Showing titles in Classics & Allegories

When he meets a strangely dressed man on the bus, he stops worrying about his grandmother, who’s in the hospital, and starts questioning his own mental health. Apparently no one else can see the strange guy. Which must mean he’s not really there. Except there he is always hanging around, all day long. And for days in a row.

Bella is living her best life in Wynbridge, with her beloved Spaniel, Tink. She’s found a way to keep the house she inherited from her grandparents while expanding her dream business – Away With the Fairies – and she’s ecstatic that Christmas is on the horizon! In fact, everything is perfect until family friend, Catherine Connelly asks Bella if she’d be willing to rent part of the house to freelance author, Jude who is researching the history of the Connelly Clan and Wynthorpe Hall ahead of turning his findings into a book.

Father Brown is an eccentric priest with his own particular ways of dealing with crime. David Timson, having completed the whole of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon, a remarkable achievement, turns his hand to the genial but certainly not innocent priest! This collection contains a group of stories from the Innocence of Father Brown, told unabridged.

This will be a Christmas to remember for the railway girls. Little Max is growing day by day and Joan is adjusting to her new life. But in her heart of hearts, she is desperate to return to work on the railways. Margaret's job in the engine shed is demanding. But when a friend finds herself in crisis, she knows she must do everything she can to help her. Alison is overjoyed at the prospect of organising a Christmas wedding until a long-held secret is revealed. Knowing the truth, can she find the strength to forgive those she holds most dear?

Sour and stingy Ebenezer Scrooge has an emotional transformation after the supernatural visits of Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. The novella met with instant success and critical acclaim. A Christmas Carol has never been out of print and has been adapted to film, opera, and other media.

BASED ON THE EPIC MINISERIES TO AIR SPRING 2013. A STORY OF GOD AND ALL OF US is a sweeping narrative that dramatizes some of the most important events and characters in the Bible. The book reads like a fine novel, dramatizing the sweep of biblical events, making the men and women of scripture...

All Meredith Verran has ever wanted is to escape the holiday season without having to wear a Christmas jumper. Her new job at the cosy gift shop in a picturesque Cornish tourist spot is making it impossible for her to maintain her Scrooge-like manner. With their seasonal hampers on everyone’s wish list, Meredith must paste on a smile and fake some holiday cheer. Then she meets handsome new arrival, Finn, who wishes it could be Christmas every day and wants her to feel the same way, too. Can she embrace the holly and the ivy before the decorations are packed away for another year?

"A ghostly little book", said Charles Dickens of his famous Christmas novella, which first appeared in 1843. It has become the most famous classic Christmas story of all, with the miserly figure of Scrooge, the epitome of the callous employer; sadly crippled Tiny Tim; and the three spectres: the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future. This audiobook continues the award-winning series of Dickens' works read by leading English classical actor Anton Lesser.

As a guide, Luke has helped countless new arrivals journey from the old train station in the valley to the city beyond, in a strange and wondrous land. Once a new arrival himself, he aids visitors in healing old wounds and confronting life’s greatest mysteries while awaiting a long-lost friend. When an elderly woman named Anna arrives, familiar yet unknown, Luke embarks on what will be his final journey as a guide, unaware of the profound connection about to unfold. The Ones We Wait For is a novel about loss, love, faith, and heaven.

Lui è Dan, l'Anticristo, e nulla può fermare il suo cammino verso il trono del mondo, tranne l'amore imprevisto per Angelina, una ragazza pura che rappresenta la sua unica possibilità di redenzione e, allo stesso tempo, la sua più grande debolezza. In questo poema epico, la loro storia si dipana tra sogni condivisi e un destino apocalittico, un viaggio che li porterà dall'innocenza di un incontro onirico fino allo scontro finale per l'anima dell'umanità.

Stephen Mitchell's marvelously clear and vivid rendering recreates the robust masculine music of the original. It both hews closely to the Old English and captures its wild energy and vitality, not just as a deep "work of literature" but also as a rousing entertainment that can still stir our feelings and rivet our attention today, after more than a thousand years. This new translation - spare, sinuous, vigorous in its narration, and translucent in its poetry - makes a masterpiece accessible to everyone.

From the creator of Dalziel and Pascoe comes a fantastic collection of crime stories complete with a foreword by Mick Herron.

This is the enthralling account of a Christian's epic journey. With a burden on his back, Christian reads a book that tells him that the city in which he and his family dwell will be set ablaze. Christian flees from the City of Destruction and journeys through the Slough of Despond, the Interpreter's House, the House Beautiful, the Valley of Humiliation, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, and the Delectable Mountains, and finally reaches the Celestial City.

Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.

From the author of the twenty-five-million-copy bestseller The Shack comes a captivating new novel destined to be one of the most talked-about books of the decade. Eve is a bold, unprecedented exploration of the Creation narrative, true to the original texts and centuries of scholarship—yet...

Plagued by spiritual anguish, devout everyman Christian fears his fate in the sinful City of Destruction. He’s told that only by embarking for the Celestial City can he achieve personal salvation. After his wife and children refuse to join him, he sets forth alone into the unknown. Mocked for his faith, tempted at every turn, and heartened by fellow pilgrims, Christian’s winding journey toward grace unfolds. But as he reaches Mount Zion, his family chooses to follow the same treacherous path, hoping to join Christian in the shining light.

When Sky Terran returns to the village of Middledip after losing the job she loves, she anticipates a quiet Christmas getting used to her new life. However, the annual street decoration competition is coming up and this year, the residents of Winter Street are determined to win. As she is pulled into the preparations, Sky quickly grows to love the quirky, tight-knit community she is now part of. Including the extremely handsome Daz, who soon becomes more than just a friendly neighbour.

The good people of Battle Hill are getting ready to put on a play by the renowned playwright, Peter Stanhope. As the rehearsals continue and the date of the premier draws closer, many things that are hidden are revealed.

Listening to The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan can be a bit challenging. Not so with this new version that translates the original archaic language into simple, conversational English, allowing listeners of all ages to easily navigate the most popular Christian allegory of all time. The story chronicles the epic adventure of a man named Christian who leaves his home in the City of Destruction and begins a life-long quest to the Celestial City.

Often disguised as something that would help him, evil accompanies Christian on his journey to the Celestial City. As you walk with him, you'll begin to identify today's many religious pitfalls. These are presented by men such as Pliable, who turns back at the Slough of Despond; and Ignorance, who believes he's a true follower of Christ when he's really only trusting in himself.

Sir David Jason reads Charles Dickens' magical, much-loved Christmas story. Ebenezer Scrooge is a mean, unpleasant man who dislikes people generally and Christmas especially. But one Christmas Eve, he has a terrifying experience: He sees the ghost of his one-time business partner, Jacob Marley...

A masterpiece of satire, this classic has entertained and enlightened readers the world over with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life and foibles from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to "Our Father Below". At once wildly comic, deadly serious, and strikingly original, C.S. Lewis gives us the correspondence of the worldly-wise old Devil to his nephew, Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man.

For 300 years, The Pilgrim's Progress has remained perhaps the best-loved and most read of devotional fictions. In plain yet powerful and moving language, Bunyan tells the story of Christian's struggle to attain salvation and the Gates of Heaven. He must pass through the Slough of Despond, ward off the temptations of Vanity Fair, and fight the monstrous Apollyon. In Part II, his wife and children follow the same path, helped and protected by Great-heart, until for them, too, "the trumpets sound on the other side."

A recording of the reading of the first edition, published in 1950. An additional bonus chapter, The Holy Planet Purgatory from the 1931 typescript, is included. Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson is Gurdjieff's world-famous cosmological epic. It examines human life on Earth from the viewpoint of beings belonging to a distant world, led by the all-wise Beelzebub. Through this cosmological allegory—rich in humour, anecdote, and linguistic elaboration—Gurdjieff demonstrates a methodology for the spiritual growth of all mankind.

You can travel back through time to the Christmas season during the Victorian era with Charles Dickens’ cast of characters in the Charles Dickens Complete Christmas Collection. It includes A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, and Dickens' original biography The Life of Dickens.

The first book written by C.S. Lewis after his conversion, The Pilgrim's Regress is, in a sense, a record of Lewis's own search for meaning and spiritual satisfaction that eventually led him to Christianity.

Written four years after The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan followed up with this second allegorical classic, which has touched hearts and minds of people for generations. The epicenter of this book is the town of Mansoul, its people (such as Conscience, Self-Denial, and Do-Right), and its gates (Eye-gate, Ear-gate, Mouth-gate, Nose-gate, and Feel-gate).

This adaptation of Dickens' much loved "Ghost Story of Christmas" is subtitled "Scrooge and the Three Spirits" and concentrates on the miserly Ebeneezer Scrooge's dealings with the spirits that visit him on Christmas Eve to bring about his redemption.

John Bunyan's classic allegory of the Christian journey of pilgrimage has never lost its power to teach the important truths of faith. A Pilgrim's Progress speaks to us as plainly as it has to generations before about the simple yet profound truths of the Christian faith. Narrated by Simon Hester with original music.

This remarkable poem, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I, was Spenser's finest achievement. The first epic poem in modern English, The Faerie Queene combines dramatic narratives of chivalrous adventure with exquisite and picturesque episodes of pageantry. At the same time, Spenser is expounding a deeply-felt allegory of the eternal struggle between Truth and Error....