cousin Thomas Osborne, Henry Cromwell (son of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell) and Sir Justinian Isham, in 1655 Dorothy Osborne married Sir William Temple, a man with whom she had carried on a lengthy clandestine courtship that was largely epistolary in nature. It is for her letters to Temple, which were witty, progressive and socially illuminating, that Osborne is remembered. Only Osborne's side of the correspondence survived and comprises a collection of seventy-seven letters held in the British Library. (Summary from Wikipedia)Note: This reading contains all the letters in the correspondence but leaves out the editorial comments.

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  My Six Years with the Texas Rangers

  James B. Gillett

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  Six years with the Texas Rangers is a  memoir of James B. Gillett, a lawman of the Old West, mostly well known due to his service as a Texas Ranger, and as a member of the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame. The author brings many authentic, exciting stories from his career including famous capture of the Baca brothers  and battles with Apaches.

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  Journey Through the Wilderness:...

  Jasper Thornfield

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  Journey Through the Wilderness: Embracing Nature's Solitude 
  ⭐⭐ Simplified Audio Guide ⭐⭐ 
  Are you looking to find peace, strength, and rediscover yourself through the solitude of nature? 
  Seeking a comprehensive guide that provides all necessary elements to embrace the wilderness? 
  Your search ends here! 
  This guide serves as your definitive companion for deepening your connection with nature, applying your skills for survival, and engaging in hands-on exercises. With this, you're geared for a transformative journey. 
  Here's what you'll find inside: 
  - Profound insights about embracing nature's solitude 
  - Detailed explanation of the emotional and mental benefits of nature 
  - Fruitful strategies for adapting to and thriving in the wilderness 
  Our guide distinguishes itself through comprehensive coverage, essential for your journey. Concepts aren't merely skimmed; they are delved into with precision. 
  Please note that this guide is not affiliated with any official entity and is purely an independent resource for your benefit. 
  Designed with a clear structure and easy-to-understand language, our Wilderness Guide ensures smooth transitions between topics. Say goodbye to dense jargon and welcome clear, precise, and genuinely human-written content. 
  So, why wait? Click the BUY NOW button, secure your guide, and begin your journey to rediscovering peace, strength, and self in the wilderness!

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  Meditations on Middle-Earth -...

  Orson Scott Card, Ursula K. Le Guin

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  Hugo Award Nominee: George R. R. Martin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Pratchett, Harry Turtledove, and others reveal how Tolkien inspired and influenced them. 
   
  When J. R. R. Tolkien created the extraordinary world of Middle-earth and populated it with fantastic, archetypal denizens, reinventing the heroic quest, the world hardly noticed. Sales of The Lord of the Rings languished for the better part of two decades, until the Ballantine editions were published in America. By the late 1950s, however, the books were selling well and beginning to change the face of fantasy . . . . forever. A generation of students and aspiring writers had their hearts and imaginations captured by the rich tapestry of the Middle-earth mythos, the larger-than-life heroic characters, the extraordinary and exquisite nature of Tolkien’s prose, and the unending quest to balance evil with good. 
   
  In Meditations on Middle-earth, writers share details of their personal relationships with Tolkien’s mythos, for it inspired them all. Had there been no Lord of the Rings, there would also have been no Earthsea books by Ursula K. Le Guin; no Song of Ice and Fire saga from George R.  R. Martin; no Tales of Discworld from Terry Pratchett; no Legends of Alvin Maker from Orson Scott Card. Each of them was influenced by the master mythmaker, and now each reveals the nature of that influence and their personal relationships with the greatest fantasy novels ever written in the English language. 
   
  A Locus Award Nominee

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  British Short Story The - Volume...

  Percival Gibbon, Radclyffe Hall,...

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  These British Isles, moored across from mainland Europe, are more often seen as a world unto themselves.  Restless and creative, they often warred amongst themselves until they began a global push to forge a World Empire of territory, of trade and of language. 
   
  Here our ambitions are only of the literary kind.  These shores have mustered many masters of literature. So this anthology’s boundaries includes only those authors who were born in the British Isles - which as a geographical definition is the UK mainland and the island of Ireland - and wrote in a familiar form of English. 
   
  Whilst Daniel Defoe is the normal starting point we begin a little earlier with Aphra Behn, an equally colourful character as well as an astonishing playwright and poet.  And this is how we begin to differentiate our offering; both in scope, in breadth and in depth.  These islands have raised and nurtured female authors of the highest order and rank and more often than not they have been sidelined or ignored in favour of that other gender which usually gets the plaudits and the royalties. 
   
  Way back when it was almost immoral that a woman should write.  A few pages of verse might be tolerated but anything else brought ridicule and shame.  That seems unfathomable now but centuries ago women really were chattel, with marriage being, as the Victorian author Charlotte Smith boldly stated ‘legal prostitution’.  Some of course did find a way through - Jane Austen, the Brontes and Virginia Woolf but for many others only by changing their names to that of men was it possible to get their book to publication and into a readers hands.  Here we include George Eliot and other examples. 
   
  We add further depth with many stories by authors who were famed and fawned over in their day.  Some wrote only a hidden gem or two before succumbing to poverty and death. There was no second career as a game show guest, reality TV contestant or youtuber. They remain almost forgotten outposts of talent who never prospered despite devoted hours of pen and brain. 
   
  Keeping to a chronological order helps us to highlight how authors through the ages played around with characters and narrative to achieve distinctive results across many scenarios, many styles and many genres. The short story became a sort of literary laboratory, an early disruptor, of how to present and how to appeal to a growing audience as a reflection of social and societal changes.  Was this bound to happen or did a growing population that could read begin to influence rather than just accept? 
   
  Moving through the centuries we gather a groundswell of authors as we hit the Victorian Age - an age of physical mass communication albeit only on an actual printed page.  An audience was offered a multitude of forms: novels (both whole and in serialised form) essays, short stories, poems all in weekly, monthly and quarterly form.  Many of these periodicals were founded or edited by literary behemoths from Dickens and Thackeray through to Jerome K Jerome and, even some female editors including Ethel Colburn Mayne, Alice Meynell and Ella D’Arcy. 
   
  Now authors began to offer a wider, more diverse choice from social activism and justice – and injustice to cutting stories of manners and principles.  From many forms of comedy to mental meltdowns, from science fiction to unrequited heartache.  If you can imagine it an author probably wrote it.  
   
  At the end of the 19th Century bestseller lists and then prizes, such as the Nobel and Pulitzer, helped focus an audience’s attention to a books literary merit and sales worth. Previously coffeehouses, Imperial trade, unscrupulous overseas printers ignoring copyright restrictions, publishers with their book lists as an appendix and the gossip and interchange of polite society had been the main avenues to secure sales and profits.

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