Showing results by narrator "Wanda McCaddon" in All Categories

Jenni Clark is a ghostwriter. She loves to immerse herself in other people's stories--it's a respite from her own life and from a relationship that appears to be nearing its end. Jenni's latest assignment takes her to a coastal hamlet in England, where she has agreed to pen the memoir of an elderly farm owner named Klara. Jenni assumes the project will be easy: a quiet, ordinary tale of a life well lived. But Klara's story is far from quiet.

The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the wealthy upper class, but her spark of character and independent drive prevents her from becoming one of the many women who will succeed in those circles. Though her desire for a comfortable life means that she cannot marry for love without money, her resistance to the rules of the social elite endangers her many marriage proposals.

London, 1937. Following the gloomy days of the abdication of King Edward VIII, the entire city is elated to welcome King George. Just one of the many planned festivities for the historic coronation is a BBC radio adaptation of Queen of Scots, and the original playwright, Josephine Tey, has been invited to sit in on rehearsals. Soon, however, Josephine gets wrapped up in another sort of drama. The lead actress has been sleeping with Britain's most venerable newsman, Anthony Beresford - and his humiliated wife happens to work in the building.

Written by a friend and scientific collaborator with Albert Einstein, this remarkable study is a model of what a biography of a scientist should be. In this book, we come to know Albert Einstein as the “backward” child; the academic outcast; the reluctant world celebrity; the exile; the pacifist; the philosopher; the humanitarian; the tragically saddened “father” of the atomic bomb; and above all, the unceasing searcher after scientific truth.

A traveling tinker, John Bunyan accepted long imprisonment rather than give up preaching the Gospel. He explained the life of the Spirit in language the common people could understand and in pictures that stuck in the mind. When he wrote Pilgrim's Progress, his fame spread rapidly, and within 50 years of his death, the book was reputed to be in most English homes. John Brown's biography of John Bunyan remains the standard, despite the lapse of over 100 years since it was first published. The author was one of Bunyan's successors as minister of the church in Bedford.

When Sir William Temple (1628 - 1699) and Dorothy Osborne (1627 - 1695) began their passionate love affair, civil war was raging in Britain, and their families - parliamentarians and royalists, respectively - did everything to keep them apart. Yet the couple went on to enjoy a marriage and a sophisticated partnership unique in its times.

Sir Henry Fortune, celebrity curator, has vanished. So too has his partner in love and money, disreputable art dealer Jason Pringle. Panic spreads throughout the London art world when more people go missing. No one can locate Anastasia Holliday, sensational Abject artist; Jake Thorogood, the critic who catapulted her into stardom; or Dr. Hortense Wilde, notorious for having influenced generations of art students to despise craftsmanship. Hysteria hits the media when it is found that the common link between the victims is that their careers blossomed when they embraced newly fashionable conceptual art.

On Midsummer’s Eve, Dan and Una enact A Midsummer Night’s Dream three times over - right under Pook’s Hill. That is how they meet Puck, “the oldest Old Thing in England” and the last of the People of the Hills. Through Puck, they are introduced to the nearly forgotten pages of old England’s history and to characters that can illuminate their own historical predicaments. Originally published in 1906, these 10 stories and accompanying poems were intended for both adults and children.

Wuthering Heights is the name of a rustic old house situated above the Yorkshire moors and dominated by its new master, Heathcliff. It is a famous story of love, passion, and the nature of man.

Sarah Crewe is treated like a princess at Miss Minchin's boarding school - until her father dies, leaving her peniless. Now she must struggle as a servant to evil Miss Minchin, but the intellgent, kind-hearted girl never loses hope. From her garrett, she soon makes friends and finds incredible adventures. And good will and imagination ultimately triumph by this book's glorious ending. This beloved classic has been continuously in publication since 1905. Experienced Shakespearean actress Wanda McCaddon captures all the drama of Sarah Crewe's adventures as well as the accents of Miss Minchin, the scullery maid, and Sarah herself.

Known to millions as the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and the best-selling author of a dozen detective novels, Dorothy Leigh Sayers was in reality a complex woman - moved, she said, by “a careless rage for life.” It is this complex Sayers, brilliant student, controversial apologist, witty, bawdy, intolerant of fools - he woman “terrified of emotion” - who is revealed in this new biography.

Taught the art of lace-making during her orphanage childhood, Heather Blackstone managed to earn her living in a Nottingham factory. But the legend of her ancestry haunted her dreams. When a gypsy-fortune teller predicted a journey, Heather knew that her destiny was clear: she must find a way to reclaim the castle that bore her family name and the fortune that was rightfully hers.

Thomas Hardy's moving story of star-crossed lovers shows human beings at the mercy of forces beyond their control, setting a tragic drama of human passion against a backdrop of space and scientific discovery. Unhappily married, Lady Constantine defies social standards when she falls in love with the youthful and socially inferior Swithin St. Cleeve. In an ancient monument converted into an astronomical observatory, they isolate themselves from society and create their own private universe.

A Million a Minute is the inside story of the mysterious and wildly influential world of trading. In our interconnected global markets, traders have become the front-line, free-market warriors closest to the money, closest to the action. Their reactions to world events can topple governments and cause currencies to rise or plummet. They affect the prices we pay for the food we eat, the gasoline we use, even our homes and mortgages.

Published in 1908, A Room with a View was one of Forster's earliest novels, and it has become one of his most famous and popular. The story is set in Florence, Italy, and Surrey, England, and centers on young Lucy Honeychurch's choice between propriety and love. It is an accomplished and beautiful love story, full of generous insights.

For Marcia Davenport, the research and writing of Mozart was truly a labor of love, during which she retraced every journey he made, saw every dwelling (then extant) in which he had ever lived, every theatre where his works were first performed, and every library and museum where his manuscripts were then to be seen. In this eloquent work of historical reconstruction, Davenport lets her characters tell their own stories.

This classic biography should be mandatory listening for all academicians. Winsor, a historian, poet, literary critic, and fiction writer, retraces every important aspect of Columbus' fascinating life, from his family origins to his beliefs and convictions. Columbus emerges as a living, breathing human being with passions and ideas: a man possessing intellect and imagination enough to believe that the earth was round, not flat. Winsor's opus represents an honest search for the truth.

Written when she was 26, Agnes Grey is Anne Bronte's first novel. It tells the story of a rector's daughter who has to earn her living as a governess. Drawing directly from her own experiences, Anne Bronte set out to describe the immense pressures that the governess' life involved: the frustration, the isolation, and the insensitive and cruel treatment on the part of employers and their families.

One of the most important books on William Shakespeare, this superb biography is both authoritative and extremely readable. It is the first modern biography of Shakespeare since the Victorian Age to pay full attention to his life and times, to his works, and to the numerous and subtle connections among them.

Hear the stories of the scientists who have shaped the past 2,000 years. This audiobook provides an absorbing and intimate account of the lives of 20 eminent scientists who reached the heights of human achievement, including Archimedes, Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and more.