Showing results by narrator "Michael Maloney" in All Categories

Frederic Moreau is a law student returning home to Normandy from Paris when he first notices Mme Arnoux, a slender, dark woman several years older than himself. It is the beginning of an infatuation that will last a lifetime. He befriends her husband, an influential businessman, and their paths cross and re-cross over the years. Through financial upheaval, political turmoil, and countless affairs, Mme Arnoux remains the constant, unattainable love of Moreau’s life.

‘It is easy to do justice - very hard to do right.’ When he is accused of stealing a five-shilling postal order, fourteen-year-old Ronnie Winslow is expelled from naval college. But his father believes his claim of innocence and, determined to clear his name, engages the most famous...

Elizabeth Bowen was one of the 20th century's most distinctive writers. An associate of the Bloomsbury Set, she was a keen observer of upper-middle-class life and relationships. Best known for her novels of the Anglo-Irish gentry and wartime London, her fiction displays recurring themes of loss, rootlessness and displacement. This collection contains five of Bowen's best-loved works, and hears from the author herself in three radio talks on the art of novel-writing.

Proteus loves Julia in Verona, Valentine loves Silvia in Milan. But when Proteus meets Silvia, he falls for her too, and the heartbroken Julia sets out in pursuit. This delightful and sometimes disquieting early comedy of love lost and found offers lyrical poetry, disguise, clowning, outlaws, and a most unreliable dog.

Hedda Gabler, the daughter of a deceased General, marries dull George Tesman and foresees a life of middle class tedium stretching ahead when they return from their honeymoon. Increasingly, she is drawn into the clutches of her admirer, Judge Brack, who seeks to establish a ménage a trois. Then the brilliant but dissolute Eilert Lovborg, a former flame, arrives to rival her husband for an academic post.

Culture and Anarchy is a series of periodical essays by Matthew Arnold, first published in Cornhill Magazine 1867-68 and collected as a book in 1869. Arnold's famous piece of writing on culture established his High Victorian cultural agenda which remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until the 1950s. According to his view advanced in the book, ‘Culture [...] is a study of perfection’.

The Canterbury Tales, written near the end of Chaucer's life and hence towards the close of the 14th century, is perhaps the greatest English literary work of the Middle Ages: yet it speaks to us today with almost undimmed clarity and relevance.

It is the late 14th century, a dangerous time beset by war and plague. Nicholas Barber, a young and wayward cleric, stumbles across a group of travelling players and compounds his sins by joining them. Yet the town where they perform reveals another drama: a young woman is to be hanged for the murder of a 12-year-old boy. What better way to increase their takings than to make a new play, to enact the murder of Thomas Wells?

But as the actors rehearse, they discover that the truth about the boy's death has yet to be revealed.

For 32 days, they were chased across the mountains as they headed for the coast and a rendezvous with a Royal Navy launch waiting to spirit the general to Cairo. Rick Stroud, whose Phantom Army of Alamein won plaudits for its meticulous research and its lightness of touch in the telling, brings these same gifts to bear in this new project.

This anthology of Kipling's most famous poems - including "If", "Mandalay", "Gunga Din" - is taken from Naxos AudioBooks' Great Poets series. Though sometimes still regarded as a product of the colonial era, Kipling touches a very popular nerve in Britain's literary tradition and is regarded more generously now as a master of popular verse. It is often forgotten that he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907.

It is the long, oppressive summer of 1912. Four months ago the RMS Titanic was lost to the Atlantic. In Europe the drumbeats of war grow louder. These things have yet to touch Mr. Sherlock Holmes who, estranged from Dr. Watson, lives in reclusive retirement on the South Downs. The world’s foremost criminal investigator has turned his back on the past, hiding from the world and thinking himself immune to its excesses.

Frankenstein, first published in 1818, is widely recognised as being one of the first 'science fiction' novels. Starring Michael Maloney as Frankenstein and John Wood as the Creature, this spine-tingling dramatisation perfectly conveys the book's pervasive sense of unease and dread. Victor...

Invited to the remote island of Dearth, far across the Dream Archipelago, to talk at a conference, he finds himself caught up in a series of mysteries. How can Dearth claim to be completely crime-free yet still have an armed police force? Why are they so keen for him to appear but so dismissive when he arrives? Is his sense of time confused, or is something confusing happening to time itself?

Bloomsbury presents The Sleeper and the Spindle by Neil Gaiman, read by Julian Rhind-Tutt, Adjoa Andoh, Michael Maloney, John Sessions, Peter Forbes and Niamh Walsh. The bestselling, award-bedecked Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell are reunited in this irresistible fairytale reboot. Weaving together...

Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a collection of narratives written between 1387 and 1400, tells of a group of 30 people from all layers of society who pass the time along their pilgrimage to Canterbury by telling stories to one another, their interaction mediated (at times) by the affable host - Chaucer himself. Naxos AudioBooks’ third volume presents the tales of six people, here in an unabridged modern verse translation (by Frank Ernest Hill, 1935).

Here are the extraordinary writings of a generation who fought through a war of unprecedented destructive power, and who had to find new voices to express the horror of what they discovered. The great names - Owen, Sassoon - are fully represented, but there are also many poems by lesser-known or unexpected figures, ranging from serving soldiers like Isaac Rosenberg and Richard Aldington to women such as Edith Nesbit and Vera Brittain.

Nikos Kazantzakis’ two most popular novels, adapted for BBC Radio Nikos Kazantzakis is widely regarded as the greatest Greek writer and philosopher of the 20th century. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 14 times, and his works have been translated into over 50 languages...

In this audiobook, Dominic Watson takes you on a very different retirement journey, one that is fun and leads to a dynamic and enthralling destination. He shows you how retirement can be done on your terms. Using incredible, real-life case studies, this audiobook will give you the insights on how to live the life you want. Redefining retirement the Rock Star Way isn’t about turning life's amplifier down, it's about well and truly ramping it up to 11 and beyond!

You should have been a detective. If there's one thing the last year has proved, it's how good you are at finding things out. Not simple things. Hard things. Things that nobody is supposed to be able to find out. Things that are buried so deep nobody even thinks twice about them. The sort of...

For centuries the Maintainers have worked. With no help from other worlds, they subsist on the food they can grow and that’s little enough. But their purpose, their whole life, is to maintain the machines that will one day make their world as habitable as old Earth. Life used to be hard. Now...