English Gothic

The Academia, once an elite proving ground for the rulers of the world, has been frozen for centuries. Now its strange slumber has ended, and a new Chancellor, an orange-eyed dragon, has reopened its lecture halls and readied its dorms. In order to thrive once more, however, the Academia needs fresh blood—new students with a passion and talent for learning.

Featuring work by M. R. James, Edith Nesbit, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Atherton and many more, this enhanced audio collection of eight enduring stories - some well-known, others less familiar - transport you to a candlelit fireside to hear tales of lonely coastlines, deadly rivers, dark, creaking corridors, horrific, everlasting love and unknown entities lurking in black velvet shadows.

The descendant of adventuring-dead-aristocrats, Clarissa Knightley supplements a modest inheritance by penning gothic novels that cost more than they earn. Upon learning that she has mysteriously inherited a share of an earl's estate, she rashly packs up her household. In remote Gravesyde Priory, she hopes to find a safe haven and family who will welcome her and her young nephew. Instead, she discovers a drunken American army captain, his African servant, and ancient, surly caretakers.

Andrew and Nathalie's love flourishes, but the secrets they keep from each other taint their relationship with doubts and suspicions. In the meantime, Sebastian and his men are getting bolder, and the storm that's brewing will shift the balance of power in the millennia-old conflict between Annani's clan and its enemies.

Ricky Desmond has been through this all before. If he could just get through to his mother, he could convince her that he doesn't belong at Brookline. From the man who thinks he can fly to the woman who killed her husband, the other patients are nothing like him; all he did was lose his temper just a little bit, just the once. But when Ricky is selected by the sinister Warden Crawford for a very special program - a program that the warden claims will not cure him but perfect him - Ricky realizes that he may not be able to wait for his mom a second longer.

In the vein of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone and the works of Ron Rash, a novel set in a tough-and-tumble Mississippi town where drugs, whiskey, guns, and the desire for revenge violently intersect.

As the new dragon keeper in the hidden valley of Ormdale, Edith expects her first dragon mating season to involve venomous bites and amorous wyverns. She doesn't expect to find herself growing closer to an inconveniently appealing suitor next door, or to stumble upon a dragon poacher lurking in the outbuildings, or to uncover a family scandal in the Abbey.

In this enthralling vampire novel, V.C. Andrews returns to the story of a beautiful girl desperate to escape her secret family legacy - bred to be a lure for unwitting victims of her father's blood appetites. Determined to break free and embrace a life outside the shadows, Lorelei runs away from the only world she's ever known. In a quiet rooming house, she finds refuge among the tenants of elderly Mrs. Winston, and the beginnings of a new love with Liam, her landlady's handsome grandnephew. But Lorelei soon discovers that burying her past is not so easy.

I wasn’t supposed to be at Olympus that night. And I definitely wasn’t supposed to witness a murder - or be caught by the killers. Hades, Apollo, and Ares run the mysterious masked fight club, and they wield more power in this town than I could dream of holding. They destroy my life with one decree: Kora Sinclair doesn’t exist. Sterling Falls was my chance to start over, but one night derails everything. My scholarship, my job - gone. I could run home, but giving up my dreams isn’t an option. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

October 1840. A young woman staggers alone through a forest in the English countryside as a huge pair of impossible wings rip themselves from her shoulders. In London, rumors of a fallen angel cause a frenzy across the city, and a surgeon desperate for fame and fortune finds himself in the grips of a dangerous obsession, one that will place the women he seeks in the most terrible danger.

When Elisabeth Quemener dies she leaves a small parcel with the instructions that it must only be opened by Astrid Oake. The trouble is, no one knows who Astrid Oake is… Elisabeth’s family turn to Touissants detective agency for help but, when Mila Shepherd and Carter Jackson try to track Astrid down, their frustration soon mounts. Their only clue is a photo of two young women holding the hands of a tiny child. The women are smiling but Mila is haunted by the sadness in their eyes. Is this Astrid and Elisabeth and if so, who is the child?

Alexander Cole was a man ruled by his voracious appetite for carnal pleasures until a golden-haired devil in the guise of a goddess lures him into an encounter that costs him his humanity. With nothing left but bitterness in his heart, he locks himself away in his dilapidated Elizabethan mansion and chains the gates to all intruders....

In 1948, Irene Willard, who’s had five previous miscarriages in a quest to give her beloved husband the child he desperately desires and is now pregnant again, comes to an isolated house-cum-hospital in the Berkshires, run by a husband-and-wife team of doctors who are pioneering a cure for her condition. Warily, she enlists herself in the efforts of the Doctors Hall to “rectify the maternal environment,” both physical and psychological. In the meantime, she also discovers a long-forgotten walled garden on the spacious grounds, a place imbued with its own powers and pulls.

Despite being born an Omega, I refused to spend my life in a facility, waiting for a suitable Alpha to claim me as his. Instead, with the help of my family, I broke the law, hiding among the Betas, trying to live a normal life. I enjoyed five years of freedom...then they caught me. Now I’ve been chosen by Arius, the second most powerful Alpha in Sandor. The moment my scent reached him, overcome by the rut, he had to take me. As his mate, I can have anything my heart desires—anything he has the power to give. The only thing I don’t have is a choice.

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy is widely acknowledged to be, as Robertson Davies pronounced, "a classic of our age." In these extraordinary novels, Peake created a world where all is like a dream - lush, fantastical, and vivid. Yet it was incomplete. Parkinson's disease took Peake's life in 1968, depriving his fans of the fourth and final volume of the series, Titus Awakes except for a few tantalizing pages, after which his writing became indecipherable. Or so it seemed....

Young Irish nurse Ellen arrives at May Day House, tasked with helping the men there rehabilitate. But there’s something strange about the house, surrounded by water, on its own island in the Thames. And then there are the men: traumatised by their experiences of war, and subject to troubling methods in a desperate race to get them back to duty. As Ellen gets drawn into the world of May Day House, she starts to realise this will be no place to hide away from her own troubles…

Idyllic Avril Island, owned by the Bennett family, is where their hundred-year-old cottage sat nestled in acres of forest. Forty-year-old June Bennett believed that the island had been sold after the summer of her father's disappearance when she was only 12 years old. It's months after the shocking death of her older sister, May, in a fatal car accident that June finds out that the cottage was never sold. Avril Island is still owned by the Bennett family, and now it's hers. Still reeling from the grief of losing her sister, June travels back to Avril Island in search of answers.

On the day of his wedding, Conrad, heir to the house of Otranto, is killed in mysterious circumstances. His calculating father Manfred fears that his dynasty will now come to an end and determines to marry his son's bride himself - despite the fact he is already married. But a series of terrifying supernatural omens soon threaten this unlawful union, as the curse placed on Manfred's ancestor, who usurped the lawful prince of Otranto, begins to unfold.

Esmeralda is just one semester away from graduating college and on her way to opening the restaurant of her dreams. Dante is a ruthless mafia monster that walks in the daylight. Neither of them would've ever crossed paths - until Esmeralda's mother makes a dire mistake that leaves them both at the mercy of the cartel and the whims of its captivating leader.

When the castle she works in is sacked by the army of Prince Edward of England, kitchen maid Agnes Fitzgerald manages to escape north of Inverness to throw herself at the mercy of the Lord and Lady at Ravenscraig Castle. Although safe for now, the people of Scotland are fighting hard for their independence, and the threat of the English hangs heavy over the land. But when Agnes spies Cam Buchanan swimming in the loch, her mind turns away from war and towards love. Agnes even dares to dream of a happy future, until she learns that Cam must go and fight alongside Robert de Brus.