Showing results by narrator "Michelle Ford" in All Categories

A widowed peasant man was left to raise his two twin children, a boy and a girl. He tried his best but nothing seemed to go right without a woman's touch. And so, he remarried and had more children but things were still not right - the stepmother was very mean to the twins, beating and starving them. This wasn't enough for the wicked stepmother and she decided to send them off into the woods where an evil witch lived. She tells the twins they are to go off and serve her sweet granny.

A king who was a fantastic hunter one day got himself lost in the forest. Unable to find his way back home, an old woman appeared and said she would help him get home, provided that he married her daughter. Although her daughter was beautiful and the king agreed, he did not trust his new wife. And so he hid away in a palace in the woods his seven children, six sons and a daughter, from his previous wife. The new queen began to suspect something was amiss, so she bribed the servants to reveal the truth to her.

Oscar Wilde was one of the most versatile writers who ever lived. He wrote classic plays, including The Importance of Being Ernest; one wildly popular and influential novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; and a number of inventive and moving stories in The Happy Prince and Other Tales.

Stories included in this volume are: "The Nightingale and the Rose", "The Devoted Friend", "The Happy Prince", "The Remarkable Rocket", and "The Selfish Giant".

Bunty McKenna's very ordinary husband has had a vasectomy - behind her back. Having found the invoice for said vasectomy, she starts to notice other things, too: like how much time her husband is spending at the gym, his new-found interest in clothes...and are his teeth looking whiter? In Bunty's mind, there can only be one explanation: he's having an affair.

What do a housewife from Hampshire, England, a pole dancer from Taranaki, New Zealand, a London publisher, and an LA soap starlet all have in common? Their lives have all been impacted by The Most Beautiful Man in the World. It's only when he's found floating face-down in his Hollywood pool that they discover the ugly truth - about themselves, about each other, and about the man they've chased around the globe and across the decades.

When the lives and stories of three people interconnect one summer at Hadleigh Hall, history ripples as if a stone has been dropped in Hadleigh's famous lily pond. All three lives are about to change forever, in ways that nobody could have foreseen. With paths winding across past and present, through love and war, something simple and bitter-sweet shows just how complex life can be.

When Cally Parsons is made redundant from her steady job in marketing, she's not devastated - in fact, she's thrilled. Finally, she'll have time to spend with Paige, to make sure that having one parent never lets her daughter down. But when Paige blows out the candles on her ninth birthday, she makes a surprising wish: to meet her father for the first time.

Shocking family news forces Madeline Wetherby to abandon her plans to marry an earl and settle for upstart Manchester merchant Nash Quinn. When she discovers that her birth father is one of the weavers her husband is putting out of work-and a radical leader-Maddie must decide which family she truly desires, the man of her heart or the people of her blood.

> Hideous Love is the fascinating story of gothic novelist Mary Shelley, who as a teen girl fled her restrictive home only to find herself in the shadow of a brilliant but moody boyfriend, famed poet Percy Shelley. It is the story of the mastermind behind one of the most iconic figures in all of literature: a monster constructed out of dead bodies and brought to life by the tragic Dr. Frankenstein. Mary wrote Frankenstein at the age of 19, but inspiration for the monster came from her life - the atmospheric European settings she visited, the dramas swirling around her, and the stimulating philosophical discussions with the greatest minds of the period.

Big Klaus and Little Klaus lived in the same village, but while Little Klaus only had one horse, Big Klaus had four. Big Klaus eventually strikes Little Klaus' one horse over the head with a blow that kills him. Upset and needing money, Little Klaus sets off to sell the horse skin in town. Cleverly, Little Klaus finds a way to make a lot of money from a farmer and a sexton, and then tricks Big Klaus into making a fool of himself. Big Klaus then tries to kill Little Klaus. Shame for Big Klaus - he should have learned by now that while Little Klaus might be little, he's also very clever.

What's the harm in a little white lie? Especially when it could carry so much good-a new life for a wounded soldier, catharsis after long years of war, and an opportunity for lady composer Olivia Delancey to finally hear her music played in public. Newspaper publisher Will Marsh refuses to compound the sins of his father's generation by taking money to print propaganda. But with the end of the wars in France and America, he needs something new to drive Londoners to grab his paper first.