Christmas Short Stories Anthology

A Christmas ball sets the plans in motion for the wealthy Julian Mastakovich, for an immensely wealthy business man has just announced that his daughter has a dowry of 300,000 rubles. First published in 1848, and adapted into a motion picture in 2000, Dostoyevsky shines a light on the business end of well-moneyed marriage. It begins when an 11-year-old girl gets an extravagant doll at a Christmas ball.

'Rumpole and the Christmas Party' sees Rumpole celebrating with his Chambers colleagues and their wives and partners. There is plenty of claret, paper streamers and mistletoe, but where is She Who Must Be Obeyed? Bill Wallis reads this special seasonal story starring Horace Rumpole, scourge of all QCs and friend of the criminal classes.

This is an excellent listen for early and beginning readers with fun Christmas stories and hilarious jokes. Perfect for listening aloud during the holidays. These stories are great as quick bedtime stories and cute tales to be listened to aloud with friends and family.

The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree is a Christmas-time short story written by Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1876. It was first published in A Writer's Diary, January 1876. This story is also known as "The Heavenly Christmas Tree". The author begins by telling us he has made this story up, but that even so, he thinks it must have actually happened—on Christmas Eve, in a great town, at a time of terrible frost. The boy of the title, "six years old or younger," awakens in a frigid cellar, reaches for his mother, and finds she is "as cold as the wall." He makes his way outside.

It's Christmas in the windy city of Chicago with two award-winning stories to warm your heart for the holiday season, "Dante’s Gift" and "Merry Christmas, Henry"....

Truman Capote makes whisky-soaked fruitcake in Alabama; Laurie Lee slides across a frozen pond in Gloucestershire; and Shirley Jackson is outwitted by a wily Santa Claus at the bank. Ghosts haunt the Christmases of Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Bowen, while Dostoyevsky, Daphne du Maurier and Italo Calvino take a cynical view of the season and Selma Lagerlof and Angela Carter celebrate its miracles. Ranging from Cork to Lagos to the Wild West, and from Paris to San Paolo to outer space, this is Christmas as imagined by some of the greatest short-story writers of all time.

In 'Rumpole and the Boy', Rumpole has recently concluded a blackmail case when he finds himself babysitting a small boy. Edmund turns out to have a keen interest in criminal cases and he throws some unexpected light on the case Rumpole has just tried. Bill Wallis reads this special seasonal story starring Horace Rumpole, scourge of all QCs and friend of the criminal classes.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! And D.P. Conway has written four enthralling stories to warm your hearts and homes. In the spirit of Dickens, Conway brings notably his two best works, Twelve Days and The Ghost of Christmas to Come. Following with equal luster, and rounding out the Christmas Collection, are Starry Night and Nava. Start with any of the four, and you will find yourself quickly wanting to listen to them all.

A brand-new audiobook by the number one best-selling author Katie Fforde containing never before published Christmas short stories. Perfect for anyone who loves romance, humour and happy-ever-after endings.

Attorney Desiree Contando can think of only one word to describe her very first home: disaster. The vintage Queen Anne is beautiful - or will be, in about 1,000 years. Certainly not in time to host the family Christmas gathering. “Disaster” also describes the bad breakup that left her picket-fence vision in tatters. Even the carpenter she’s hired is a reminder of lost dreams - the high school crush who never spared her a passing glance. But she’s a grown-up now, perfectly capable of keeping things professional.

Christmas is coming – and so is love. Love is in the air this Christmas, and three couples are finding that working at the holidays comes with an unexpected benefit – a soul mate. This holiday anthology includes three previously published novellas, together for the first time in one collection. Each steamy story features a midlife couple, an alpha male, an independent woman, meddling friends, and a guaranteed happily ever after. Dating Santa: A Hot Workplace Seasoned Romance Forty-year-old Samantha has never had much interest in falling in love. Her troubled childhood taught her that ...

The holidays have arrived in Avalon, Illinois and everyone is filled with festive cheer. Well, maybe not everyone. The husbands of Avalon have started a Bah Humbug Club. A neighborhood cookie exchange wreaks havoc on Erin Meeks' carefully planned life. Melvin O'Malley's daughter has abandoned him for the holidays in a senior facility, and shop owner Margot West is intent on creating the best holiday shopping experience for her customers when a stranger threatens to ruin it. But a few surprises await them as well.

Cami McClure is spending the holidays with her best friend, Genie Wainwright Taylor, in Hawaii. Will Cami find love in paradise, or will it slip through her fingers?

Lady Elizabeth craved excitement and adventure. Unwilling to endure further boring Seasons, she convinces her uncle, who has lived a more adventurous life than anyone else she knew, to let her work for him. A few years later, Elizabeth was established in Tuileries Castle, a servant in Napoleon's court known as Lisette Renard. John Phillip Trent has been working in the stables of Tuileries as Jean Pierre Bouvier for the past two years.

Christmas brings out the best and the worst in us, as can been 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, made mystical in stories and summed up in a line by the poet Elizabeth Jennings: "The hush, the star, the baby, people being kind again."

Not your Granny's Christmas stories … Step off the beaten path and enjoy six stories that look beyond the expected, the traditional, the tried-and-true.

Thomas Hardy wrote this engaging seasonal story for The Father Christmas Annual in 1877, which was very early in his career. One can just imagine the family sitting by the fireside after the big Christmas lunch, and listening as one member of the family read the story (set in the Wessex countryside he knew so well). By this time, he was already making his mark as a writer. One of his greatest achievements, Far From the Madding Crowd was published three years earlier.

A Chicago journalist finds himself in a small Texas town on Christmas Eve. Lonely and alone, he encounters old faces and new facts: a hand carved manger, a father's guilt, a young girl's faith. The trip into the past holds his key to the future, and a scarlet cross shows him the way home.

A Charles Dickens Christmas story about remembering the poor, forgotten, and overlooked once a year by the Christmas fire. This grand story sets up the bickering Big Wig family as a guide to the laboring Nobody family, led by a man named Legion, and nothing good comes of it. Legion's master discusses his losses in term of the poor and their habits and diseases. Legion points out it is one world: "What happens to us happens to you."

Four dark tales of the holiday spirit. In "Christmas Eve Gift", Old Bill sets out on her annual Christmas Eve journey to her niece's house and encounters an unexpected darkness along the way. In "A Dark Christmas", Alice, a dark daughter of the vampire, Elizabet, turns the table on a family of hunters. In "On the 7th Day of Christmas", Sunny finally gets to throw a party, only a monster shows up and twists a small kink into her New Year's Eve festivities. In "Twelfth Night", A 13-year-old encounters the Woman with No Face for the first time.