The great myths of Ancient Greece have inspired mankind for centuries. Each of the heroes has to undergo trials of strength and courage to prove his valour against a host of monsters the Minotaur, half man, half bull; Hydra, the many-headed serpent; Medusa the Gorgon. Meanwhile, the gods, lead by Zeus the Thunderer from his seat on Mount Olympus, watch, encourage, help and sometimes hinder. In this new retelling, the tales come alive more vividly than ever with the added drama of popular m...

Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare’s great series of four tragedies, the others being Othello (1603), King Lear (1605) and Macbeth (1606). In writing this extraordinary play Shakespeare effectively reinvented tragedy after an interval of roughly two thousand years we have to go back to the Greek dramatists of fifth-century Athens to find anything of comparable depth and maturity.

The tree, the fireside, the candles, the presents and the festive food may be the main features of the traditional Christmas, but so were the stories, the poems, and the traditional tales. Here, is a delightful confection of Christmas texts: the story of The Nutcracker told with Tchaikovsky’s immortal music, Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales, as well as nineteenth and twentieth century poems and the always affecting tale of The Little Match Girl. An enchanting collection for those...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream must be one of the most enduringly popular of Shakespeare’s plays, and it is not difficult to see why: the work blends several kinds of comedy with a powerful atmosphere of magic and mystery and a satisfying set of contrasts between city and country, reason and imagination, love and infatuation.

The Adventures of Odysseus is the story of what happened after the Trojan War when Odysseus, the most cunning of all the Greek heroes, left Troy and made his way back to his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. It was first told by a poet named Homer nearly three thousand years ago and is retold in this new version especially for younger listeners.

The tales of the Norse gods, of the giants, demons, trolls and dwarves, still have the power to fascinate more than a thousand years after they were first told. Here are the stories of the one-eyed god Odin, the all-seeing, who from his throne in Asgard the home of the gods, has to prepare for Ragnarok, the final conflict between good and evil. There are tales too of Tyr the god of war, of the cunning Loki, of Thor the mighty thunder god and a host of others. These retellings of the old ta...

Macbeth, Shakespeare’s last great tragedy, has remained one of the most popular plays since it’s first performance in 1606 probably in front of King James. This exciting new audiobook production is directed with fresh imagination by Fiona Shaw who breaks the conventional strait jacket that has hampered the development of Shakespeare on audio. We are as much in the twenty-first century as in medieval Scotland the tensions, the politics, the struggle for power and dark ambition is part of ou...

Shakespeare’s Sonnets, one of the most remarkable collections of poetry, was first published in 1609, 400 years ago, by Mr Thomas Thorpe. Naxos AudioBooks marks the occasion with a selection of 80 of the finest, read by leading actors. The selection includes famous ones such as ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ as well as lesser well-known sonnets though of equally fine stature.

Classic Poems for Boys comprises a delightfully varied set of poems for 5-10-year olds. From rousing favourites like Felicia Dorothea Hemans’s Casabianca and John Keats’s A Song About Myself, to dreamy, thoughtful poems by Rudyard Kipling and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, this is a collection to be treasured.

Classic Poems for Girls is a collection of over 25 funny, whimsical and moving poems for 510-year olds, designed to fuel the imagination. From the adventures of the Jumblies, who sail away in a sieve, to the sticky end of a girl named Matilda, to the courtship of a maiden who lived long ago in a kingdom by the sea, there’s a poem to suit any feeling or mood. Seasoned Naxos AudioBooks readers Roy McMillan, Laura Paton, Anne-Marie Piazza, and Benjamin Soames work their magic on the works of ...

Christmas brings out the best and the worst in us, as can be seen in this evocative anthology. Among what Thomas Love Peacock calls the ‘many poetical charms in the heraldings of Christmas’ there are eulogies by saints and diatribes from curmudgeons. Here, Christmas is expounded by divines, sung by rustics, deplored by philosophers and made mystical in stories. This collection includes complete versions of old favourites and new discoveries: a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes, an account of Chr...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in collaboration with his friend William Wordsworth, revolutionised English poetry; in 1798 they produced their Lyrical Ballads, poems of imagination and reflection using ‘the language of men’. They pointed the way forward for a generation of Romantic poets. Coleridge’s addiction to opium affected his poetic output, and yet the handful of poems he did produce were innovative. These ranged from the quietly conversational to the wildly imagined, and include two of th...