Showing results by narrator "Ralph Cosham" in All Categories

Frankenstein is the most famous novel by Mary Shelley: a dark Faustian parable of science misused that was an immediate success on its publication in 1818. Purporting to be the record of an explorer, it tells of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but wayward student of science, who builds a human from dead flesh. Horrified by what he has done, he abandons his creation. The creature, an outcast for his horrific appearance, learns language and becomes civilized. In time, he attempts to join society but is rejected because he is assumed to have murderous intentions.

Ten superbly narrated stories that help explain America by America's best writers.

In Around the World in 80 Days, Phileas Fogg rashly bets his companions £20,000 that he can travel around the entire globe in just 80 days - and he is determined not to lose. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, the reserved Englishman immediately sets off for Dover, accompanied by his hot-blooded French manservant, Passepartout. Traveling by train, steamship, sailboat, sledge, and even elephant, they must overcome storms, kidnappings, natural disasters, Sioux attacks, and the dogged Inspector Fix of Scotland Yard to win the extraordinary wager.

With amazing insight, Anton Chekhov wrote of the lives of the Russian common man as well as the landowner. He established the style of the modern short story and influenced many great writers, including George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.

Enjoy two seafaring adventures by a beloved classic adventure writer in Kidnapped and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

"Marley was dead, to begin with...." And yet, he manages to visit his old partner, the miser Ebenezer Scrooge, and send him on a transformative journey, led by three ghosts. First to his own past, where he sees again the love he spurned. Then to the present, where he sees those around him going about their holiday preparations. And then into his own future, to see his just reward. A Christmas favorite, it will warm your heart with favorite memories, and remind you how the true Christmas spirit comes from giving with love.

From its first publication in 1877, Black Beauty has been one of the best-loved animal stories ever written. The dramatic and heartwarming tale is told by the magnificent black horse himself, from his idyllic days on a country squire’s estate to his harsh fate as a London cab horse and his merciful rescue by two kindly old ladies. Filled with vivid anecdotes about animal intelligence, the novel derives a special magic from the love of all creatures, great and small, apparent on every page.

Written just 40 years after David Livingstone’s death, this admiring account of the famous missionary’s life and work takes us deep into the “dark continent” of 19th-century Africa, where he labored to bring “Christianity, commerce, and civilization.” A national hero in Victorian Britain, Livingstone earned fame as an explorer and scientific investigator, an antislavery crusader, and imperial reformer, as well as in the role of a Protestant missionary and martyr who eventually died in Africa of malaria.

After being horribly mistreated at a government animal-research facility, Snitter and Rowf escape into the isolation - and terror - of the wilderness. Aided only by a fox they call "the tod", the two dogs must struggle to survive in their new environment. When the starving dogs attack some sheep, they are labeled ferocious, man-eating monsters, setting off a great dog hunt that is later intensified by the fear that the dogs could be carriers of the bubonic plague.

When a woman turns up drowned on the grounds of a royal estate, Sergeant Keen Dunliffe of Leeds, West Yorkshire, is hoping it's just a case of a drunken skinny-dipping accident. But when the woman turns out to be a historian, whose specialty is eighteenth-century English royalty and politics, and who was attending a conference at a local university, it's too much of a public relations nightmare to take lightly.

In 1923, 34-year-old Adolf Hitler was languishing in prison after leading an unsuccessful putsch to overthrow the German government. Within a decade he was German chancellor, one of the most powerful men in Europe. How did he do it? Had Hitler been a regular politician, Wilson argues, he would have vanished without trace after his prison experience. He was not, however, a regular politician but rather a conjurer, seeing politics not as the art of the possible but as the art of the impossible.

Holmes encounters one of his most formidable adversaries and must unlock the mystery of the demonic hound, the curse of the Baskerville family. Published in The Strand magazine in episodes between August 1901 and April 1902, The Hound of the Baskervilles became one of the most popular of all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

Ralph Cosham gives a remarkable performance of five of Joyce's best known stories from Dubliners including The Dead, considered to be one of the greatest works of short fiction, and which was a movie and is now a Broadway Play.

Selected by Keith Winston, these are beautiful narrations of the best verse of the Celtic poets. Included are works by a Jonathan Swift, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats.

On her morning journey to earn money for her impoverished family, Tess' horse has an accident, forcing her to seek assistance from some newly rich relatives. There, she is vigorously pursued by Alec, who corners her in a field one night and takes advantage of her.

Chekhov can characterize with a single well-selected detail. He sums up relationships among a group of people, or the beliefs held by an entire country, by finding those key objects that crystallize his characters' strongest emotions. These four stories dramatize an array of obsessions that are at once purely Russian and deeply universal. Ralph Cosham's voice is so clear and unaccented as he reads these tales that he is a bit surprising; the complex Russian names stand out, jolting the listeners.

Did one of the Cavendish brothers poison their stepmother, Mrs. Iglethorp, or was it her new husband? Nadia May reads with such a delightful English accent, intonation, and careful pacing that the suspense and drama build gradually. Each character is easily distinguishable and a treat to listen to, especially Poirot. This baffling tale with many characters is well worth this listening experience. The compulsion to discover the truth is motive enough for all.

On the desolate Essex marshes, a young girl named Fritha arrives at a remote lighthouse seeking help from its lonely inhabitant: Philip Rhayader, a crippled artist who has established a bird sanctuary on his land. The girl brings to him a wounded snow goose, which the gentle Philip takes under his care. Soon a friendship blossoms as he and Fritha nurse the bird back to health, though as the years pass, Fritha visits the lighthouse only when the snow goose is there. Then the outbreak of World War II draws Philip away from his home to help in the war effort - and suddenly Fritha has a new reason to return to the lighthouse.

Jim Hawkins and his mother unlock a sea chest belonging to Billy Bones, an old sea captain who died while staying at their inn. Inside the chest was a logbook and map. Thus begins one of the greatest adventures of all time. Once again come aboard the Hispaniola in search of treasure with young Jim Hawkins, Dr. Livesey and Long John Silver.

When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, there were many who proclaimed that a new Elizabethan Age had begun. Few could have any inkling, however, of the stupendous changes that were going to take place, in Britain and around the world. The collapse of British power in the world and the near-evaporation of its wealth were established facts, but few people had even begun to understand them.