Showing results by narrator "Eve Karpf" in All Categories

These 11 stories include, amongst others, a terrifying Nordic curse and a country garden inhabited by a deadly ghost. Aiken's other works include 'The Kingdom Under The Sea', 'Mortimer Says Nothing' and 'Past Eight O'Clock'.

Charlotte Mary Mew was born on 15th November, 1869 in London to professional parents her father was responsible for the design of Hampstead Town Hall. Charlotte, one of seven children, three of whom died in early childhood, was educated at Lucy Harrison's School for Girls and attended lectures at University College, London. 

Sheila Beattie knew exactly what her future would be. She would marry her sweetheart Eric, a fisherman like her father, and they would raise their family and dream their simple dreams in the village in which they’d been born. Her life lay before her, happy, safe and secure. But she was sixteen - and about to discover in this world there is nothing certain but change. After all, no one and nothing can be trusted - except the voice of your own heart...

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood began as a group of painters, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, who wished to reject the stern and academic strictures of current painting and return to the simpler and more uncomplicated days before the Italian High Renaissance and the days of Raphael. The movement was short lived but very influential and, as well, was taken up by a number of different arts. 

'Malachi’s Cove' tells the story of Mally Trenglos and Barry Gunliffe, who both earn their living by gathering seaweed. They are sworn enemies unit la near fatal accident seals their fate forever. Father Giles of Ballymoy is a hospitable Irish priest whose strange ways are at first misinterpreted by an English visitor.

Elizabeth Gaskell is equally well known as Mrs Gaskell. When her mother died, she was three months old and she was sent to live in Knutsford, Cheshire with her Aunt Hannah, this setting would become the basis for her novel Cranford.

Bennett may not be the best school in the world - but it's theirs. And Barny, Spag and Clipper certainly don't want to get sent off to snobby King's Road School instead. So when Bennett School is threatened with demolition, the three friends draw up a plan of campaign to save it. But everything they do seems to go disastrously and hilariously wrong...

Mirabai was a Rajput princess born to the Rathore clan in 1498 in Kudaki, Rajasthan, in northern India. Despite being one of the most significant saints in the Bhakti tradition and an immensely popular Hindu mystic and religious poet, very few facts are actually known about her life including her date of birth. It is clear that her mother died when she was very young and she was greatly influenced by her father, also a worshipper of Krishna. From a young age, Mirabai’s devotion to Krishna was absolute surrender and complete devotion.

From the author of The Daffodil Sea comes this post-war saga of love and loss. Corporal Reith Douglas loses his memory after sustaining a head injury. Desperate to recover his past, he little realises that things are never quite what they seem.

'There you have it -' Miss Dimont smiled and, lifting her dark glasses, turned to face the trainee reporter '- in a nutshell. A mystery death. Needs looking into, wouldn't you say?' Death stalks the beaches of Devon. With its pale, aquamarine waters and golden sands, the shoreline at Temple Regis was a sight to behold. But when an unidentifiable body is found there one morning, the most beautiful beach in Devon is turned into a crime scene.

When most of Maggie Jordan’s family are killed in a freak flood in the small coastal village of Heymouth, she is forced to find work in one of Glasgow’s carpet mills. She becomes engaged to Nevil Sanderson, who suddenly decides he must go to Spain and join the Republicans in their fight against Franco. Although she struggles on without him, Maggie eventually realises her place is by his side and journeys to Spain to join him. But the newly promoted Nevil has become distant and ruthless, and is fiercely jealous of her new friendship with American journalist Howard Taft.

Perhaps England’s greatest literary family. To find one brilliant novelist in a family is extremely rare. But two? Three?

The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily Jane and Anne, together with their brother Patrick, are famed throughout the world. And amongst their many talents was poetry. Of course, being Brontë’s, they were rather good at that too.

It is May 1926. Glasgow is crippled by the General Strike and the future looks bleak for John Forsyth. Made redundant from his factory job and with no prospect of employment, he and his family only hold together through the determination of his ambitious wife, Madge. Even though this means a dramatic move to the farthest reaches of England - to Devon.As the family begin a new life in the village of Atherton, their fortunes change.

The Sounds of Crime is an exclusive collection of five brand new short stories by some of the best crimewriters around. Using the theme of 'audio', this unique collection features brand new stories by Lawrence Block, Peter James, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham and Christopher Fowler.

For holidaymakers it’s a glorious time of breathtaking scenery, picnics on beaches, and flocks of tourists on their summertime holidays. But for Miss Judy Dimont, this is all a trifle dull. As a reporter for local rag, The Riviera Express, she needs scandal and intrigue - and one morning, as the clock strikes the quarter hour, she gets it. A woman has been shot dead in one of Buntorama’s upmarket holiday huts, the toffee-nosed rival hotelier next door is rubbing his hands with glee, and Judy and her trusty moped, Herbert, are off like a shot to survey the scene of the crime.

In this selection of some of Saki's best short stories, we enter a fictional world in which the Edwardian gently are pitched against the rude forces of nature and maiden aunts struggle unsuccessfully to contain the merciless antics of children in their charge. Saki is perhaps the ultimate master of writing complete stories in just a few pages and his sublime craftsmanship is accompanied by a wicked black humour.

The first time Jessie laid her eyes on Tommy McBride was in July 1947, when they were still at school - and long before she knew anything about heartbreak or pain. Then she was the sheltered, dreamy minister’s daughter, determined to take a bite out of life. And he was the fighter from the wrong side of the tracks, hell-bent on proving himself in the world. They had nothing in common, separate destinies. But in 1947 the world was about to move into new decades of turbulence and change - and it was only the fighters and the dreamers who would make it theirs….

Herbert George Wells was born on September 21st, 1866 in Bromley in Kent. He was the youngest of four siblings and his family affectionately knew him as ‘Bertie’. The first few years of his childhood were spent fairly quietly, and Wells didn’t display much literary interest until, in 1874, he accidentally broke his leg and was left to recover in bed, largely entertained by the library of books his father regularly brought him. Through these Wells found he could escape the boredom and misery of his bed and convalescence by exploring the new worlds he encountered in these books.

We begin with one of Hardy’s best regarded stories, 'The Fiddler of the Reels'. Here Hardy exposes a supernatural and demonic theme, against a realistic and historical background of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the first trains. A typical Wessex girl is gripped by the power of music and dance when a lone fiddler casts his spell on her, causing her cloying but plain suitor to leave suddenly for London.

In the small village of Haworth in Yorkshire, the Bronte family created novels and poems that are still admired to this day around the world. The middle of the three Bronte sisters, Emily Jane was born on 30th July 1818. The author of Wuthering Heights, she was also a very talented poet, as witnessed here in this collection.