Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.
Audiobooks Narrated by Veronika Hyks
Browse audiobooks narrated by Veronika Hyks, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
With elegant simplicity and unswerving honesty, Irene Nemirovsky chronicles the brutalizing effects of war, on three ordinary Parisian families whose lives intertwine, spanning the years between 1912 and 1941. What starts out as a glorious campaign, in 1914, full of optimistic declarations of France's greatness, soon turns to shame and cynicism as the conflict drags on. Parisians, suffering from cold and hunger, seem unable or unwilling to comprehend the horrors of the trenches.
Others seeing the main chance, prospers as black market racketeers. Bernard, who had enlisted with high hopes, returns from the Western Front, hardened and disillusioned, whose one aim, as he faces the interwar years, is to make money in whatever way possible and to indulge his senses. For his childhood friend, Therese, widowed at 22, the pursuit of happiness, now seems an impossible dream.
Virginia Woolf's semi-biographical novel, inspired by her life changing love affair with Vita Sackville-West, takes us on an exhilarating, fantastical roller coaster, tracing 400 years of English history, in the company of her shape-shifting, gender-bending, time-travelling hero Orlando, whose inner conflicts and triumphs challenge our preconceptions of the nature of love, the battle of the sexes, posing socal and metaphysical questions including what we now call climate change.
The Lifted Curtain and My Conversion are two short erotic classics written by the colourful, aristocratic political fire-brand, esteemed author, and renowned libertine the Comte Gabrel Honore Riquetti de Mirabeau, who spent much of his young adult life in prison at the behest of this father, who disapproved of his son's licentious behaviour. During one particular stretch, Mirabeau decided to put pen to paper, to while away the time and to make the separation from his then paramour more bearable. Pock-marked but boisterous, he never had trouble seducing the ladies, so his two stories are in part based on his own experience. The Lifted Curtain confronts the age old taboo of incest and My Conversion is a humorous but cynical exploration of the sexual appetites of ladies of quality. For 200 years their publication remained clandestine, but they established Mirabeau's reputation as a writer, and in later years he became one of the Revolution's finest oratore. His state funeral lasted three days, and he is buried in the Pantheon. Public Domain (P)2013 Aquarium Audio Books
Lady Chatterley's Lover, written in 1928, tells the story of a passionate love affair between an upper-class woman and her husband's gamekeeper, which was thought to be so shocking in its content and its straightforward use of explicit sexual terms, that it was not officially published until 1960. Its 1961 second edition contained this dedication from the publisher: "For having published this book, Penguin Books were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1959 at the Old Bailey in London from 20 October to 2 November 1960. This edition is therefore dedicated to the 12 jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of 'Not Guilty' and thus made D. H. Lawrence's last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom."
Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was one of the most banned and censored books in the history of literature. John Cleland (a contrary man of letters, prone to boasting and getting into trouble with the law) wrote it while he was in Fleet debtor's prison. First published in 1748 and withdrawn within a year, it was not legally republished until 100 years later. Widely considered to be the first example of literary erotica and a stylistic tour de force, with its combination of charm, daring, and love of pleasure.
