Gulliver's Travels has been in print since its first publication in 1726, due to its popularity with young and old alike. As well as a wildly imaginative tale of travel and adventure, it is a comment on human nature and an overblown explorer's story, rich in symbolism and humour. Lemuel Gulliver, an English surgeon, sets sail on expeditions to extr...

The second part of John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, chronicling the downfall of an upper middle class family in the turbulent period of social change at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries. This book tells of the struggle between Soames and his beautiful wife Irene, who leaves him but cannot persuade him to grant a divorce. While Soa...

Soames Forsyte's great desire to own things even extends to his captivating wife, Irene. Jealous of her friendships with others, he concocts a plan to move her away to the countryside, where he might come to own her completely. Resisting his bitter intentions, she falls for architect Philip Bossiney, who is unfortunately engaged to her best friend...

Helen Johns reads some fascinating early writings by Jane Austen from the fictionalised A Collection of Letters. A prolific letter writer herself, in this collection we see how the budding writer is experimenting, and starting to explore the medium as a literary convention.

Woof! Woof! I am a spaniel called Flush and owned by Elizabeth Barret Browning and her husband Robert and this is my amusing but ultimately sad autiobiography. Virginia Woolf's biography of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings spaniel was what she called "a little escapade", begun to "ease my brain" in the wake of The Waves (1931). The intensities of that m...

Quasimodo is the lonely and deformed bell-ringer of Notre Dame in Paris, will there ever be anyone that can brighten his life and relieve his sorrowful isolation? Quasimodo, the hunchback, is bell-ringer at Notre Dame. One day, he notices a gipsy girl dancing in the square below, and desires to get to know her. Events transpire so that the two mee...

A gritty and absorbing glimpse into the lives of women and men living in a small community, and the often unpleasant truths that relationships can sometimes hold. Bathsheba Everdene flees her abusive husband and spends the night by a stagnant and spooky swamp. When light begins to break over her hiding-place, she sees strong parallels between her...

Virginia Woolf's pioneering work on women in literature. An accessible yet fiercely astute essay, it is a crystallisation of the intelligent analysis behind her novels, and confirms her as a writer not only of style, but of undeniable substance. Ranging from discussing Austen's pandering to a male writing style, to imagining the dreadful fate of...

Set in the nineteenth century against a backdrop of island life and the vast surrounding seas, A High Wind in Jamaica is the gripping story of the Bas-Thornton children, whose parents send them back to England following a hurricane in the postcolonial Caribbean they call home. Having set sail, the children quickly fall into the hands of pirates.

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and twice adapted into films, The Good Companions also inspired the Yorkshire Television series of the same name. One of Priestley's best-known works, it follows the fortune of a group of misfits who decide to join a concert troupe. An excellent choice for audio due to Priestley's use of regional diale...

Emma is used to ruling over the social lives of those living in Highbury, but she has a lesson to learn about trying to co-ordinate other people's lives and actions a little too much. Emma is an exquisitely crafted portrait of late 18th century society, generally considered to be Austen's most accomplished work. Set within the confines of a Surrey...

Four more delightful tales from one of the most entertaining storytellers of all time. Though writing in the thirteenth century, Chaucer's wit and observation comes down undiminished through the ages, especially in this accessible modern verse translation. The stories vary considerably from the uproarious Wife of Bath's Tale, promoting the power of...

The first book in the 'Barsetshire' series. When John Bold decides to challenge corruption in the Church of England he sets the whole town of Barchester ablaze with the consequences. This book is the study of conflicting loyalties and principles in a cathedral city where the gentle warden becomes an unwilling focus of national controversy.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a collection of narratives written between 1387 and 1400, tells of a group of thirty 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 prese...

Fanny Price's rich relatives offer her a place in their home so that she can be properly brought up. However, Fanny's childhood is a lonely one as she is never allowed to forget her place. Her only ally is her cousin Edmund. When her cousins befriend two glamorous new young people who have arrived in the area, Henry and Mary Crawford, Edmund starts...

A classic love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities. At 19, Anne Eliot is persuaded to jilt her suitor-Captain Frederick Wentworth-because he has neither rank nor fortune. When they encounter one another eight years later will she make the same mistake again?

Cousin Bette is one of the best loved and most admired of Honore de Balzac's novels. A tale of seductive women and philandering men, of passionate affairs and spiralling debts, Cousin Bette paints a vivid portrait of Paris in the 1830s and '40s. It's a city full of temptations, in which money is king, morals are loose and the appeals of the virtuou...

'Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life . . .' Passionate, free-thinking and unconventional, Miss Brodie is a teacher who exerts a powerful influence over her group of 'special girls' at Marcia Blaine School. They are the Brodie set, the creme de la creme, each famous for something - Monica for mathematics, Eunice for sw...

Lorna Doone, a Romance of Exmoor is an historical novel of high adventure set in the South West of England during the turbulent time of Monmouth's rebellion (1685). It is also a moving love story told through the life of the young farmer John Ridd, as he grows to manhood determined to right the wrongs in his land, and to win the heart and hand of t...

A timeless classic on "Hell's latest novelties and Heaven's unanswerable answer" A masterpiece of satire, this classic work has entertained and enlightened readers the world over with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life and foibles from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to "Our Father Below." At once wildly comic, dea...

The Chuzzlewits are a family divided by money and selfishness; even young Martin, the eponymous hero, is arrogant and self-centred. He offends his grandfather by falling in love with the latter's ward, Mary, and sets out to make his own fortune in life, travelling as far as America - which produces from Dickens a savage satire on a new world tainte...