Showing results by narrator "Cathy Dobson" in All Categories

A moving story of a random act of kindness. Old Tom Pickford, an elderly clerk at Tweedie's warehouse, is moved by the sight of a young boy on a London omnibus who is about to embark on a new life at sea. His thoughts drift back to his own boyhood in the country, which he left behind long ago. A wonderful study in characterisation and nostalgia.

The Princess Who Was Hidden Underground is the tale of a king who goes to extreme lengths to safeguard his daughter from potential suitors unworthy of her hand. But one cunning young lad manages to outwit the king by disguising himself as a sheep. 

'The Bowmen' is perhaps the most famous of Machen's tales. It is the iconic story of an incident from the First World War trenches. Faced with inevitable death and defeat, a battalion of English soldiers is saved by the mysterious and miraculous intervention of Saint George and a company of English bowmen who had last fought at Agincourt.

The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Never more so than in this collection of 30 weird and macabre tales.

Harry Houdini's greatest escape ever. While visiting Cairo as a tourist, Houdini and his wife are shown around the pyramids by a mysterious and slightly sinister guide who has a strange hollow voice and looks like an old pharaoh. What starts as a strange traveller's adventure to witness a duel at midnight on the summit of one of the pyramids, turns into a nightmare as Houdini is seized, tied up and lowered on a rope far into the bowels of the earth to an unknown tomb where the oldest and most sinister of the Egyptian Pharaohs dwell....

Be careful what you wish for. W.W.Jacob's famous horror story about the monkey's paw, a talisman which has had a spell cast on it, enabling three people each to have three wishes... which come true with devastating consequences.

Great Horror Stories is a vintage collection of some of the finest ghost tales, horror stories, and supernatural legends ever written, by the best writers the genre has to offer.

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a Scottish poet and novelist, best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. 'The Three Dogs' tells the story of a shepherd who trades his three sheep with a stranger for three dogs with magical powers. The dogs are able to help him slay a dragon and win a princess.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English writer best known for his fictional priest-detective, Father Brown.This collection features five of Chesterton's most intriguing cases:The Shadow of the SharkThe Hammer of GodThe Invisible ManThe Queer FeetThe Blue Cross

A superb anthology of 40 great classic humorous stories.

A spectacular collection of outstanding half-hour short stories...perfect for commuters or bedtime listening. 'The Whistle' by Hugh Walpole, 'The Well' by W. W. Jacobs, 'The Scrupulous Father' by George Gissing, 'The Debt' by Edith Wharton, 'The Problem of the Five Marks' by Melville Davisson Post, 'The Purple Wig' by G. K. Chesterton, 'Pickman's Model' by H. P. Lovecraft, 'Humplebee' by Geroge Gissing.

Baring-Gould's strangest and most enduring works are those which are based on fantastical medieval myths and folklore. 'A Dead Finger' is a strange vampire story about a parasitic dead human finger which feeds off living humans in an attempt to draw the life force out of them and thus regrow its body.

A grisly collection of despicable crimes told by some of the world's best writers.

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) is arguably the greatest European novelist in terms of the range and power of his writing. Most of his short stories predate his long novels and are written in a different style. One of the earliest is An Episode of the Reign of Terror in which two nuns and a priest in hiding from the mob are visited by a stranger with a very peculiar request, and even odder motives behind it.

One of the hobbies of Charles Lindley Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax, was the collection of gruesome tales of the supernatural. These stories were told to him by friends, acquaintances and sent to him by strangers, and he duly recorded them in a book over the course of his long life - he lived to be 94. This is the complete collection in one volume.

Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (1812-1885) was a Norwegian writer, scholar and collector of traditional folktales. Peter Gynt is the story of a hunter who gets the better of a group of trolls who like to take over peoples' farms.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. 'A Suburban Fairy Tale' is a disturbing story set in an English family at the end of the First World War. While the parents are revelling in the end of rationing and enjoying the availability of all kinds of food which had been rationed, their young son is aware of the hungry birds chirruping in the garden. But are they actually birds? Or could they be hungry little boys like himself?

Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) was one of France's finest writers of short stories. 'The Pope's Mule' is the amusing story of an animal which waited patiently for seven years to repay a man who mistreated her.

Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856 - 1925), known as H. Rider Haggard, was an English writer of adventure stories, often set in exotic locations, especially Africa, and a pioneer of the Lost World literary genre. Only a Dream is a ghost story about the strange experience of a widower about to remarry, who is visited on the eve of his wedding by the ghastly apparition of his dead first wife.

William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an English author of horror, fantastic fiction, and science fiction. Hodgson used his experiences at sea to lend authentic detail to his short horror stories, many of which are set on the ocean. He became one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century. He died in World War I at age 40. 'A Tropical Horror' is the vivid story of a ship which is attacked by a hideous sea serpent.