Highly acclaimed actress Susannah York reads this exclusive unabridged audio book of My Lady Ludlow.

Written by Elizabeth Gaskell, creator of the characters that were to become the basis for the hugely successful TV series Cranford, My Lady Ludlow paints a brilliant picture of the shift in power in a rural Northern village, from the velvety feudal Ludlows to the glitter of the new money rattling through the system courtesy of the brazen baker from Birmingham.

Lady Ludlow’s appalling snobbery, prejudice and her bred-in-the-bone conviction as to the superiority of the English aristocracy and their feudal way of life are tested, and found wanting, in this radical tale of the collapse of a social system.

One of the extraordinary things about My Lady Ludlow as a book is that in spite of the creation of a monster of hide bound arrogance and pretention Gaskell cannot help but produce a character that you end up rooting for right up to the wide grin induced by the final twist in the plot.

This very special unabridged audio book of  My Lady Ludlow is available for download as mp3 files and in audiobook format for your iPod - only from Silksoundbooks.

Very few novels have created as much outrage and adoration as Madam Bovary. This unabridged audio book, read by the aclaimed actress Julie Christie tells of  Emma Bovary’s attempts to escape the maddening boredom of being married to the wrong man, in the wrong town, with the wrong picture of her life via a series of very realistically described adulterous affairs.

This ensured that author Gustave Flaubert had practically the whole of France involved in the hullabaloo that greeted the novel’s publication in 1856. He was prosecuted for it (unsuccessfully), and then wildly fêted for it and his establishment as one of the most popular of literary geniuses is based on it.

Attraction, desire and sex were not proper subjects for a nineteenth century novel and Charlotte Brontë’s clear and open handling of all three in Jane Eyre was shocking, exciting and revolutionary.

Jane Eyre - a small, plain-faced, intelligent and honest English orphan is abused by her aunt and cousins as a child, acquires role models during her education at Lowood Academy, becomes the governess of Thornfield Manor, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester; spends time with the Rivers family at Marsh's End and Morton, where cousin St John Rivers proposes to her; and is finally reunited with and marries her beloved Rochester at his house of Ferndean.

Julian Glover’s audio book version of Beowulf takes the poem back to its origins as a spoken tale. He has taken the essence of the poem and with a scholarly eye to the British Museum’s manuscript, created a truly Bardic performance. Beowulf’s battles against Grendel (the monster who takes you in your sleep) and the original lethal female – his mother who comes to avenge her son’s killing, are faithfully transformed into a roaring reality.

Download Beowulf audiobook today for just £7.95

The wonderful 'Little Voice' of Jane Horrocks brings this exclusive downloadable audiobook collection of your favourite childhood Nursery Rhymes out of the dust covers of Mother Goose’s books and into strange and merry life.

Recorded with all the, often surprising, original words and verses this classic audiobook is absolutely perfect for very young children learning to speak!

Available in MP3 or iPod audiobook format for you to download and enjoy immediately.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), read as an unabridged audio book by star performer Nickolas Grace,  was intended to be a serious travel guide. It failed dismally in this respect, but succeeded in becoming an hilarious account of a boating holiday on the Thames, between Kingston and Oxford.

The three men were based on the author and two of his friends. The holiday was a typical boating holiday of its time carried out on what was known as a Thames Camping Skiff. The dog, Montmorency, however, was entirely fictional, but, as Jerome remarked, *had much of me in it.*

The book was denounced as “vulgar” by the literary establishment, but it was hugely popular amongst what were known as the clerking classes who yearned to be “free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth century life”. It has coined one of the great quotes about the pressures of the modern working life – “I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”