Showing results by narrator "Ruth Jones"

In 1896, in a pilgrim church in the Alps, an abandoned baby girl is found by a cook and a housemaid. They take her home, and Annika grows up in the servants' quarters of a house belonging to three eccentric Viennese professors. She is happy there but dreams of the day when her real mother will come to find her. One day a glamorous stranger arrives at the door.

In the mountains of Transylvania there stands a castle. It is the home of Count Dracula – a dark, lonely place, and at night the wolves howl around the walls. In the year 1875 Jonathan Harker comes from England to do business with the Count. But Jonathan does not feel comfortable at Castle Dracula. Strange things happen at night, and very soon, he begins to feel afraid. And he is right to be afraid, because Count Dracula is one of the Un-Dead – a vampire that drinks the blood of living people.

Orphan Molly Moon was found as a baby in a box marked "Moon's Marshmallows". For 10 miserable years, she's lived under the cruel rule of Miss Adderstone in grim Hardwick House. But her life changes overnight when she finds a mysterious book on hypnotism and discovers an amazing talent - the power to make people do anything she wants them to. Escaping from the orphanage, Molly flies to New York in search of fame and fortune. But her adventures lead her into the clutches of a dangerous enemy.

Molly Moon, the orphan who once took Broadway by storm, has vowed never to use her amazing hypnotic powers again. But when she learns that a megalomaniac master hypnotist called Primo Cell is rumoured to be controlling the minds of famous movie stars, she has to intervene. Arriving in Hollywood, Molly, Rocky, and Petula the pug get to work. While Petula is being pampered at a beauty parlour for glamorous pooches, Molly and Rocky plan how to blag their way into Primo's famous Oscar-night party. Here they find that their enemy is far more dangerous and powerful than they suspected.

Throughout the centuries, death has been something to be terrified about. The fear comes from the lack of knowing what it is like to experience the last breaths of life. For sure, no one knows exactly what it is like. What is certain is that death leaves a strong impression on us all, not so much as participants, but as witnesses.

This collection of poetry, memoirs, and stories of short fiction presents to the listener such themes as depression, suicide, hopelessness, grief, loss, love, mental illness, and abuse both emotional and physical experienced by the writers or someone close to them. This collection serves to demonstrate that hiding behind shame or fear rather than sharing emotional pain as the authors in these works do is tantamount to putting on a mask; wearing a person suit.