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  The Last Cellar - A Modern...

  Edgar AllanPoe Poe, Michael

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  This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. An AI voice narrates this audiobook. 
  A chilling modern retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado. When an online influencer crosses the wrong person on a public livestream, a sinister plan unfolds beneath the city’s surface. Set during a glittering Halloween night, “The Last Cellar” is a psychological thriller that explores ego, betrayal, and revenge in the age of social media. 
   
  For fans of dark fiction, modern horror, and suspenseful short stories.

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  Ma'ame Pelagie - From their pens...

  Kate Chopin

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  Katherine O'Flaherty was born on the 8th February 1850 in St Louis, Missouri to parents of French and Irish descent. 
  At age 5, she was sent to the Sacred Heart Academy and, apart from a 2 year period at home when her father died, remained there until graduating in 1868.  Whilst there she began writing and became an avid reader of almost anything that crossed her path.   
  Kate married Oscar Chopin in 1870 and the couple moved to New Orleans, and later to the rural setting of Cloutierville, Louisiana to raise their 6 children.  
  In 1882 her husband died leaving her in a deep trench of debt.  Despite her best efforts to turn the businesses around they were sold, and she moved the family back to St Louis and the financial help of her mother.  Sadly, her mother died within the year.  Kate, now struggling with depression, pushed herself to write and gained a local reputation as a writer of short stories that captured the local color and vibrancy of her surroundings.  
  By the early 1890’s her short stories were published nationally.  With this widespread audience also came negative reviews, controversy, and cries of immorality as themes such as interracial relationships, the rights of women and other burning issues of the day were written about. 
  Despite the criticism, which unnerved her, she continued to write though in the main her works, around 100 short stories and two novels, were not attributed with any literary worth. 
  Kate Chopin died from a brain haemorrhage in St Louis Missouri on the 22nd of August 1904.  She was 54. 
  For much of the 20th Century her work was forgotten and out of print.  It was only in early 1970’s, with the rise of feminism and the call for a more just society that she was given the status her works had long described and shone a literary light at.  She is now safely revered as one of America’s great authors.

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  The Meeting - Seventeen Series...

  A.D. Starrling

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  Discover the origins of the incredible friendship that defines Hunted…  
     
  On a hot summer’s day in Boston, US Marine turned Homicide Detective Reid Halsey finds himself in the middle of a deadly shootout with a murder suspect.  
     
  When Lucas Soul, a seemingly innocent victim, rises from the dead moments after a fatal gunshot wound to the head, Reid comes to the shocking realization that the world he believes in may very well be a carefully fabricated lie masking an unearthly reality.The Meeting is a short story set in AD Starrling's bestselling supernatural thriller series Seventeen. If you like high-octane adventures that combine science and fantasy, then you'll love the world of Seventeen. Get this thrilling short story and continue the epic series today!  
     
  Visit Shop AD Starrling to get digitally signed books and discounted bundles!

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  John Galsworthy - The Shorter...

  John Galsworthy

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  John Galsworthy was born on the 14th August 1867 on the family estate, Parkfield, in Kingston-upon-Thames.  His family’s wealth came from the shipping industry 
  At age nine he began his education at Saugeen, a Bournemouth preparatory school, before moving to Harrow school in 1881, distinguishing himself as an athlete.  
  Galsworthy attended New College, Oxford to read law and left with a second-class degree with honours in 1889. The bar called him in 1890 but Galsworthy decided he would rather run the family’s shipping business. This also meant travelling to destinations such as Vancouver, South Africa and Australia. 
  In 1895 Galsworthy began a decade long affair with Ada Nemesis Pearson Cooper, the wife of his first cousin. It was only when, in 1905, she divorced and married Galsworthy that their affair became known. 
  His literary career began in 1897 with a short story volume, ‘From the Four Winds’, with the pseudonym John Sinjohn as were three further works. Under his own name, in 1904, came ‘The Island Pharisees’, a novel of social observation, seasoned with flashes of satire and propaganda. He also switched from small, independent publishers to the larger Heinemann and to whom he remained for the duration of his career. 
  1906 saw first major play, ‘The Silver Box’, and the novel ‘The Man of Property’. Each to considerable acclaim. The latter was the first in ‘The Forsyte Saga’ trilogy written between 1906 and 1921. It dealt with the questions of status, class and materialism through Soames Forsyte, who is acutely aware of his ‘new money’ status. Jealous of his wife, his machinations drive her into the arms of another. Soames engages in a terrible revenge with terrible consequences.  
  His social agenda was enlightened particularly in his condemnation over the use of solitary confinement in prisons, his attacks on theatrical censorship and campaigning for animal rights. 
  Galsworthy, having been passed over for active service, spent much of the First World War working as an orderly in a field hospital in France. 
  Despite his it was only in 1920 that he had his first blockbuster play ‘The Skin Game’, a melodrama dealing with ethics, property and class.  
  In 1920 ‘In Chancery’ also arrived with further discourse on the marital disharmony between Soames Forsyte and his wife.  
  The appreciation of his work gradually shifted from plays to novels, particularly through his detailing English social difference, tension and pretension with the Forsytes.  A second trilogy, ‘A Modern Comedy’, followed, examining his love for his daughter Fleur and the English commercial upper-middle class, its ideologies and Soames’ poisonous materialism.  
  Having rejected a knighthood in 1918 he was appointed, in 1929, to the Order of Merit. Galsworthy spent his last years writing a third Forsythe trilogy, ‘End of the Chapter’.   
  In 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize, but by now failing health meant he was too ill to attend the ceremony. 
  John Galsworthy died at his Hampstead home of a brain tumour on 31st January, 1933. He was cremated and his ashes scattered from an aeroplane over the South Downs.

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  Benediction - From their pens to...

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack.

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  Mutiny - A Novel of the Bounty

  John Boyne

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  “Enthralling . . . Boyne’s novel can stand comparison with William Golding’s Rites of Passage . . . Mutiny is storytelling at its most accomplished.” —The Independent (UK) 
   
  Internationally bestselling author John Boyne has been praised as “one of the best and original of the new generation of Irish writers” by the Irish Examiner. With Mutiny, he’s created an eye-opening story of life—and death—at sea. 
   
  Fourteen-year-old pickpocket John Jacob Turnstile has just been caught red-handed and is on his way to prison when an offer is put to him—a ship has been refitted over the last few months and is about to set sail with an important mission. The boy who was expected to serve as the captain’s personal valet has been injured and a replacement must be found immediately. 
   
  Given the choice of prison or a life at sea, John soon finds himself on board, meeting the captain, just as the ship sets sail. The ship is the Bounty, the captain is William Bligh, and their destination is Tahiti. Their journey, however, will become one of the most infamous in naval history. 
   
  Mutiny is the first novel to explore all the events relating to the Bounty’s voyage, from the long passage across the ocean to their adventures on the island of Tahiti and the subsequent forty-eight-day expedition toward Timor. This vivid retelling of the notorious mutiny is packed with humor, violence, and historical detail, while presenting an intriguingly different portrait of Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian than has ever been presented before. 
   
  “The writing grows into a mesmerizing tour-de-force . . . this is a remarkable and compelling piece of storytelling.” —The Irish Times

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