Showing results by publisher "Audio Connoisseur" in All Categories

The Cassique of Kiawah is the romantic story of Harry Calvert, a privateer in service to King Charles II of England. Set in the year 1684, it is a colonial romance set in South Carolina. Because of a change of political winds in London, Calvert is hiding his crew and ship in the backwaters near Charleston. He sets out in disguise to see his friend, the governor of Carolina, in order to gauge the situation. But then he learns that his titled older brother, who has become the Cassique (or lord) of the beautiful island of Kiawah, is in the area and has married the woman Harry was previously in love with back in England....

Out of the mixture of Latin and Germanic paganism and the Christianity of the Early Middle Ages has sprung one of the world's supremely great pieces of literature. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, delivered a famous lecture to the British Academy in 1936 in which he maintained that Beowulf was a poem all of a piece, and not (as had been suggested) a jumble of fragments for pedantic scholars to paw over.

Of the surviving work of Cornelius Nepos, Lives of the Eminent Commanders is the only piece that has come down to us intact, and it was actually only one of a much larger set of volumes on foreign and Roman kings, generals, lawyers, orators, poets, historians, and philosophers. What makes the writing of Nepos highly original was his intent to endow his biographies with a moral purpose and to display the strengths and weaknesses of each great man. Modern listeners will enjoy the work of Nepos and gain new insights into classical Greek leaders, among others.

The spirit of Christmas has never been captured better than by Charles Dickens' masterpiece about Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit and all those wonderful spirits, especially the ghost of Jacob Marley. It can be fairly stated that Dickens was so successful with A Christmas Carol, that his characters have become more well known than the title itself.

The 19th century witnessed some of the most far-reaching social and political changes in English history. In volume 4, we trace the arc of England's march to worldwide imperial dominance along with the nation's reckoning with her poorest citizens. It is a story of contrast and courage. The contrast is between those with titles, money, and power...and those lacking any or all of these.

Widely considered the greatest of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles was originally serialized in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902. It is the third of only four short novels Doyle wrote about his super sleuth. Set largely on Dartmoor in Devon in England's West Country, it is the gloom-enshrouded story of murder inspired by the family legend of a gigantic, demonic hound of supernatural origin.

The weaver Silas Marner is a member of a small Calvinist congregation in Lantern Yard, a slum street in an unnamed city in Northern England in the early 19th century. He is falsely accused of stealing the congregation's funds, leaves the city in disgrace, and accumulates a small fortune in another town…only to lose it to theft. But he soon adopts an orphan child quite by accident. The exchange of one treasure for another is the heart of the story.

In his Poetics, Aristotle puts forward that everything we create is a kind of imitation of life, merely using different types of media, objects and manners, whether painting, music, or language. We shape the images, sounds or words to make some particular point and tell a unique story. But if you want an audience to respond to what you have to say, whatever you create must be connected logically to the real world. The rules of doing this successfully are laid out in Poetics.

Roanoke Hundred is an historical novel about the very first attempt to found an English colony in North America in 1585. Although it is a fictional account, the story is based on the letters, diaries, and archives of the period. Every character is based on a real person. The entire adventure centers around one of England’s greatest heroes, Sir Richard Grenville. Grenville was lord of the manors of Stowe, Kilkhampton in Cornwall, and of Bideford in Devon. He was also a soldier, an armed merchant fleet owner, privateer, colonizer, and explorer.

Acclaimed as "the first citizen of Athens", Pericles was one of the greatest statesmen ancient Greece ever produced. During the Golden Age of Athens, in the much admired 5th century B.C., Pericles epitomized the influential politician. But he was also a brilliant orator and military leader brought up in the competitive environment of Greek democracy.

Dickens never employed greater skill or more consummate craftsmanship on any other of his works than he did on A Tale of Two Cities, his magnificent historical novel set during the turbulent era marking the end of Louis XVI's reign. His passionate portrayal of the lives of two groups, one English, one French, caught up in the net of revolutionary intrigue and cruelty, has never been equalled. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy.

The Rider on the White Horse is one of the most beautiful stories to emerge from 19th century Germany, as well as being one of the most romantic and most tragic. In this short masterpiece, set in the middle of the 18th century in North Friesland, Theodor Storm exhibits a man's will in conflict with unintelligent conservatism among his fellow men on one side, and with the forces of nature on the other. The figure of dikemaster Hauke Haien emerges from this struggle in starkly outlined character.

Volume 2 continues our story by picking up with the flight of Sophia from her father, Squire Western, and continues the journey of Tom as he ponders his future on the road to London. In a series of tightly constructed plot twists and turns, Tom and Sophia end up at the same inn, unbeknownst to one another. Meanwhile, a plethora of new characters are introduced.

In Volume Three, Gibbon picks up his story with the chaotic events following the retreat of the Eastern Roman Empire from the Italian peninsula in the seventh century. As the German conquerors settle into the new territories they took from the old Roman Empire, Islam suddenly emerges on the Arabian peninsula and sweeps across North Africa and into Spain. Muslim forces move north and threaten Constantinople itself.

This is the story of John Ridd, a yeoman farmer of the border country in southwest England. Set in the turbulent late 17th century, amid political tensions aroused by the religious animosities of a nation that had just emerged from the Commonwealth government of Cromwell, the story follows the adventures of John Ridd and his love, Lorna Doone, an aristocratic beauty who was kidnapped by the Doone family as a child. How John Ridd meets Lorna, wins her love, rescues her from the clutches of the Doone clan, and tries to keep her safe constitutes the bulk of the plot.

The seventeenth century was one of the most fascinating and seminal periods in European history, particularly with regard to France. For it was here in France that the fruits of the earlier Renaissance were to be most brilliantly realized. Although the path of "greatness" for Louis XIV was prepared for him by men like Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert, Turenne, and Louvois, it was during his reign that French preeminence in all facets of civilization emerged.

A History of Greece continues with the bitter struggle between Sparta and Athens for mastery of the Hellenic world. Though Sparta finally emerges victorious, her victory soon turns to ashes with the ascendancy of Thebes and the still greater power of Philip of Macedon. Philip unites an unwilling Greece with his iron policy. Athens gives up her independence, but maintains an aloof intellectual and artistic leadership in the Greek world.

First published in 1850, David Copperfield is the eighth novel of Charles Dickens. Like most of his work, it had been previously published in serial form in 1849. It is said to be the most autobiographical of all his novels, and Dickens late wrote of it, "… like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield." The book has been greatly praised by some of the world's greatest authors, including Tolstoy, Lawrence, and Dostoevsky.

Martial was a Latin poet from Hispania best known for his 12 books of Epigrams, published in Rome between A.D. 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In these short, witty poems, he cheerfully satirises city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing.

Englishman Charles Strickland leads the life of a mundane London stockbroker. He has a wife and two children and enjoys a settled life with the prospect of a prosperous retirement. However, Strickland throws it all over and abandons his family to become an artist in Paris. In a novel rich with the kind of characters and conversations that only W.S. Maugham could conjure up, we follow Strickland's path of hedonism and sheer creative verve as he moves from Paris to Marseilles to Tahiti.