Fran Manca

Venice, 1486. Across the lagoon lies Murano. Time flows differently here – like the glass the island’s maestros spend their lives learning to control. Women are not meant to work with glass, but Orsola Rosso flouts convention to save her family from ruin. She works in secret, knowing her creations must be perfect to be accepted by men. But perfection may take a lifetime. Skipping like a stone through the centuries, we follow Orsola as she hones her craft through war and plague, tragedy and triumph, love and loss.

Alex Green is four years old when she first sees a dragon. In her next-door neighbour's garden, in the spot where the old lady usually sits, is a huge dragon, an astonished expression on its face before it opens its wings and soars away across the rooftops. And Alex doesn't see the little old lady after that. No one mentions her. It's as if she's never existed. Then Alex's mother disappears, and reappears a week later, one quiet Tuesday, with no explanation whatsoever as to where she has been. But she is a ghostly shadow of her former self, with scars across her body.

Scottish Highlands, 1727. In the aftermath of a tragic fire that kills her father, Aila and her mother, Janet, move to the remote parish of Loth, north-west of Inverness. Blending in does not come easily to the women: Aila was badly burned in the fire and left with visible injuries, while her mother struggles to maintain her grip on reality. When a temporary minister is appointed in the area, rather than welcome the two women, he develops a strange curiosity for them that sets them even further apart from the community.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who lost his mother.... As twelve-year-old David takes refuge from his grief in the myths and fairytales so beloved of his dead mother, he finds the real world and the fantasy world begin to blend. That is when bad things start to happen. That is when the Crooked Man comes. And David is violently propelled into a land populated by heroes, wolves, and monsters, and begins his quest to find the legendary Book of Lost Things.

In The Money Is Coming, Sarah Akwisombe, founder of No Bull Business School, gives you an easy-to-follow, 10-step system to manifest more money into your life. By using a unique blend of Sarah's no-bullsh*t style and an honest, inquisitive look at the universe and the law of attraction, you will learn to re-programme your brain to work for you, breaking down negative money blocks to replace them with new thought patterns for a positive money mindset.

Enter a world where bloody battles and heroic deeds combine in the historic struggle to unite Britain in the face of a common enemy. The third instalment in Bernard Cornwell's King Alfred series, follows on from the outstanding previous novels The Last Kingdom and The Pale Horseman. The year is 878 and the Vikings have been thrown out of Wessex. Uhtred, fresh from fighting for Alfred in the battle to free Wessex, travels north to seek revenge for his father's death, killed in a bloody raid by Uhtred's old enemy, renegade Danish lord, Kjartan.

A Saxon raised by Vikings. A pagan fighting for a Christian King. The conflict at the heart of a hero will be played out in the fight for England. It is 877. Across the kingdoms of Britain the Danes are gaining strength. Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a pagan warrior, must decide who he will align with: the Vikings who raised him or Alfred, King of the West Saxons.

The first book in a brand-new series, The Last Kingdom is set in England during the reign of King Alfred. Uhtred is an English boy, born into the aristocracy of ninth-century Northumbria. Orphaned at 10, he is captured and adopted by a Dane and taught the Viking ways. Yet Uhtred's fate is indissolubly bound up with Alfred, King of Wessex, who rules over the only English kingdom to survive the Danish assault. The struggle between the English and the Danes and the strife between christianity and paganism is the background to Uhtred's growing up.

In the age of the Faerie Queene, Elizabeth I, Lord Francis Rodermere starts to lay waste to a forest. Furious, the sorceress who dwells there scrawls a curse into the bark of the first oak he fells: A faerie boy will be born to you whose beauty will be your death. Ten years later, Lord Rodermere’s son, Beau is born - and all who encounter him are struck by his great beauty. Meanwhile, many miles away in a London alchemist’s cellar lives Randa - a beast deemed too monstrous to see the light of day. And so begins a timeless tale of love, tragedy and revenge.

Renowned as much for her wit and satirical social commentary as for her stories of love and romance, Jane Austen remains unfailingly relevant and one of Britain’s best loved authors. In this Audible Original collection, an all-star list of narrators (Billie Piper, Claire Foy, Emma Thompson, Florence Pugh and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) capture Austen’s pin-sharp humour and tone in these dramatisations of her six beloved novels accompanied by a full cast.