Great Literature

In this Audible Exclusive performance by Matt Lucas of Great Expectations, Charles Dickens demonstrates that conscience, loyalty and empathy are virtues far more valuable than intellect, wealth and social standing. First published in Dickens’ own periodical, All the Year Round, the novel was divided into nine monthly instalments, from December 1860 to August 1861. Unsurprisingly, it was an instant success and managed to sell over 100,000 copies per week. Though written at a challenging time in Dickens’ life, when the impending breakdown of his marriage loomed over him, Great Expectations proves to be one of his most optimistic, comical and romantic novels.

As Fanim war drums beat just outside the city, Empress Anasurimbor Esmenet searches frantically throughout the palace for her missing son, Kelmomas. Meanwhile, and many miles away, Esmenet's husband's Great Ordeal continues its epic march farther north. But in light of dwindling supplies, the Aspect-Emperor's decision to allow his men to consume the flesh of fallen Sranc could have consequences even he couldn't have foreseen.

Fragrant blossoms herald spring, but the orchard is also a place of secrets and heartache. After the death of her husband Frank, Eliza is left with three young children and mounting debts. When a gentle stranger enters her orchard, she experiences a peculiar sensation of familiarity with the man. But will his unknown past jeopardize all that she has fought for?

Into Keldale's pastoral web of old houses and older secrets comes Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton. Along with the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lynley has been sent to solve a savage murder that has stunned the peaceful countryside. For fat, unlovely Roberta Teys has been found in her best dress, an ax in her lap, seated in the old stone barn beside her father's headless corpse. Her first and last words were "I did it. And I'm not sorry".

Tinker Bell has been captured by a human! Find out how Vidia, Rosetta, and the other fairies attempt to rescue Tink in this adventurous audio story!

The Great Lakes - Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior - hold 20 percent of the world's supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work, and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan's engaging portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes.

Scorio will rise from the ashes to conquer the 10 layers of hell. Reborn without memories, Scorio learns that he is a Great Soul, a legendary defender of the ancient city of Bastion. That within the hallowed halls of the Academy and under the stern eyes of the underworld’s greatest instructors he will enjoy enormous privilege, rediscover unique and wondrous powers, and one day return to the millennium-old battle against their infernal foes. Until he is betrayed.

It's the last week of summer. Rebekah, Mouse, RJ and the gang are excited to spend their last days of school vacation hanging out together in Curtis Bay. They have lots of fun pool days planned until suddenly everything is ruined. This bad news brings with it a mystery followed by the best prank of the summer.

After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There—after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe.

Alaska, 1974. Untamed. Unpredictable. A story of a family in crisis struggling to survive at the edge of the world, it is also a story of young and enduring love. Cora Allbright and her husband, Ernt, a recently returned Vietnam veteran scarred by the war, uproot their 13-year-old daughter, Leni, to start a new life in Alaska. Utterly unprepared for the weather and the isolation, but welcomed by the close-knit community, they fight to build a home in this harsh, beautiful wilderness.

When Orwell went to England in the 30's to find out how industrial workers lived, he not only observed but shared in their experiences. He stayed in cramped, dreary lodgings and subsisted on the scant, cheerless diet of the poor. He went down into the coal mines and walked crouching, as the miners did, through a one- to three-mile passage too low to stand up in. He watched the back-breaking, dangerous labor of men whose net pay then averaged $575 a year.

The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapologetic account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world.

From the Gilded Age until 1914, more than 100 American heiresses invaded Britannia and swapped dollars for titles - just like Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, the first of the Downton Abbey characters Julian Fellowes was inspired to create after reading To Marry An English Lord. Filled with vivid personalities, gossipy anecdotes, grand houses, and a wealth of period details-plus quotes and the finer points of Victorian and Edwardian etiquette - To Marry An English Lord is social history at its liveliest and most accessible.

Stuey Ungar dropped out of high school to become an underground card-table sensation, eventually taking out every top gin-rummy player on the east coast. Bankrolled by the Genovese crime family, Ungar went on to win the World Series of Poker a record three times. Then his luck began to run out.

August 1914. While Europe enters a brutal conflict unlike any waged before, the Duncan household in Baltimore, Maryland, is the setting for a different struggle. Ruth and Elise Duncan long to escape the roles that society, and their controlling father, demand they play. Together, the sisters volunteer for the war effort - Ruth as a nurse, Elise as a driver.

Pigeonholed in popular memory as a Jazz Age epicurean, a playboy, and an emblem of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation's shifting mood and manners after World War I. In Paradise Lost, David Brown contends that Fitzgerald's deepest allegiances were to a fading antebellum world he associated with his father's Chesapeake Bay roots. Yet as a midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, and a perpetually in-debt author, he felt like an outsider in the haute bourgeoisie haunts.

In teeming Victorian London, where lavish wealth and appalling poverty live side by side, Edward Pierce charms the most prominent of the well-to-do as he cunningly orchestrates the crime of the century. Who would suspect that a gentleman of breeding could mastermind the daring theft of a fortune in gold? Who could predict the consequences of making the extraordinary robbery aboard the pride of England's industrial era, the mighty steam locomotive?

Using the same characters as those found in Miller’s other bestseller, The Secret and one new character, a retired Special Forces Commander, this work aims to help team leaders and team members create high-performing teams. The core message is that Talent, Skills, and Community are all essential to team success, and that team leaders and leaders supervising or training team leaders, need to develop all three in order to create such teams.

Peter, Mary, and Hank journey to the pyramid-studded desert of ancient Egypt. When the trio become friends with Pharaoh's daughter, they witness first-hand as Moses petitions Pharaoh for the Israelites' freedom. Plagues wreak havoc as the group races to decode the scroll, gets chased by a panther, and battles Pharaoh's cunning advisor, the Great Magician.

Warring samurai clans fight with swords and magic for the Emperor's favor with these collected Legend of the Five Rings novellas, including a brand-new novella of the Crane Clan.