Showing results by narrator "Rob Goll" in All Categories

A Christmas Carol is one of Charles Dickens' best loved tales. Ebenezer Scrooge, described as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner," is certainly no lover of the Christmas season. He is visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley, who warns him that he will be visited by three further spirits: The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come.

Three veteran hunters are on the trail of a supernatural creature. It is a simple tracking mission, promising easy money. But things go horribly wrong, and the mercenaries realize too late that they are facing one of the deadliest creatures known to man. Embroiled in a desperate fight for survival, their doom may well await them.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is the first published collection of short stories featuring the famous consulting detective and his friend and colleague Dr. Watson.

In 1916, Chris returns home from a French hospital to his country estate just outside London. The nature of his injuries at the front has caused him to suffer from amnesia. Awaiting him at home are his devoted wife, whom he does not remember, and his cousin, Jenny, whom he remembers only as a childhood friend. For Chris, the last 15 years have not happened and he believes himself still in love with a woman named Margaret, the poor innkeeper's daughter he courted many years before.

America a Prophecy (1793) is the first book in Blake’s Continental Prophecies - the other two being Europe a Prophecy (1794) and The Song of Los (1795). The poem was engraved on 18 plates with illustrations by Blake, and survives in 14 known copies. Written during a time of great political and social upheaval, Blake uses his own complex invented mythology to explore the human need to resist tyranny. His verse is rich in metaphor, powerful, and apocalyptic in scope.

Old Friends and New Fancies is the first ever Jane Austen fan fiction and was originally published in 1913. Sybil Brinton imagines an entirely new story of romantic entanglements using a mashup of characters from all of Austen's major novels. Have you ever wondered what happened to Georgiana Darcy and Kitty Bennet from Pride and Prejudice or Mary Crawford and Tom Bertram from Mansfield Park? Find out in this delightfully comic homage to Austen's beloved characters.

In January 1817, Jane Austen began work on Sanditon, but died a few months later, leaving it unfinished. The surviving fragment begins the story of Charlotte Heywood, a sheltered young woman who is invited to the up-and-coming resort town of Sanditon. While there, she meets a host of memorable characters, drawn with Austen's classic wit and insight, including a fortune-hunting fop, a domineering dowager, and a hoard of hypochondriacs.

When Mr. Lepel and his friend Mr. Rothsay return from travels abroad, a half-forgotten play witnessed in Italy lingers uneasily in their memories. A subsequent visit to a quiet country estate draws Mr. Lepel into the lives of those around him, as a young woman at the gate becomes the unknowing centre of rival affections. As illness, friendship, and good intentions begin to intersect, events unfold that will test loyalty and conscience, and lead toward consequences no one has foreseen.

The brightest light of the Pickwick Club is its founder member and illustrious leader, Samuel Pickwick. He is joined by his three friends and fellow club members: the poetic Augustus Snodgrass, the romantic Tracy Tupman, and the sporting Nathaniel Winkle. Their mission is to travel the country in search of interesting scenes and characters and to report back the results of their observations. What follows is a series of adventures and misadventures, encounters and intrigues which show the dazzling brilliancy of Charles Dickens' comic invention with regard to character and situation.

Mr Rayburn, a widower, and his young daughter, Lucy, first meet Mrs Zant in Kensington Gardens. She is oblivious to their presence and appears to be in some sort of trance. When they next meet she astounds Rayburn with her explanation: she is convinced that a vision of her recently deceased husband had come to her with a warning...

Follow the foils and foibles of Bertie Wooster and his devoted man, Jeeves, through all of his wild adventures in The Inimitable Jeeves, the first collection of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series. There are schemes to bet on the clergy's length of sermon, attempts at theatre, communist curiosity, and nearly every chapter finds Bertie's best mate, Bingo, falling in love, all under the watchful eye of Jeeves, who always finds a way to make things just right.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes picks up where the previous collection of Holmes stories left off: with the great detective's return from the dead in "The Empty House." This and the twelve other stories in the anthology—including "The Dancing Men," "The Solitary Cyclist," "The Six Napoleons," and "The Second Stain"—are absolute classics of detective fiction centered on the genius Holmes and his loyal friend and companion Dr. Watson

John Keats (1795-1821) was one of the foremost English Romantic poets. Despite his early death from tuberculosis at the age of 25 he had a considerable poetic output, the majority of his best-known works being written in the year 1819. The six odes composed during this year are among his most famous and well-regarded poems. The first five were composed during the spring of 1819, while 'To Autumn' was composed in September. The exact order of composition of the first five is unknown.

Mr. Redlaw is a chemistry professor tormented by painful memories of the sorrow, wrong, and trouble he has suffered in his life. On Christmas Eve, he is visited by a phantom, the double of himself, who offers him the gift of forgetting these painful memories. The catch is that others who come into contact with the professor will also lose the remembrance of their past hurts and sorrows. Redlaw is hesitant at first but, believing his life will be better and happier, he accepts the ghost's bargain.

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is the second published collection of short stories featuring the famous consulting detective and his friend and colleague Dr. Watson.

The lyrical ballad The Lady of Shalott is one of Tennyson's best-known and best-loved poems. It is based on the story of Elaine of Astolat, a figure from Arthurian legend, who dies from her unrequited love for Sir Lancelot. The subject matter provided inspiration for many of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Tennyson published two versions of the poem, both of which are included in this recording. The first was written in 1832, and the second—the better-known of the two versions—in 1842.

Lamia is a tragic narrative poem in two parts. It was written in 1819 and first published in 1820 with "Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes". The Greek god Hermes has left Olympus in search of a beautiful nymph. He comes across Lamia, a woman trapped in the form of a snake, who promises to reveal the nymph to him if he, in exchange, restores her human form so she may seek the love of Lycius, a youth of Corinth.

The Cricket on the Hearth, published in 1845, is the third in Charles Dickens' series of "Christmas Books." The story centers around the hearth and home of the good-hearted carrier, John Peerybingle, and his young wife Mary—affectionately called Dot by her husband. Their baby boy is cared for by a clumsy nanny, Tilly Slowboy. The household is completed by Boxer the dog and the cricket on the hearth, who acts as a guardian angel to the family. When disaster looms following the arrival of an elderly stranger, the cricket appears in fairy form to save the day.

On New Year's Eve, an elderly ticket porter, Toby "Trotty" Veck, a hardworking but poor man, is disillusioned with the state of the world. He is appalled by newspaper reports of crime and immorality, and fears for the future prospects of his daughter, Meg, who is to be married on New Year's Day. Trotty has always fancied that the bell chimes of the nearby church offer him encouragement when he is most in need. On this particular night, he is drawn to the church tower, where he is greeted by the spirits of the bells and their goblin attendants who show him a vision of the future.

The Happy Prince and Other Tales is a collection of five stories first published in 1888. Oscar Wilde said of these stories that "they are studies in prose, put for Romance's sake into a fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness." The five stories in this collection are "The Happy Prince", "The Nightingale and the Rose", "The Selfish Giant", "The Devoted Friend", and "The Remarkable Rocket".