Good evening and welcome to the sleepy bookshop.

This season we'll be reading you, Cremford by Elizabeth Gaskin.

We know our listeners are as unique as our novels,

and lucky for you,

our bookshelf is varied with lots of different types of stories to lung you into a deep sleep.

The following is a preview to give you an idea of what to expect from this season.

Cranford is one of the earliest books by English writer and biographer Elizabeth Cleghorne Gascal.

It was first published episodically in the magazine

Household Words. in the magazine household words

After the first installment the magazine's editor

famed author Charles Dickens

encouraged Gascal to continue the series.

It was ultimately released as a full-length novel in 1853.

Gascal and 1853.

Gascal and Dickens would go on to have a long literary relationship full of ups and downs. They often disagreed about how to approach common themes in their work,

including class struggle and Victorian society, and yet both became acclaimed authors in their own right.

Like much of Gascals' work,

Cranford gives readers a detailed look at Victorian English society.

As an author, she often focused on relationships between different social strata from the richest to the poorest

and the inner workings of working-class families and communities.

Cranford is loosely based on the town in Cheshire,

where she grew up.

...