Showing titles in World Literature

Real Italian people don’t speak like your textbook…so it’s no wonder you feel unprepared when it’s your turn to speak! Try the StoryLearning method, and dive into a real-world, gripping drama between six characters that helps you learn authentic spoken Italian in the process.

Called to Washington, DC to analyse the victims of a mysterious arson attack, Tempe quickly finds her misgivings justified. The fire site is in Foggy Bottom, a neighbourhood with a colourful history, and as the pieces start falling into place, the property’s ownership becomes more and more suspicious. Sensing a good story, Tempe teams up with a new ally, telejournalist Ivy Doyle. Delving into the past, the duo learns that back in the Thirties and Forties the home was the hangout of a group of bootleggers and racketeers known as the Foggy Bottom Gang.

Dear Catherine, he began. Here I sit, making a meal out of asking you to dinner. I don’t really know how to do it. To have cultural integrity, I would have to send my aunt to speak, discreetly, to your aunt, who would then speak to your mother, who would speak to my mother, who would speak to my father, who would speak to me and then approach your mother, who would then approach you. Demoralised by small persecutions and the squalor and poverty of his life, Daud takes refuge in his imagination.

This revised and expanded edition of The Essential Rumi includes a new introduction by Coleman Barks and more than 80 never-before-published poems. Through his lyrical translations, Coleman Barks has been instrumental in bringing this exquisite literature to a remarkably wide range of listeners, making the ecstatic, spiritual poetry of 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi more popular than ever.

When the Jewish families of Berlin start disappearing in nightly raids, 21-year-old Jacob Kagan knows it’s only a matter of time before the trucks come for him. Along with his family and best friend, he flees the country he’s always called home to find shelter in a Dutch refugee camp. Before long, the Netherlands falls to the Nazi war machine - Jacob’s new home is transformed into a transit camp with weekly trains bound for the horrors of the Eastern concentration camps.

Gorgeous, charismatic Paige White has always lived a picture-perfect life. Her meticulously curated social pages exude an old-fashioned, wholesome lifestyle set against a picturesque town in Australia. Images of breakfasts lakeside with her daughter, sunny afternoons in the family van, and romantic picnics with her husband are the envy of her thousands of followers. But when a dark, brooding image pops up on Paige’s page, where she appears waterlogged and disheveled–and shortly after she’s discovered drowned–alarm bells go off.

It is 1547 and, after five years imprisonment and exile far from his homeland, Francis Crawford of Lymond - scholar, soldier, rebel, nobleman, outlaw - has at last come back to Edinburgh. But for many in an already divided Scotland, where conspiracies swarm around the infant Queen Mary like clouds of midges, he is not welcome. Lymond is wanted for treason and murder, and he is accompanied by a band of killers and ruffians who will only bring further violence and strife. Is he back to foment rebellion? Does he seek revenge on those who banished him? Or has he returned to clear his name?

The Old English epic poem Beowulf, recorded in its original Saxon dialect for the first time. Performed by Icelandic poet, playwright, professional storyteller and performer Svanur Thorkelsson, Audible’s production gives listeners the opportunity to experience how it might have felt to hear bards recite sections of the 3000-line poem from memory in Anglo Saxon dining halls. Audible’s Beowulf recaptures the heroic style and vast scale of what can be considered ‘England’s first native audiobook’.

Shiva, 'the destroyer' among the Hindu trinity (of gods), is depicted in many contradictory manners. The author, Devdutt Pattanaik, introduces listeners to these varied aspects and representations, and then sets about interpreting them. He explains the different anomalies and conflicts in beliefs, as well as the symbolism, rituals and reasons behind Hindu worship.

On the eve of his wedding to the beautiful Mercedes, Edmond Dantès is betrayed by jealous rivals and wrongfully imprisoned for treason. Locked away in the dreadful Château d'If, he spends years plotting his escape and planning a brilliant revenge against those who destroyed his life. As the mysterious and powerful Count of Monte Cristo, he returns to exact justice, but along the way, he faces his own vulnerability.

With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee's Pachinko and Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Trần family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trần Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North.

Meet Alex, a photographer on a holiday with his family in the south of France. Meet Abe, a music producer with a baby on the way. Two men - both fathers, husbands, and sons - take us on a journey you will never forget. The finest actors of their generation, Academy Award® nominee Jake Gyllenhaal (Sunday in the Park with George) and Tony Award nominee Tom Sturridge (1984), had audiences roaring to their feet during the sold-out Broadway engagement. Now Sea Wall / A Life, a dramatic exploration of transformative love and devastating loss, comes to Audible.

La realizzazione di questa Commedia di Dante si deve al contributo appassionato di diversi attori: Ivano Marescotti ha prestato la sua voce profonda e la sua interpretazione accurata e sensibile ai molti personaggi che pullulano nei tre regni visitati da Dante.

It's the number one rule in this beach town: don't fall for a tourist. But Jonah Lachlan isn't like any tourist I've ever met. He's not here for a good time, that much is obvious. In fact, the brooding, boy-next-door cutie is clearly hell-bent on being miserable. Though he's here with his best friend, he doesn't seem interested in hook-ups. Or fun. The guy brought a book to this beach full of gorgeous single gay men, for crying out loud. Who does that?? And as if he couldn't be any more confusing, he seems superhumanly immune to anyone who flirts with him. Myself included.

At the end of World War II, American army officer Captain Sean O’Sullivan is commissioned with rebuilding Berlin. Reeling from the death of his brothers at German hands and faced with the direct horrors of the Holocaust, O’Sullivan struggles against his animosity towards the nation he is helping restore. Meanwhile, Soviet forces blockade Germany in a bid for power, and the Western Allies must unite to prevent a communist takeover. When the airlift begins, the Allies find their deepest convictions tested as they fight against a threat even more dangerous than Hitler.

Fresh from maternity leave, Detective Elma finds herself confronted with a complex case, when a man is found murdered in a holiday cottage in the depths of the Icelandic countryside - the victim of a frenzied knife attack, with a shocking message scrawled on the wall above him.

Eager to clean up his act after his troubled early 20s, Owen has returned to Kentucky to take a job as a groundskeeper at a small college in the Appalachian foothills, one which allows him to enrol on their writing course. It's there that he meets Alma, a writer-in-residence, who seems to have everything Owen doesn't - a prestigious position, an Ivy League education and published success as a writer.

Mark Twain (real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens), was one of the foremost writers and humourists to come out of the United States. Hailed by William Faulkner as 'the father of American literature', he is renowned worldwide for his classic novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This wide-ranging collection comprises dramatisations and readings of a host of his much-loved stories, from well-known works to less familiar gems.

Peter Coke and Marjorie Westbury star in another intriguing case for BBC Radio's smoothest sleuth and his glamorous wife. From 1938 to 1969 the fictional crime novelist and detective Paul Temple, together with his Fleet Street journalist wife Steve, solved case after case in one of radio's most popular series.

Homer's masterpiece tells the story of Odysseus, the ideal Greek hero, as he travels home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, a journey of 10 years and countless thrilling adventures. Rich in Greek folklore and myth, featuring gods and goddesses, monsters and sorceresses, The Odyssey has enchanted listeners around the world for thousands of years.