Audiobooks narrated by Peter Yearsley

"Jack London lived for a time within the grim and grimy world of the East End of London, where half a million people scraped together hardly enough on which to survive. Even if they were able to work, they were paid only enough to allow them a pitiful existence. He grew to know and empathise with these forgotten (or ignored) people as he spoke with them and tasted the workhouse, life on the streets, ... and the food, which was cheap, barely nutritious, and foul. He writes about his experiences in a fluid and narrative style, making it very clear what he thinks of the social structures which created the Abyss, and of the millionaires who live high on the labours of a people forced to live in squalor. '... The food this managing class eats, the wine it drinks, ... the fine clothes it wears, are challenged by eight million mouths which have never had enough to fill them, and by twice eight million bodies which have never been sufficiently clothed and housed.'"

Jack London (Author), Peter Yearsley (Narrator)

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The King in Yellow

"The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by the American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The book is named after a play with the same title which recurs as a motif through some of the stories. The first half of the book features highly esteemed horror stories, and the book has been described by critics such as E. F. Bleiler, and T. E. D. Klein as a classic in the field of the supernatural."

Robert W. Chambers (Author), Peter Yearsley (Narrator)

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Sadhana: the realisation of life

"A collection of essays on the Hindu/Buddhist view of humankind's place in the universe. As the author says in his introduction: 'in these papers, it may be hoped, western readers will have an opportunity of coming into touch with the ancient spirit of India as revealed in our sacred texts and manifested in the life of to-day.' Most of the essays were given as lectures before Harvard University in 1916 or before."

Rabindranath Tagore (Author), Peter Yearsley (Narrator)

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The Parenticide Club

"'The Parenticide Club' features four short-stories about a family murder, as seen from the eye of its most innocent member, who just might be the murderer himself. - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) was an American writer, journalist, critic, poet, and Civil War veteran, best known for The Devil's Dictionary (1911). He dominated the horror genre as the preeminent innovator of supernatural storytelling in the period between the death of Edgar Allan Poe and the rise of H.P. Lovecraft. Bierce’s death was as mysterious as his strange stories; sometime around 1914 he left for Mexico, wanting to experience the Mexican Revolution firsthand, and was never to be seen again."

Ambrose Bierce (Author), Peter Yearsley (Narrator)

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Three Men in a Boat & Three Men on the Bummel

"Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers - the jokes have been praised as fresh and witty. The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator Jerome K. Jerome) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom Jerome often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, 'as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog'. The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff. This was just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity. Three Men on the Bummel (also known as Three Men on Wheels) is a humorous novel by Jerome K. Jerome. It was published in 1900, eleven years after his most famous work, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). The sequel brings back the three companions who figured in Three Men in a Boat, this time on a bicycle tour through the German Black Forest. D. C. Browning's introduction to the 1957 Everyman's edition says 'Like most sequels, it has been compared unfavourably with its parent story, but it was only a little less celebrated than Three Men in a Boat and was for long used as a school book in Germany.' Jeremy Nicholas of the Jerome K. Jerome Society regards it as a 'comic masterpiece' containing 'set pieces' as funny or funnier than those in its predecessor, but, taken as a whole, not as satisfying due to the lack of as strong a unifying thread."

Jerome K. Jerome (Author), Nick Bulka, Peter Yearsley (Narrator)

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Life in a Mediaeval City, Illustrated by York in the XVth Century

Edwin Benson (Author), Peter Yearsley (Narrator)

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The Five Jars

"The Five Jars is the only novel written by James, who is best known for his ghost stories. It is a peculiarly surreal fantasy apparently written for children. While he is out walking, the narrator is drawn to a remote pool, and finds a small box that has been hidden since Roman times. He gradually learns how to use its contents, fighting off a series of attempts to steal it, and becomes aware of a strange world hidden from our own. (Summary by Peter Yearsley)"

M.R. James (Author), Peter Yearsley (Narrator)

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The Ghosts of Piccadilly

"Nothing spooky or supernatural, but a very personal gathering of gossip, letters, and fragments of biography of famous people who have lived in Piccadilly (in London, England) ... and of some of the buildings, now long gone. "If any part of any city deserves a book to itself, it is Piccadilly. We shall stand before some house in the hours when the traffic is stilled, and I shall tell of its history, of the men and women who dwelt there, and talked and loved and gambled and lived and died. I shall follow the lines of my temperament and tastes rather than those of completeness and impartiality: it is likely that I shall be voluble about Byron and reticent about Macaulay." (From the preface)"

G. S. Street (Author), Peter Yearsley (Narrator)

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The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

"A light journey through the history of chemistry, from its start in the obscure mysteries of alchemy to what was, for the author, the cutting edge of the development of modern atomic theory ... and whose developing blind ends we can now see with the advantage of hind sight. (Summary by Peter Yearsley)"

M. M. Pattison Muir (Author), Peter Yearsley (Narrator)

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"'Off with her head!' yells the Queen of Hearts, one of the many peculiar creatures Alice encounters after falling down a rabbit hole and into an absurd fantasy world of Mad Tea Parties, nonsensical trials, and talking animals. Published In 1865, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland became an instant success, and author Lewis Carroll broke ground with his unique take on children’s stories: Instead of the overly simplistic and sometimes dry tales that characterized the genre in the Victorian age, Carroll introduced a book that didn’t look down on its audience, and one that – to this day – is enjoyed by children and adults alike. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into 176 languages, and adapted to the screen close to 20 times, most notably by Tim Burton in the 2010 feature film that saw Mia Wasikowska as Alice and Helena Bonham Carter as the unforgettable Queen of Hearts. - Lewis Caroll, pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, (1832-1898), was a British mathematician, photographer, and children’s book author. The idea for his most famous work, 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland', came to Carroll when he was on a boat with friends, having to entertain three young girls, one of whose name was Alice. Despite his success as a children’s book author, Carroll considered himself, first and foremost, a man of science and mathematics."

Lewis Carroll (Author), Peter Yearsley (Narrator)

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Version 3)

""Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do ..." .. and from that moment onward we drift with Alice into another world. When she sees a White Rabbit as it runs through the tall grass (looking worriedly at the watch it takes from its waist-coat pocket), she runs after it and drops into a strange dream. The world is full of chatty animals, from a rather stand-offish hookah-smoking caterpillar to the friendly Cheshire Cat which only sometimes goes to the bother of having a body. And everyone seems to be ordering her about ... or telling her to recite poetry! ... and all those verses that she once knew so well seem strangely distorted. In this book and in "Through the Looking Glass", Lewis Carroll affectionately brought together many of the wonderful stories he told to Alice and her sisters on long summer boating trips. (Summary by Peter Yearsley)"

Lewis Carroll (Author), Peter Yearsley (Narrator)

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Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

"Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) was a medieval scholar; Provost of King's College, Cambridge. He wrote many of his ghost stories to be read aloud in the long tradition of spooky Christmas Eve tales. His stories often use rural settings, with a quiet, scholarly protagonist getting caught up in the activities of supernatural forces. The details of horror are almost never explicit, the stories relying on a gentle, bucolic background to emphasise the awfulness of the otherworldly intrusions."

M.R. James (Author), Peter Yearsley (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Peter Yearsley