British Literary Fiction

Read by Juliet Stevenson and Simon Callow, A Literary Christmas is a seasonal anthology that collects together poems, short stories, and prose extracts by some of the greatest poets and writers in the English language. Like Charles Dickens’ ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, they are representative of times old and new - from John Donne’s Elizabethan hymn over the baby Jesus to Rudyard Kipling’s "Christmas in India", from Thomas Tusser counting the cost of a Tudor feast to Laurie Lee’s "Cider with Rosie".

An enemies to lovers romance.Connor is in mourning for his deceased wife and two young daughters, and now he's been accused of murdering their killer. Laura is his court appointed attorney. She's struggling to justify a loveless marriage and a career filled with moral conflict. This is her first big murder case and the media is all over it - the Celtic Vigilante. Connor has become a local celebrity. Laura has to win him an acquittal but Connor isn't making that easy. He's resistant to all of her ideas, and he clearly dislikes everything about Laura, including her defense strategy. And yet ...

This anthology looks back over some of the great love affairs of literary history. It includes readings of poetry, letters and scenes from fiction written by British poets and authors from Shakespearian times to the twentieth century. Here are real-life romantic couples, such as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Fanny Brawne, Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.

Mervyn Peake was a writer, artist, poet and playwright, best known for his gothic masterpiece, the Gormenghast trilogy. This selection of works from Peake’s Progress includes some of his most characteristic and memorable poems and short stories, from memories of the horrors of the concentration camps at Belsen to the fantastic wit of his nonsense poetry. The selection includes 'The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb', 'The Weird Journey', 'Mr Slaughterboard' and 'Danse Macabre'. It is read by Mervyn Peake's sons, Sebastian and Fabian Peake.