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Jack's due back...and Nell is waiting. She's dreamt of this moment for a long time. Nine years after their plan was hatched, Master Mariner Jack Riley is ready to take control of his own ship. And Nell is preparing to travel with him. Counting down the days until he gets home, she longs to see America...and nobody is going to stop her. Not her two young daughters...and especially not her sister, Maria.

The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. It was published in book form in December 1922. Eliot's poem loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of contemporary British society.

The 200th anniversary of the birth of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892), one of the most popular of poets, is celebrated in 2009. Works such as The Charge of the Light Brigade, Crossing the Bar and Tears, Idle Tears have made him an internationally famous figure, and the second most quoted writer of all time (after Shakespeare).

When her father remarries, the honest, innocent Molly Gibson suddenly finds herself with a new stepsister, Cynthia, who is beautiful, worldly and impetuous. This would be more than enough to deal with, but the new wife is the deeply snobbish (and darkly secretive) Hyacinth. Thwarted love, scheming ambition and small-town gossip underlie the warmth, irony and brilliant social observation which link the relationships and the inevitable conflicts as profound change comes to rural England.

In post-war East Midlands, in a home dominated by their difficult grandmother and aunt, Yvette and Lucille are two sisters struggling to bring joy into their lives. Their mother, having run off in a scandal, leaves the two to suffer a dysfunctional family life and oppressive domesticity. But one day, Yvette meets a free-spirited gypsy and his family, awakening her sexual desires and compounding her disenchantment.

DCI Lesley Clarke’s team is still reeling from the fallout of the Mudeford Spit case and the loss of a much-loved colleague. But there’s no time to adjust. On the very day that they’re commemorating their friend, a new case comes in – a homeless man found dead at Shaftesbury’s iconic Gold Hill.

SHIIBY MAGEE: An Irish Tragicomedy. A vanished mother • A fractured family • A lifetime of choosing the wrong men. When their bold, brassy mother vanishes into Ireland's Traveller community, Shibby Magee and her twin sister Dorah are left behind in a family already cracking at the seams. Under the iron rule of their rigidly bigoted grandmother, the girls grow up on opposite tracks: Dorah, defiant and arrogant; Shibby, bruised and unmoored. As an adult, desperate for love, Shibby is drawn to men who abuse or discard her, caught in patterns she can't yet see.

Poetry was Louis de Bernières’ first literary love. Here the much-loved author returns us to the vivid Mediterranean landscape of his fiction. Introduced to Greek poetry while in Corfu in 1983, de Bernières’ own poems about the distant past, the erotic and the philosophical owe much to the...

Three dramas by Barry Hines and an abridged reading of his classic Kes (A Kestrel for a Knave) Yorkshire-born author Barry Hines is renowned for his 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave (later turned into Ken Loach’s award-winning film Kes) and for scripting the BAFTA-winning BBC TV film Threads...

Do not think, because this collection of essays is titled Volume 2, that there is anything lesser or additional to it. Here is Virginia Woolf at her most entertaining and informative, relishing the portraits and insights she presents as she surveys a varied collection of individuals in English...

Read by Eimear McBride, an electrifying analysis of one giant of twentieth-century literature by another: Beckett on Proust. The whole of Proust's world comes out of a teacup . . . When he was only 25, Samuel Beckett published his first ever book: an electrifying dissection of Marcel Proust's...

Byron's exuberant masterpiece tells of the adventures of Don Juan, a handsome and charming young man naturally gifted with the ladies. After his first illicit love affair at the age of 16 in his native Spain, he is exiled to Italy. Following a dramatic shipwreck, his exploits take him to Greece, where he is sold as a slave, and to Russia, where he becomes a favorite of the Empress Catherine, who sends him on to England.

The Old English epic poem Beowulf, recorded in its original Saxon dialect for the first time. Performed by Icelandic poet, playwright, professional storyteller and performer Svanur Thorkelsson, Audible’s production gives listeners the opportunity to experience how it might have felt to hear bards recite sections of the 3000-line poem from memory in Anglo Saxon dining halls. Audible’s Beowulf recaptures the heroic style and vast scale of what can be considered ‘England’s first native audiobook’.

Walter Matthau stars in the story of a climate scientist trying to balance romance and research. The piece is both serious and surreal as Matthau removes the “fourth wall” while addressing the show’s recording engineer. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Barbara Bain, Zeljko Ivanek and Valerie Landsburg. Directed by Shaun McLoughlin. Recorded before a live audience in Santa Monica, California, in June 1992.

This final play from the pen of Oscar Wilde is a stylish send-up of Victorian courtship and manners, complete with assumed names, mistaken lovers, and a lost handbag. Jack and Algernon are best friends, both wooing ladies who think their names are Ernest, "that name which inspires absolute confidence". Wilde's effervescent wit, scathing social satire, and high farce make this one of the most cherished plays in the English language.

Julia and Fred and Willy and Jane are happily married and the best of friends, until a postcard arrives with news of the imminent arrival of a certain handsome Frenchman. Gay, debonair, and utterly sophisticated.

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about two young Italian star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers.

Tom Jones, a foundling, is brought up by the kindly Mr. Allworthy as if he were his own son. Forced to leave the house as a young man after tales of his disgraceful behavior reach his benefactor's ears, he sets out in utter despair, not only because of his banishment but because he has now lost all hope of gaining the hand of the beautiful Sophia. But she too is forced to flee her parental home to escape an undesirable marriage and their stories and adventures intertwine.

Xenophon was a friend of Socrates, and yet his concise memories of the iconic philosopher have lived under the shadow of the more voluminous accounts by Plato. Yet Xenophon’s two works - Apology and Memorabilia - are, in many ways, more entertaining and more accessible, and they present a...

Tom Jones is a splendid Hogarthian panorama of 18th-century English life and morals, encompassing both city and country, and comprising some of the greatest comic characters in British literature. First published in 1749, it was an instant success and has gone on to become a classic of its genre. Quite simply, there has never been anything like it.