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The wonderful Little Voice of Jane Horrocks brings this exclusive downloadable audiobook collection of your favourite childhood nursery rhymes out of the dust covers of Mother Goose's books and into strange and merry life. The nursery rhymes that make up our collection are taken from the original Mother Goose rhymes. They are the classics from our childhood, with all the original verses and all the parts of rhymes that one usually hums over due to having forgotten the words.

Eustacia Vye's great desire in life was to be loved to madness, and in this, one of Thomas Hardy's best-loved novels, one of his most superb female characters conducts her wild and lethal campaign against her rival - the innocent, rather conventional Thomas - against the backdrop of Egdon Heath, the equally wild and lethal Dorset moorland on which Hardy grew up.

'My Daddy! My Daddy!' has become one of the most famous tearjerking lines. Bobby's cry as her father's figure appears through the mist of the steam train in this story of a family's stalwart struggle to keep calm and carry on when forced by the wrongful arrest of their father on spying charges to move from their idyllic life to a rundown cottage by a railway line has jerked the tears of generations of readers (and, in latter years, filmgoers and theatre audiences).

Trapped by the strength of the public adoration of his character Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle was desperate to write other works not involving the sleuth. The Tales of Terror and Mystery have all the recognisable qualities that made Conan Doyle's work so popular - the attention to gruesome detail, the meticulous logic and the intricate and wittily bemusing plotting - yet they are free of the constraints put on Conan Doyle by Mr. Holmes.

It was a nightmare from which he was furious to have been woken which triggered Robert Louis Stevenson's most successful and famous work. Having been stirred from what he termed 'a fine bogey tale', Stevenson set about putting his nightmare onto paper. It reputedly took him only three days to write, but the story of a split personality warring with itself between righteousness and immorality is as much a part of modern thought as it became in 1885.

Framed for a theft he didn’t commit and expelled from the church which has been his life, Silas Marner, the weaver, exiles himself to the remote rural village of Raveloe to bury himself in making money with his loom. The arrival of a golden-haired orphan toddler at his door, however, drags the recluse back into the world and away from his obsession with his hoard.

The love affair between Elizabeth Barrett-Browning and Robert Browning is one of the most famous in literature. It begins in 1844 with Elizabeth Barrett, closeted in her room for five years through ill health and forbidden from marrying by her nonconformist father, publishing the most recent of her highly successful literary works, a collection of poetry. The poems prompt a letter from Robert Browning in praise of her work, which so touches her that she agrees to let him into her voluntary seclusion.

Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales have become so much a part of the Western culture that they are often assumed to be a part of folklore and not credited to the strange and gangling Dane who wrote them. Several years before the fairy tales came out, the Brothers Grimm had published their tales taken from the folklore of European stories, but Andersen was to change the understanding of what a tale can achieve.

Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is one of the most influential pieces of writing in the British literary cannon. It helped to establish English, rather than Latin or Norman French, as an acceptable language for literature. It was also one of the earliest pieces of work to have story linking - what had previously been just collected writings which the author deemed interesting.

Robert Louis Stevenson's lengthy short story 'The Pavilion on the Links' was considered by Arthur Conan Doyle to be 'the first short story in the world'. This unsettlingly nerve-racking tale is every bit as chilling as its much wider known follower, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and at the time of its publication was every bit as successful. Stevenson makes the choice in the story of having two fairly unpleasant characters for his main protagonists.

The wild adventure that David Balfour takes in Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped starts with the newly orphaned boy travelling to his uncle's terrifying House of Shaws. Having failed in an attempt to murder young David, the miserly Ebeneezer Balfour, who would rather keep the fortune to which the child is now entitled, arranges for a kidnapping aboard a ship bound for the new world.

The stabbing of an antique dealer on Christmas Day leads the murderer, Markheim, to try to justify his life to the devil in an in-depth discussion about the nature of good and evil. His evening ends quite differently from how he'd planned it and results in him making an admission of guilt for the killing.... Author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Edinburgh into a prestigious family of lighthouse designers and engineers on his father's side and moral philosophers on his mother's.

The refusal to settle for what life has dealt you and the consequences of trying to change it is a theme which hasn’t altered much in the last 150 years, and the astonishing beauty and challenge of Madame Bovary is as electric today as it was then. Very few books have created this much outrage and adoration.

Attraction, desire and sex were not proper subjects for a 19th-century novel, and Charlotte Brontë's clear and open handling of all three in Jane Eyre was shocking, exciting and revolutionary. Jane Eyre - a small, plain-faced, intelligent and honest English orphan - is abused by her aunt and cousins as a child; acquires role models during her education at Lowood Academy; and becomes the governess of Thornfield Manor, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester.

'In the high and far off times...' begins Rudyard Kipling’s 'How the Elephant Got His Trunk', and off we are taken by one of the most supreme storytellers into a world where children’s questions are turned neatly on their heads, and questions are provided which, far from stopping the stream of enquiries, only serve to make it gush faster.

There is the warmest of Christmas fires in this hearth. It was reportedly written in a matter of weeks to catch the Christmas deadline. Unlike his other seasonal stories, this is not a supernatural tale but one of the perfect domestic scene with which Dickens was so obsessed throughout his writing. It is all here: the warmth of home, the loving little woman, the children, the food and the laughter. All the things that go to make an idealised Christmas are rolled into one very warming story.

Filled with an array of comic characters, The Chimes tells the story of Toby Veck, a humble porter whose loses his faith in human nature at the hands of his presumed social superiors but regains it thanks to the spirits of the bells. Like its predecessor, it carries a heartfelt plea for charity and brotherhood and examines such distressing themes as suicide and infanticide as well as the question of whether the poor have any right to live at all.

This is one of the most famous children's books ever written. Since its publication in 1877, it has sold well over 30 million copies. It held the world record for sales far and above any other piece of children's literature for 130 years. It wasn’t, however, written for children - the story of the highly spirited and gorgeous black stallion and his transfer from owner to increasingly abusive owner until his final happy rescue was originally intended to be a campaigning work distributed to those who worked with horses.

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without A Christmas Carol. At the time Dickens was writing it, many of the time-honoured customs linked with Christmas were beginning to disappear. It is largely due to this book that we carry with us much of the imagery that is now associated with the traditional celebration and spirit of Christmas.

In A Lodging for the Night, a dissolute Parisian student finds himself forced into accepting the favours of a venerable and respected knight on a cold winter's evening in 1456. The ensuing dinner conversation is spellbinding.