Publication date: 2004-09-13
Dewey code: 813
Price: £19.99
Review Daphne Du Maurier Collection / Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books:
Creator: Sophie Thompson
Publication date: 2002-06-10
RRP: £9.00
Price: £20.18
Review "Billy the Bird" & "All Because of Jackson" (Cover to Cover) / Cover to Cover Cassettes Ltd:Ages 6-9 One moonlit night, Mary's otherwise perfectly normal little brother suddenly starts floating above his bed. Mary is, of course, amazed: she has never seen anyone fly before and the responsibility that comes with knowing little Billy's secret presents its own set of problems. Dick King-Smith rarely disappoints, and Billy the Bird adds to his extraordinary repertoire of favourites (Babe, Dodos are Forever The Hodgeheg) with its magical elements taking young readers on an extraordinary adventure they will never forget. -Susan Harrison.
Creator: Michael Kitchen
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1991-09
Price: £36.37
Review The African Queen: Complete & Unabridged (Sterling Audio Series) / Chivers Audio Books:
Creator: Kathy Bates
Edition: Abridged edition
Publication date: 1996-05-06
RRP: £12.98
Price: £20.00
Review A Thousand Acres / Simon & Schuster Audio:Ageing Larry Cook announces his intention to turn over his 1,000-acre farm-one of the largest in Zebulon County, Iowa-to his three daughters, Caroline, Ginny and Rose. A man of harsh sensibilities, he carves Caroline out of the deal because she has the nerve to be less than enthusiastic about her father's generosity. While Larry Cook deteriorates into a pathetic drunk, his daughters are left to cope with the often grim realities of life on a family farm-from battering husbands to cut-throat lenders. In this winner of the US 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Smiley captures the essence of such a life with stark, painful detail. -Amazon. com.
Creator: Jonathan Cecil
Edition: Library Ed
Publication date: 1989-09
Price: £36.37
Review Right Ho, Jeeves: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:
Creator: Orson Welles
Publication date: 1997-10-30
Dewey code: 823
RRP: £16.99
Price: £29.62
Review Sherlock Holmes: the Classics: Full Cast Dramatization / Soundelux Audio Publishing:
Creator: Michael Tudor Barnes
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2000-10-30
Price: £47.95
Review The Last English King / ISIS Audio Books:
Creator: Prunella Scales
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2001-05-08
RRP: £8.99
Price: £1.46
Review Charm School: Complete & Unabridged (Cover to Cover) / Cover to Cover Cassettes Ltd:Bonny is certainly not keen to spend a day at Charm School, but her mother has to sit an exam and can't find a babysitter so she bites the bullet and heads off for a day of sheer agony. As the delightfully bitchy Charm School girls-prissy little Tinkerbells with fluffy hair and glittery dancing shoes-rev up for the competition to win the glistering tiara of Miss Supreme Queen, the confused and self-conscious Bonny finds herself in the middle of an out-and-out, no-holds-barred, war. Anne Fine has never fought shy of digging for emotional truth in her work, and here the author of Madame Doubtfire and Goggle-Eyes, doesn't fail the reader for one second as she skilfully takes one day in the life of a group of little girls and gives an exquisite, achingly sad yet robustly comical insight into what makes us all tick. -Susan Harrison.
Edition: Set
Publication date: 1987-12
Review The Mayor of Casterbridge / Cram Cassettes Study Guides:
Creator: Hugh Laurie
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 1996-11
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £11.74
Price: £19.99
Review Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics) / Penguin Audiobooks:
Publication date: 1963-01
Review The Glass Blowers / Books on Tape:
Publication date: 1996-06-01
Price: £18.50
Review Solitaire Mystery / Nova Audio Books:
Publication date: 1995-02-11
Price: £8.99
Review Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Penguin Audiobooks) / Penguin Audiobooks:Salman Rushdie is one of the best contemporary writers of fables and parables, from any culture. Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a delightful tale about a storyteller who loses his skill and a struggle against mysterious forces attempting to block the seas of inspiration from which all stories are derived. Here's a representative passage about the sources and power of inspiration. So If the water genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Stream of Stories, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead, but alive. "And if you are very, very careful, or very, very highly skilled, you can dip a cup into the Ocean," Iff told Haroun, "like so," and here he produced a little golden cup from another of his waistcoat pockets, "and you can fill it with water from a single, pure Stream of Story, like so," as he did precisely that.
Creator: Jonathan Cecil
Publication date: 1992-01
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £43.42
Price: £84.61
Review The Mating Season: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:
Creator: Alan Bennett
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 1998-05-04
Price: £8.99
Review The Story of Doctor Dolittle (BBC Radio Presents) / Bantam USA:
Publication date: 1935-01
Review The African Queen / Books on Tape:
Authors
- Patrick O'Brien
- Patrick O'Brian
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 1998-09-07
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £10.99
Price: £49.99
Review The Hundred Days / HarperCollins Audio:The year is 1815, and Europe's most unpopular (not to mention tiniest) empire-builder has escaped from Elba. In The Hundred Days, it's up to Jack Aubrey-and surgeon-cum-spymaster Stephen Maturin-to stop Napoleon in his tracks. How? For starters, Aubrey and his squadron have been dispatched to the Adriatic coast, to keep Bonapartist shipbuilders from beefing up the French navy. Meanwhile, one Sheik Ibn Hazm is fomenting an Islamic uprising against the Allies. The only way to halt this manoeuvre is to intercept the sheikh's shipment of gold-because in the Napoleonic era, as in our own, even the most ardent of mercenaries requires a salary. The Hundred Days is the 19th (and, we are told, the penultimate) instalment of O'Brian's epic. Like many of its predecessors, it features a swashbuckling plot, complete with cannon fire, exotic disguises and Aubrey's suspenseful, slow-motion pursuit of an Algerian xebek. Yet it never turns into a mere exercise in Hornblowerism. In part, this is due to O'Brian's delicate touch with character-the relationship between extroverted Aubrey and introverted Maturin has deepened with each book, and even Aubrey's reunion with his childhood companion Queenie Keith is full of novelistic nuance: "They sat smiling at one another. An odd pair: handsome creatures both, but they might have been of the same sex or neither. [+]" Nor does the author focus too exclusively on his dynamic duo. Indeed, The Hundred Days is very much a chronicle of a floating community, which Maturin describes as "his own village, his own ship's company, that complex entity so much more easily sensed than described: part of his natural habitat. " Finally, O'Brian shows his usual expertise in balancing the great events with the most minuscule ones. Other authors have written about battles at sea, and still others have recorded the rapid rise and fall of Napoleon's fortunes after his escape from confinement. But who else would give equal time-and an equal charge of delight-to Maturin's discovery of an anomalous nuthatch? -James Marcus.
Creator: Juliet Stevenson
Edition: Gift
Publication date: 1994-11
Dewey code: 813
Price: £25.00
Review Pemberley: Gift Pack / Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books:
Creator: Carole Boyd
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1996-03
Price: £35.19
Review School for Love: Unabridged / Soundings:
Authors
- Terry Donnelly
- Robert Blumenfeld
- Tracy Chevalier
Price: £38.41
Review The Lady and the Unicorn / Sound Library:If you think you wouldn't raise your skirts for a rakish legend about the purifying powers of a unicorn's horn, then maybe you aren't a 15th-century serving girl under the sway of a velvet-tongued court painter of ill repute. In keeping with her bestselling Girl with a Pearl Earring, and its Edwardian-era follow-up, Falling Angels, Tracy Chevalier's tale of artistic creation and late-medieval amours, The Lady and the Unicorn is a subtle study in social power and the conflicts between love and duty. Nicolas des Innocents has been commissioned by the Parisian nobleman Jean Le Viste to design a series of large tapestries for his great hall (in real life, the famous Lady and the Unicorn cycle, now in Paris's Musee National du Moyen-Age Thermes de Cluny). While Nicolas is measuring the walls, he meets a beautiful girl who turns out to be Jean Le Viste's daughter. Their passion is impossible for their world-so forbidden, given their class differences, that its only avenue of expression turns out to be those magnificent tapestries. The historical evidence on which this story is based is slight enough to allow the full play of Chevalier's imagination in this cleverly woven tale. -Regina Marler, Amazon. com.
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Models & Brands:
Daphne Du Maurier Collection, "Billy the Bird" & "All Because of Jackson" (Cover to Cover), The African Queen: Complete & Unabridged (Sterling Audio Series), A Thousand Acres, Right Ho, Jeeves: Complete & Unabridged, Sherlock Holmes: the Classics: Full Cast Dramatization, The Last English King, Charm School: Complete & Unabridged (Cover to Cover), The Mayor of Casterbridge, Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics), The Glass Blowers, Solitaire Mystery, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Penguin Audiobooks), The Mating Season: Complete & Unabridged, The Story of Doctor Dolittle (BBC Radio Presents), The African Queen, The Hundred Days, Pemberley: Gift Pack, School for Love: Unabridged, The Lady and the Unicorn |
