Fiction Drama

Some of the greatest poets and lovers in the English language speak of their love in this seductive and romantic collection. Here are the voices of Romeo, Robert Burns, Lord Byron and many others.

The weatherworn cottage Clachan has always been Jo Wilding’s sanctuary, a blissful escape from her tumultuous home life. From the first summer Rachel invited her to join the Willoughby family in the wilds of Scotland, she fell in love with the sea air, sandy beach and Tristan, Rachel’s older brother… All these years later, Clachan is where their most important occasions and conversations take place, so when Rachel organises a weekend there, Jo never suspects that this weekend will change everything.

After the death of their father, Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene return to Thebes. The ruler is their unyielding uncle by marriage, Creon, who assumed command after the death of the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles, and Polynices in a fratricidal struggle to take control of the city. Creon has the body of one brother buried with full civic honors but forbids the burial of the body of the other, whom he regards as a traitor. Antigone's challenge to Creon's decree, which she considers unjust, results in the extinction of the family line of Oedipus.

Attorney Nate Shepherd doesn’t want to take on an attempted murder case. But when people he trusts ask him to get involved, Nate agrees to represent the hard-working farmer who’s been accused of trying to kill his brother’s fiancée. By the time Nate steps in, law enforcement has already gathered a mass of evidence to bury his client. With the help of a diligent associate, a dogged investigator, and a dangerous bail bondsman, Nate unearths a web of money and motives that only raises more questions.

Grace Adams gave birth, blinked, and now suddenly she is forty-five, perimenopausal and stalled—the unhappiest age you can be, according to the Guardian. And today she’s really losing it. Stuck in traffic, she finally has had enough. To the astonishment of everyone, Grace gets out of her car and simply walks away. Grace sets off across London, armed with a £200 cake, to win back her estranged teenage daughter on her sixteenth birthday. Because today is the day she’ll remind her daughter that no matter how far we fall, we can always get back up again

There is now no doubt that not only is Waiting for Godot the outstanding play of the 20th century, but it is also Samuel Beckett's masterpiece. Yet it is both a popular text to be studied at school and an enigma. The scene is a country road. There is a solitary tree. It is evening. Two tramp-like figures, Vladimir and Estragon, exchange words. Pull off boots. Munch a root vegetable. Two other curious characters enter. And a boy. Time passes. It is all strange yet familiar.

In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age 42, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn - King Lear - then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

Written in alternating prose and poetry, La Vita Nuova is a profound reflection on the nature of love, devoted to Dante's muse Beatrice. Following Beatrice's death in 1290, Dante became obsessed with the young Florentine woman, whom he only ever knew from a distance. He believed his love for her was a form of divine love and saw her as an image of salvation itself - a theme that is later explored in his masterpiece The Divine Comedy, where she guides him through heaven.

1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.

How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings? This is the question the unnamed protagonist of GhostForest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong “astronaut” fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China. As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings.

A baker’s dozen audio dramas are conjured out of the imagination of author Richard Curtis. Everyday places and situations are the backdrops for tense and unpredictable confrontations. A chance encounter between neighbors in their building’s trash room; a routine visit to a yoga class; a friendly chat in the cardiac recovery ward of a hospital - 13 commonplace moments escalate into tension, violence - and even death.

Nate Shepherd can’t tell if his client is lying. The police say Nate’s client beat a young reporter to death during a break-in. They have the evidence to prove it, from the stolen goods right down to the bloody aluminum bat. A celebrated prosecutor takes over the case, aiming to convict Nate’s client of murdering the reporter while robbing his house. Nate’s client swears he didn’t kill the man. So, helped by a new associate and old friends, Nate dives into the overwhelming evidence in search of a defense. With each new lead, Nate’s suspicions grow that there might be more to this crime.

At the core of the drama is Brick, an alcoholic son mourning the death of his friend, Skipper, and his strained marriage to Maggie. Maggie, resilient yet desperate for love, grapples with Brick's emotional withdrawal. The family is entrenched in mendacity, with each member harboring secrets, particularly about Big Daddy's terminal cancer.

In this Holllywood Stage presentation we find Dantes still loyal to Napoleon in exile on Elba, he carries a message from him but is intercepted and imprisoned without trial. Whilst in prison his fiancé is told he has died and is forced to marry his arch enemy, Count Mondego. Dantes rots in prison for many years but is then helped by Abbe Faria, who leaves him the treasure of Monte Cristo and assists him in escaping prison.

An urban couple are on a getaway to visit her father at his vast rural estate. But when they arrive, they find him missing and a local Indigenous man staying there instead. They ask him to leave . . . and with a click on your device, you choose what happens next. When it’s revealed that the colonial rights to this entire property are actually up for grabs, you must continue to decide how the story unfolds. Inheritance is an interactive audio-drama specially adapted from the award-winning and published stage play, replete with all of the same humor and suspense as the live production.

How can we look afresh at Shakespeare as a writer of sonnets? What new light might they shed on his career, personality, and sexuality? Shakespeare wrote sonnets for at least 30 years, not only for himself, for professional reasons, and for those he loved, but also in his plays, as prologues, as epilogues, and as part of their poetic texture.

Arcade and Daffodil are twins born one minute apart. With their fiery red hair and thirst for escape, they form an unbreakable bond nurtured by their grandmother’s stories. Together, they disappear into their imaginations and forge a world all their own.

Lysistrata is an ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes, which was originally performed in Athens in 411 BC. It is a comic account of a woman's extraordinary quest to terminate the Peloponnesian War between Greek city states, by advocating that the women deny all the men of the land any sex. At a meeting, Lysistrata persuades the women of the warring cities to withhold sexual privileges from their men. She has also persuaded the older women of Athens to seize the Acropolis.

Using forbidden Marrangha magic and the three stolen vapours, the evil sorcerer Zharradan Marr has created a creature....but for what purpose?

Lyra Prescott, a Los Angeles film student, is closing in on graduation and facing important decisions about her future. She's already been offered a job at her hometown TV station, an opportunity that could ultimately launch her dream career as a film editor. But heading back home would also mean dealing with her overprotective brothers, social-climbing mother, and eccentric grandmother. Unsure of her future, Lyra dives into work on her final school assignment: A documentary transformed by a twist of fate into a real-life horror film.