Our recording of The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is a translation from the Middle English into modern language. It is translated by the leading Chaucerian enthusiast Terry Jones, yes the Monty Python one, who adds to his truly scholarly rendition of the text a smattering of vital and fascinating notes, recorded as he read.

A meeting between pilgrims at the Tabard Inn on the road to Canterbury provides the linking narrative for The Canterbury Tales. A group of pilgrims swap their tales, with a thoroughly human competitiveness and retaliatory jousting. The choice of pilgrims for his characters allowed Chaucer to put together types that wouldn’t usually associate let alone talk. This allowed him to put a tale of courtly love along side a political treatise, and in this case a filthy and very funny tale of adultery, the feared coming of the second flood and burnt bums.

Download "The Prologue" and get "The Miller's Tale" Read by Terry Jones Absolutely FREE!

Our recording of The Miller’s Tale is a translation from the Middle English into modern language. It is translated by the leading Chaucerian enthusiast Terry Jones, yes the Monty Python one, who adds to his truly scholarly rendition of the text a smattering of vital and fascinating notes, recorded as he read.

A meeting between pilgrims at the Tabard Inn on the road to Canterbury provides the linking narrative for The Canterbury Tales. A group of pilgrims swap their tales, with a thoroughly human competitiveness and retaliatory jousting. The choice of pilgrims for his characters allowed Chaucer to put together types that wouldn’t usually associate let alone talk. This allowed him to put a tale of courtly love along side a political treatise, and in this case a filthy and very funny tale of adultery, the feared coming of the second flood and burnt bums.

Download The Miller's Tale audiobook today and get The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales Free!

‘In the High and Far off times…’ begins Rudyard Kipling’s ‘How the Elephant got his Trunk’, read by star actor Art Malik in this unabridged audio book. Then off we are taken, by one of the greatest storytellers, into a world where children’s questions are turned neatly on their heads and questions provided which far from stopping the stream of enquiries only serve to make it gush faster.

These astonishingly funny and remarkably clever tales follow on directly from the tale told to Mowgli in the second ‘Jungle Book’ (1895) of ‘How the Tiger got his Stripes’.

Art Malik reads The Just So Stories brilliantly, with the perfect soft and gentle voice… an absolute must for any child (or adult!)

We have embedded Kipling’s own original illustrations into this audiobook so that they will appear on your screen with each chapter, whether you are listening on a computer or your iPod.

The Garden Party, read in this unabridged audio book by the great English actress Lindsay Duncan,  has often been held up as an example of the near perfect short story.

Virginia Woolf once said that Katherine Mansfield’s was “the only writing I have ever been jealous of”.  Mansfield’s short stories are some of the best examples of this fiendishly difficult from of literature.  Her style, with its seemingly haphazard stream of consciousness and deliciously funny surprises follows directly from that of Anton Chekhov, whose stories she admired greatly, but her own stories were to become just as influential in the formation of the genre.

The acerbic and startlingly accurate snippets of people’s lives that Mansfield shows us in these stories have many resonances in her own life.  Although a central member of the exciting and extraordinary Bloomsbury set at the turn of the twentieth century, Mansfield was born and brought up in New Zealand and The Garden Party first published in 1923, harks back to her time in Wellington with her socially ambitious parents and the society that surrounded them.  At The Bay follows this train of inspiration with Mansfield’s childhood beach home providing the back drop for this icy little number.  The Daughters of the Late Colonel with its exquisite and agonisingly wicked descriptions of the “old tabbies” dining off their terrified white blancmange, was the only story Mansfield ever professed herself satisfied with – “to any extent”.  The nail biting tension in Mr Hammond’s jealous insecurity about his oh-so popular wife in The Stranger reveals a side of Mansfield which must have made her somewhat varied sex life rather harder than it appeared.

These are a collection of wonderfully vicious portraits and seriously infectious emotions.

Download The Garden Party audiobook from Silksoundbooks today!

Award winning British actor Tim Pigott-Smith reads this unabridged audio book of the wry, evocative and extremely witty stories of the British at play in the hills of Simla, escaping the fire of the Indian high summer.

Author Rudyard Kipling’s love for the society he was born into and worked with shines out of the tales with the heat of the Indian sun.

His enthusiasiasm has often been taken to be an endorsement of the English Colonial system - George Orwell called him the “prophet of British Imperialism” and he did indeed revel in the eccentricities and peculiarities of the ex-patriot community.

The stabbing of an antique dealer on Christmas Day leads the murderer, Markheim to try to justify his life to the devil in an in depth discussion about the nature of good and evil. His evening ends quite differently from how he'd planned it and results in him making an admission of guilt for the killing...

Alan Howard's magnificent performance really brings out the mystery of this story.

Free with this audiobook we have included “The Pavilion on the Links” by Robert Louis Stevenson, read by Alan Howard.

Download both for just £7.95 direct to your computer.