Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Hayes" in All Categories

Master builder Halvard Solness is a self-made man. With no professional qualifications, he has built himself up through ruthless ambition and achieved a position of power and domination in his home town. But his success has come at a cost. His marriage is empty, destroyed by a personal tragedy that has left him wracked with guilt and pain, and he is increasingly frightened of failure and being displaced by the next generation. Then a mysterious young woman, Hilde Wangel, appears from the mountains, claiming to have met Solness 10 years earlier, when she was only 13.

Here are 16 tales from one of the great works of the Middle Ages. Ten young people have fled for a while the terrible effects of the Black Death in Florence and, in an idyllic setting, tell a series of brilliant stories, by turns humorous, bawdy, tragic and provocative. This celebration of physical and sexual vitality is Boccaccio’s answer to the sublime other-worldliness of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

For most of us, our days are typically filled with joy and some degree of peace. But what happens when we experience the unexpected and our world gets buffeted by the storms of life? Do we cave under pressure, or do we stand firm in our faith and patiently wait for the storm to pass? Come along with Aubrey Jordan as her near-perfect life spirals out of control and she battles her way back from the brink of the abyss in The First Storm.