Showing results by publisher "Macmillan Digital Audio" in World Literature

A huge novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women. It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London.

On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, their relationship growing increasingly intimate and unnerving. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he's forced to grapple with his own fraught history.

Punk. Poet. Pioneer. The Bard of Salford’s hugely anticipated new collection of poetry is his first in over 30 years. These are poems as scabrous, wry and vivid as only John Cooper Clarke could deliver. Inimitable and iconic, this collection will be a complete joy for lifelong fans and a whole new generation.

This unique collection of poems from the poet laureate, filled with her characteristic wit, is a feminist classic and a modern take on age-old mythology. Who? Him. The Husband. Hero. Hunk. The Boy Next Door. The Paramour. The Je t'adore. Behind every famous man is a great woman - and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart's shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection.

The effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is an audiobook-length love poem and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is that Duffy refuses to simplify the contradictions of love and read its transformations - infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and grief - as simply redemptive or destructive.

Hollie McNish has thrilled and entranced audiences the length and breadth of the UK with her compelling and powerful performances. Plum, her debut for Picador Poetry, is a wise, sometimes rude and piercingly candid account of her memories from childhood to attempted adulthood. This is a book about growing up, about flesh, fruit, friendships, work and play - and the urgent need to find a voice for the poems that will somehow do the whole glorious riot of it justice.

1930s New York City. Three brothers grow up poor on the Lower East Side, until the death of their father forces them to find work to support their family. Each brother takes a different path. Twelve-year-old Morris Rabishevsky apprentices himself to a garment manufacturer with the aim of running the business. Sol, six years older, heads to accounting school but is forced to drop out. Scarred by a family tragedy, Harry falls under the spell of the charismatic Louis Buchalter, who in a few short years becomes the most ruthless mobster in town.

Sincerity is Duffy’s final collection of poems as Poet Laureate and the much-anticipated successor to the Costa Award-winning The Bees. Time and its passage are at the heart of this reflective work, which gazes out from the autumn of life. There are moving elegies here for what has departed; whether that be children who have flown the nest, a way of life, literary luminaries, past loves, lost parents or our own youth. 

History, both political and literary, was made when W. F. Deedes met Evelyn Waugh in 1935. Both were in Abyssinia to cover a war which many in England regarded with bewildered indifference but which profoundly influenced an impending global conflict. Whilst Deedes was principally concerned with filing copy to London, the author of Brideshead Revisited had another agenda and another novel in mind, Scoop. 

In her prize-winning fourth collection, Mean Time, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy dramatizes scenes from childhood, adolescence and adulthood, finding moments of grace or consolation in memory, love and language amid the complexities of life. These are powerful poems of loss, betrayal and desire.

The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy's first collection of poems as Poet Laureate. In it she uses her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems of political anger; there are elegies, too, for beloved friends and - most movingly - the poet's own mother. Woven and weaving through the book is its presiding spirit: the bee.

It is a cold day in Ireland, the 26th of December; frost lies thick on the blackthorn. A man walks the just-waking village, banging on every door, summoning the boys. Today is St. Stephen's Day, when legend has it that the Saint was betrayed by a wren's call, and the boys are off to the forest where they hope to find the traitorous bird and capture it by nightfall. But what will they do if their prey escapes them?

Down at the Front, on a cold winter's night in 1914, amidst the worst war the world had ever seen, an inexplicable silence spread from man to man. Belief was in the air. Then the soldiers ceased fire and the magic of Christmas took hold....

Beginning with the King's Cook, who is preparing a sumptuous Christmas Pie, Wenceslas takes us to a medieval feast. The lords and ladies are at their places, the wine is in full flow, the musicians are playing in the gallery and the entertainment has begun. All should be perfect. But when the good King looks up from his table he sees something more than just snow, falling deep and crisp and even....

Bethlehem is normally a quiet little town on the edge of the desert. But tonight, as dusk falls, there is a sense of something special in the air. An inn packed with revellers, shepherds sprawled on the grass, animals in their stables: everything will be changed when a bright star bearing news arrives in the sky. Carol Ann Duffy's evocative poem will transport you to Bethlehem, capturing the sights, the sounds and the atmosphere of this ancient and magical place.