Family Classics

Schooldays at St Clare's are never dull for twins Pat and Isabel O'Sullivan in Enid Blyton's much-loved boarding school series. In audiobook five, it's time for a new head girl. There are plenty of candidates, but after a terrible accident and an hilarious school play, the true leaders are revealed. Expect more mischief at St Clare's!

The dreams, pranks, misfortunes, and courtships of the March girls form a charming family portrait.

This magnificent novel - which secured for its author the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature - is now available to contemporary American audiences. Although it is set in the early 20th century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.

Schooldays at St Clare's are never dull for twins Pat and Isabel O'Sullivan in Enid Blyton's much-loved boarding school series. In audiobook four, the twins have made it to second form. New girls Gladys and Mirabel have great talents for acting and music, and Elsie, the form's unpopular head girl, learns to be less spiteful. Expect more mischief at St Clare's!

Carry on a family tradition or start one of your own with this new version of the classic Christmas book for children and families. Initially published anonymously as A Visit from Saint Nicholas, and credited as a work by Clement Clark Moore, this timeless tale is the perfect family listen as children prepare for Santa and his reindeer on Christmas Eve.

Ashley Court: the tumbledown ancestral home of the Ashley family, all blessed with 'the gift' of being able to speak to each other without words. When Bryony Ashley's father dies under mysterious circumstances, his final words a cryptic warning to her, Bryony returns from abroad to uncover Ashley Court's secrets. What did her father's message mean? What lies at the centre of the overgrown maze in the gardens? And who is trying to prevent Bryony from discovering the truth?

Mrs. Pepper, a widow, and her five children lived in a plain little brown house, where she struggled to feed and clothe her lively brood. The family had little in the way of luxury and hardly any of the things that many of us today take for granted, but they had such fun and good times together, and loved one another so dearly that, when a very rich little boy discovered the warmth and happiness that flooded the little brown house, he felt himself lucky to be in it.

Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

“Something good” is exactly what Tyya, Andrew and Julie want to put into their shopping cart. Tyya’s dad won’t buy anything good at the store—no ice cream, no candy, no cookies. But when the saleslady puts a price sticker on Tyya’s nose, Daddy is finally forced to buy something good.

With Father in Washington and Cuffy away visiting a sick cousin, almost anything might happen to the Melendys left behind at the Four-Story Mistake. In the Melendy family, adventures are inevitable: Mr. Titus and the catfish; the villainy of the DeLacey brothers; Rush's composition of Opus Three; Mona's first rhubarb pie and all the canning; Randy's arrowhead; the auction and fair for the Red Cross.

Beloved by children (and the parents lucky enough to share it with them) since it was first published in 1954, Half Magic is the uproarious tale of four siblings who discover a charm that grants exactly half of whatever they wish for--with results that are twice as predictable (and hilarious) as you might expect.

In rural North Carolina, in 1951, despite parental reassurances, a typhoid shot hurt. It hurt even more when the children saw who would be administering the shot: Miss Winnie, a large, dictatorial nurse who had been "especially built by the nursing school so she would never blow away in a hard wind".

Set in Mississippi at the height of the Depression, this is the story of one family's struggle to maintain their integrity, pride, and independence in the face of racism and social injustice. And it is also Cassie's story - Cassie Logan, an independent girl who discovers over the course of an important year why having land of their own is so crucial to the Logan family, even as she learns to draw strength from her own sense of dignity and self-respect.

A slumber party over at Lucille's richie nanna's big giant house is sure to be a dream come true for Junie B.! 'Cause what could possibly go wrong?

As John Baxter makes plans to marry Elaine, one of the Baxters enters into the most trying season of all. During a time of renewed love and hope for the future, the Baxters try to come together to establish the sacred ground of marriage and to chart a course for the future. Memories of times gone by meet with the changes of today in a story that proves only the support of faith and family can take a person into the sunset years of life.

Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert decide to adopt a young boy to help on the farm. All of Avonlea is shocked and surprised when Anne Shirley arrives and takes the little community by storm. The first of the series written by Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables is the heartwarming tale of how imagination and love transform the hardest of hearts and stiffest of spines.

This favorite book for children, based on the author's own youthful experiences, describes the family life of the Marches in a small New England community. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are raised in genteel poverty by their loving mother, Marmee, while their father serves as a chaplain during the Civil War. The story explores their domestic adventures, their attempts to increase the family's income, their friendship with the neighboring Laurence family, and their later love affairs and destinies as women.

The disregard of a dying woman's bequest, a girl's attempt to help an impoverished clerk, and the marriage of an idealist and a materialist intersect at an estate called Howards End. There, the lives of three families become entangled. As chance brings them together, societal conventions come into question as does the ownership of Howards End. Through the fate of the estate - as well as the lives of the families who are affiliated with it - Forster creates a brilliant parallel to the fate of English society itself.

Julie thinks her new neighbors must be very scary because all the stuff being moved into their house is enormous. Then she meets David and finds out that he's just a normal, regular boy. But when David's father calls him for supper the sound makes Julie jump in the air, run in a circle three times, run home and lock herself in her room until it is time for breakfast the next day. Could David's father be a giant?

"I will come by train. I will wear a yellow bonnet. I am plain and tall." A heartwarming story about two children, Anna and Caleb, whose lives are changed forever when their widowed papa advertises for a mail-order bride. Sarah Elisabeth Wheaton from Maine answers the ad and agrees to come for a month. Sarah brings gifts from the sea, a cat named Seal, and singing and laughter to the quiet house. But will she like it enough to stay? Anna and Caleb wait and wonder -- and hope. Performed by Glenn Close