Other books that might interest you

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  The Pursuit of Love

  Nancy Mitford

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  Mitford's most enduringly popular novel, The Pursuit of Love is a classic comedy about growing up and falling in love among the privileged and eccentric. 
   
   
   
  Mitford modeled her characters on her own famously unconventional family. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin Fanny, who stays with them at Alconleigh, their Gloucestershire estate. Uncle Matthew is the blustering patriarch, known to hunt his children when foxes are scarce; Aunt Sadie is the vague but doting mother; and the seven Radlett children, despite the delights of their unusual childhood, are recklessly eager to grow up. 
   
   
   
  The first of three novels featuring these characters, The Pursuit of Love follows the travails of Linda, the most beautiful and wayward Radlett daughter, who falls first for a stuffy Tory politician, then an ardent Communist, and finally a French duke named Fabrice.

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  Stone Cold Dead Serious - And...

  Adam Rapp

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  A collection of plays from Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp, "one of the more daring young stylists working today" (Time Out New York)Adam Rapp's plays have captivated audiences across the country with their unflinching explorations of the good, the bad, and the ugly in America's heartland and cities. Gathered here are three of his works: Faster, in which two young grifters try to strike a deal with the devil during the hottest summer on record; Finer Noble Gases, a lament for a band of arrested thirty-year-olds slouching toward adulthood amid East Village decay; and the Off-Broadway hit Stone Cold Dead Serious. An honest, strange, and humorous look at a blue-collar family struggling to survive in the face of disability and addiction, and the seemingly surreal lengths their teenage son will go to save them from themselves."Rapp is very gifted, and, even rarer, he has something to say . . . Stone Cold Dead Serious [is] brave, compassionate, and . . . breathtakingly moving." -(New York Times)

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  The Fir Tree

  Hans Christian Andersen

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  A young Fir Tree stands in the forest. It longs to grow and discover the world and find out where all the other trees are disappearing to... 
  "Oh, grow, grow, become big and old, that is the only wonderful thing in this world!" 
  Set against the backdrop of Christmas, Hans Christian Andersen’s poignant and bittersweet tale about the importance of living in the moment and not allowing life to pass you by - a wonderfully evocative listen for young and old alike. 
  Recorded with immersive 3D sound by award-winning audio company Almost Tangible. We recommend listening on headphones. 
  Read by Carl Prekopp 
  With Les Dennis as Fir Tree, Clare Corbett as Sparrow, Clare Perkins as Mouse, Josh Manning as Rat, Natalie Dew as Sun & Air, Charlotte Melén as Woman, Dan Sutherland as Man, Mackensie Sutherland as Girl, and Raife Sutherland as Boy.

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  The Cloak aka The Overcoat

  Nikolai Gogol

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  Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born on 1st April 1809 to a father, descended from Ukrainian Cossacks and a mother with a military background in the Ukrainian town of Sorochyntsi, then part of the Russian Empire and rich in Cossack traditions and folklore.   
   
  His father wrote poetry and plays which the young Gogol helped stage at his uncle’s home theatre.  This helped ignite in him a love of literature and blossomed when he attended, what is now, the Nizhyn Gogol State University at the age of 12.  Here he participated in school theatre productions and refined his mastery of his native Ukrainian and also the Russian of his Imperial masters. 
   
  In 1828 he went to St Petersburg and unsuccessfully tried to begin a career as an actor after finding that with no money and no connections the civil service was barred to him. 
   
  Embezzling money from his mother he embarked on a trip to Germany. When the money ran out, he returned to St Petersburg but the experiences were used in a series of stories he contributed to periodicals.  These tales were steeped in his childhood memories of the Ukrainian landscape and peasantry enlivened with the supernatural of its folklore woven with realistic events of the day.  He wrote in Russian in a whimsical, colloquial style with a smattering of Ukrainian words and phrases that provided an authenticity.  Eight stories were published as ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’.  Seemingly all at once fame and fortune arrived. Gogol was hailed by his contemporaries, including Pushkin, as a pre-eminent writer of Russian literature.   
   
  His success continued with his brilliant plays ‘The Inspector General’ and the comedy ‘The Marriage for the Theatre’, both being highly acclaimed.   
   
  In 1834 he became Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg but with little academic or teacher training, failed to adequately fulfil many of his duties and soon resigned this post.  With no obligations and using his earnings from his writing, which now included the impressionistic and immortal ‘Dead Souls’, Gogol travelled around Europe, spending the most time in Rome where he studied art, read Italian literature and developed a passion for opera.  
   
  In the 1840s Gogol became preoccupied with a need to purify his soul and embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In tandem he fell under the influence of a strict and austere spiritual ascetic who persuaded him to observe strict fasts that, allied with his depression and deteriorating health, contributed to his death on 21st April 1852 at the age of only 43. 
   
  Gogol had a profound and enduring impact on literature which can be evidenced from his masterpiece, ‘The Cloak’, more popularly although wrongly translated as ‘The Overcoat’ published in 1841.  A hundred years later Vladamir Nabokov called it ‘The greatest Russian short story ever written.’

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  Pride and Prejudice

  Jane Austen

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  Step into a world where wit is sharp, glances speak volumes, and the dance of manners conceals deeper truths. Pride and Prejudice isn't just a novel—it's a perfectly tuned social symphony composed by one of literature's most insightful observers, Jane Austen.
  This timeless classic captures the tension between pride and vulnerability, societal expectation and personal desire, all through language as elegant as the world it critiques. In its pages—and now in your ears—you'll encounter unforgettable characters whose joys, flaws, and revelations still echo today.
  Let Austen's artistry carry you to a place where decorum is everything, yet emotion wins the day. Whether it's your first visit to Longbourn or a cherished return, this audiobook promises not only storytelling at its finest, but the quiet thrill of rediscovering the brilliance behind every ironic turn.

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  Edward Page Mitchell - A Short...

  Edward Page Mitchell

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  Edward Page Mitchell – An Introduction 
   
  Edward Page Mitchell was born in Bath, Maine on 24th March 1852 into a wealthy family.  When he was eight the family moved to a house on New York’s Fifth Avenue. 
   
  In 1863 he witnessed the Draft Riots and in the aftermath Mitchell's father moved the family to Tar River, North Carolina. It was there, at the age of fourteen, that his letters were first published in the local newspaper The Bath Times. 
   
  In 1872, at age twenty, whilst on a train journey to Bath, Maine, a hot cinder from the engine's smokestack flew in through the window blinding his left eye.  After several weeks, while doctors attempted to restore his sight his uninjured right eye underwent sympathetic blindness.  He was now completely blind. His burnt left eye eventually regained its sight, but his uninjured right eye remained blind and was later removed surgically and replaced with a prosthetic glass eye. While recovering from this surgery, Mitchell wrote his famed story ‘The Tachypomp’. 
   
  He became a journalist for the Daily Advertiser in Boston, where his mentor was Edward Everett Hale, now also recognized as an early pioneer of science fiction. 
   
  Mitchell’s influence on science fiction writing is incredible, pre-dating many major themes. He wrote about a man made invisible (‘The Crystal Man’, 1881), a time-travel machine (‘The Clock that Went Backward’), about faster-than-light travel (‘The Tachypomp’, 1874), a thinking computer and a cyborg (‘The Ablest Man in the World’, 1879), matter transmission or teleportation (‘The Man without a Body’, 1877), superior mutants (‘Old Squids and Little Speller’) and mind transfer (‘Exchanging Their Souls’, 1877). Add to this other stories which predicted travel by pneumatic tube, electrical heating, newspapers printed at home, food-pellet concentrates, international broadcasts, and suspended animation through cryogenics amount to talents that are not as publicly lauded as they should be. 
   
  He had a lifelong interest in the supernatural and paranormal—several early newspaper pieces are factual investigations of alleged hauntings and usually he determined they had rational explanations. 
   
  In 1874, Mitchell married Annie Sewall Welch and they had four children.  
   
  In 1903, Mitchell became editor-in-chief of the New York Sun, then the Nation’s leading newspaper. 
   
  In 1912, following Annie’s death, he married Ada M. Burroughs and produced a fifth son. Mitchell remained a popular and respected figure in American journalism and writing up to his death. 
   
  Edward Page Mitchell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in New London, Connecticut on 22nd January 1927.  He was 76. 
   
  1 - Edward Page Mitchell - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  2 - The Clock That Went Backward by Edward Page Mitchell 
  3 - The Tachypomp by Edward Page Mitchell 
  4 - The Man Without a Body by Edward Page Mitchell 
  5 - The Devilish Rat by Edward Page Mitchell 
  6 - The Crystal Man by Edward Page Mitchell

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