New Releases

Three young people from vastly different backgrounds – Armando from Mozambique, Lolita from India and East German national Theo – are drawn together in a small Baltic city in 1989, just as the DDR begins to collapse around them.

The Second World War has finally ended and so begins a new era of freedom and opportunity for the Cazalet family in Casting Off, the fourth novel in Elizabeth Jane Howard's magnificent Cazalet Chronicles. Read by Indira Varma (Game of Thrones, Luther and Oedipus at The Old Vic). ‘Somehow, she...

Gigi, the daughter of a struggling theatre singer, is left in the care of her great-aunt and grandmother, both former courtesans. Determined to teach Gigi the family business, they begin a series of lessons involving lace, expensive meals and cigars – all in the art of pleasing men. Gigi, soon bored of their antics and unconvinced of their instruction, rebels.

She gave up the stage for love. Now the man she married barely looks at her. For listeners who love emotionally intense historical romance, forbidden love, and impossible choices, The Soldier and the Swan is set in World War II–era San Francisco, where duty collides with desire and one woman must choose between the life she vowed to protect and the one she can’t forget. San Francisco, 1943: Vivienne Hartley, the city’s prima ballerina, gave up the spotlight to care for her war-wounded husband, Charlie Sterling.

A passionate young artist falls disastrously in love with a woman he can never truly have. What begins as longing soon becomes obsession, drawing him deeper into a world where beauty, desire, and despair are impossible to separate. Set against the restless intensity of youth, The Sorrows of Young Werther is a timeless portrait of emotional excess — the kind of love that feels larger than life and more dangerous because of it.

Léa de Lonval, a wealthy, beautiful forty-nine-year-old courtesan, is coming to the end of her career. Her lover, the young and fiercely handsome Fred Peloux – otherwise known as Chéri – is having to face his own reality, with an advantageous marriage arranged by his mother on the horizon. Both lovers, despite their six-year history, reluctantly decide it's time to end their affair. Yet their connection is more difficult to let go of than either of them care to admit…