Cantankerous and vinegar-tongued Grandmama, from Anne Perry's Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series, is the leading character in this Christmas novel, which unfolds in the chilly, windswept Romney Marshes off the English Channel. Grandmama arrives on a holiday visit to the home of Charlotte's parents, where a...

Lily and Freddy have always had a have a wonderful relationship, but then Freddy becomes snappy and distracted. Is he having an affair? The truth turns out to be much worse... Freddy is addicted to gambling. He's been helping himself to money from his own company, and worst of all, his wife's money.

Giles, my ten-year-old son whom I really hardly knew, came down to the car with me, wandering, idling, as if there was no hidden urgency, no fear or anxiety... 1 opened the glove-pocket before me. Under some old maps and a packet of fruit-gums lay the key, the ancient key which had thumped on to the doormat...

First published in 1977, A Postillion Struck by Lightning is volume one of Dirk Bogarde's best-selling memoirs Following Bogarde from childhood through adolescence, to the beginnings of his budding career, A Postillion Struck by Lightning is a heartfelt memoir, offering insight into what created the drive and...

In A Presumption of Death, Jill Paton Walsh tells how World War II changed the lives of Peter, Harriet and their growing family. The story opens in 1940. Harriet Vane - now Lady Peter Wimsey - has taken her children to safety in the country.

When a freak accident kills a driver on the remote roads outside Duluth, Jonathan Stride is disturbed to discover that the victim appears to be a ''ghost,'' with a false identity and no evidence to suggest who he really was. What's worse, the man has a gun locked in the trunk -- and it has recently been fired.

Fred Trueman was a national treasure, a legend not only to cricket fans the world over but also to those who only ever took a passing interest in the game.

Volume 4 of Dirk Bogarde's autobiography.

Pulitzer Prize, Biography, 2016 A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker writer. Barbarian Days is William Finnegan's memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding...

Barchester Towers is Anthony Trollope's comic masterpiece. Ranged either side of the unfathomable Victorian divide between the High Anglican clergy and their modern, evangelical brethren we meet the saintly Septimus Harding and the furious Archdeacon Grantly and, opposing, the fearsome ...

In this luminous prequel to her beloved Cobbled Court Quilts series, New York Times bestselling author Marie Bostwick takes readers into the heart of a small Texas town and the soul of a woman who discovers her destiny there. . . .

A stranger enters the inner sanctum of the Ashby family posing as Patrick Ashby, the heir to the family's sizeable fortune. The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick's mannerisms, appearance and every significant detail of Patrick's early life, up to his 13th year when he disappeared and was...

This is a full-cast dramatisation of Evelyn Waugh's classic story of a lost golden age. In 1944 Captain Charles Ryder travels with a company of soldiers to Brideshead. He has been there before, and the great house serves as a potent reminder of the decadent, stylish lifestyle now destroyed by the austerity ...

Brilliance of the Moon is the third book in the Tales of the Otori series by Lian Hearn.A beautiful, haunting evocation of the medieval Japan of Lian Hearn's imagination, this thrilling follow-up to Grass for His Pillow and Across the Nightingale Floor delves deeper into the complex loyalties that bind its characters...

Albert Campion sets out to plumb the secrets of Saltey, an ancient hamlet on the Essex marshes. Once the haunt of smugglers, now it hides a secret rich and mysterious enough to trap all who enter - and someone in the village is willing to terrorise, murder and raise the very devil to keep that secret to themselves.

Churchill: A Life follows Winston Churchill from his earliest days to his moments of triumph. Here, the drama and excitement of his story are ever-present. Martin Gilbert gives us a vivid portrait, using Churchill's most personal letters and the recollections of his contemporaries, both friends and enemies, to go...

The story of one upper-class family in Sussex, gathered together for the death of their well-loved nanny. Instead of blessing them all from her death bed she curses them. As the family wait for the funeral, underlying stories reaching back into a World War II scandal begin to emerge.

Robert Amiss is persuaded by his friend Detective Sergeant Pooley of the CID to take a job as a waiter in ffeatherstonehaughs (pronounced Fanshaws), a gentlemens' club in St James. The club secretary has allegedly jumped to his death from the gallery of this imposing building. Against most of the evidence...

A couple of ice cubes, first, then the apple that really started it all. A loft apartment in London’s East End; cool but doomed, demolition and redevelopment slated for the following week. Ken Nott, devoutly contrarian leftish shock-jock attending a mid-week wedding lunch, starts dropping stuff off the roof ...

When police constable Hamish Macbeth receives the news that there has been a murder at Arrat House, home of the relentless practical joker Arthur Trent, he doesn’t race to the scene of the crime. After all, last time he was called to investigate a death at the isolated Scottish manor, the "victim" turned out to be...

A Bright New Dawn is just around the corner for thousands of tiny nomes when they begin to move into the ruined buildings of an abandoned quarry. Or is it? Soon strange things start to happen. Like the tops of puddles growing hard and cold, and the water coming down from the sky in frozen bits. Then ...

Julia Fox Garrison refused to listen to the professionals she called Dr. Jerk and Dr. Panic, who - after she suffered a massive, debilitating stroke at age thirty-seven - told her she’d probably die, or to Nurse Doom, who ignored her emergency call button. Instead she heeded the advice of kind, gifted Dr. Neuro, who...

Imagine a CD set that could change your life for the better, just by listening to it. Effortless success is it!For the past fifteen years, Michael Neill has been a coach, friend, mentor and creative sparkplug to celebrities, CEO's, royalty and people who want more out of their lives. In this friendly and practical CD set...

A country house murder, artistic insight and the post-war reunion of Alleyn and Troy combine in Ngaio Marsh’s wittiest and most readable novel. Agatha Troy, world famous portrait painter, is inveigled into accepting a commission to paint the 70-year-old Sir Henry Ancred, Bart.,

The hero of Genevieve Incident is assigned to the Monitor Insolent as she escorts a freighter into the northern reaches of league space. Their destination, the distant world of Cimmeria.While the Cimmerians are striving to find their own identity under the yoke of a corrupt regime, far from their world the Pruessen...

The secrets of the respected publishing house of Barnabus Ltd. stretch back many years, but when one of the directors is found dead, locked in the company's strongroom, it's time for Albert Campion to set to work puzzling out the mysteries.

A game of canasta turns out crooked and a golden girl ends up dead. It seems that Auric Goldfinger is a bad loser when it comes to cards. He's also the world's most ruthless and successful gold smuggler. As James Bond follows his trail, he discovers that Goldfinger's real game is the heist...

The world will end on Saturday. Next Saturday. Just before dinner, according to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655. The armies of Good and Evil are amassing, and everything appears to be going according to Divine...

Part 5 of Bogard's Memoir. From 1927 to 1934 the young Dirk Bogarde lived in a remote cottage in the Sussex Downs with his sister Elizabeth and their strict nanny, Lally. This lost world, visited fleetingly in A Postillion Struck by Lightning, the first volume of Dirk Bogarde's autobiography, is seen here through...

A Genius Performance by Paul Scofield!

Hamlet is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601.

When the bullet-ridden body of a Silicon Valley billionaire washes up on shore, assistant D.A. Dismas Hardy finds himself the prosecutor in San Francisco’s murder trial of the century. The suspect: a Japanese call girl with a long list of prominent clients. But when a bizarre series of events blows the case wide...

A Genius Performance by Philip Franks!

In Hide My Eyes, Campion finds himself hunting down a serial killer. A spate of murders leaves him with only the baffling clues of a left-hand glove and a lizard-skin lettercase.

**** In order to preserve this brilliant recording the price of this item includes the Audio Transfer onto CD ****. C.S. Forester's famous War story about the hunt for the deadly German battleship Bismark, which threatened vital supply convoys in the North Atlantic.

This definitive retrospective of Friends incorporates interviews, history and behind-the-scenes anecdotes to offer a critical analysis of how a sitcom about six twentysomethings changed television forever When Friends debuted in 1994, no one expected it to become a mainstay of NBC's "Must See TV" lineup, let...

After the untimely death of her mother, Mary Yellan travels across the untamed and desolate Cornish moors in search of her only living relative. A resolute and inspirational heroine, 23-year-old Mary finds her aunt, Patience Merlyn, in a desolate and irksome Inn on Bodmin Moor. Realising that the stark and...

A sadistic killer. An infamous victim. A crime that gets darker and darker… The body of a young woman is found in a London hotel room, the victim of a suspected poisoning. Called in to investigate, DI Simon Fenchurch soon discovers the case is far more sinister than he could have imagined. He should have...

Roberta Stanton had grown up a thief on the streets of Portland. Breaking into the old building had been easy, and she'd gotten away with it. Or so she thought. It had only cost her the lives of seven close friends. Years later, now Rob found herself on the other side of the law. Tracking down a thief of millions..

The Admiral's face was grim as he gave Commodore Hornblower his orders. The situation was critical: mutiny was an infection that could spread through the fleet like the plague and, furthermore, the crew were threatening to go over to the French.

Detective Chief Inspector Sloan and his assistant, Detective Constable Crosby, are called in to investigate the theft of a valuable painting from the old manor house of Tolmie Park just before the estate goes up in flames, but their search for a thief is complicated by the discovery of a grisly pile of bones in the...

The show must go on, as murder, music and mayhem run riot in the night. The Opera House, Ankh-Morpork, is a huge, rambling building, where innocent young sopranos are lured to their destiny by a strangely familiar evil mastermind in a hideously deformed evening dress. At least, he hopes so. But Granny...

George Sherston - the 'I' of the book - is a shy, sensitive, and rather lonely boy living on the Kent/Sussex border in the early years of the 20th century. His great loves are sports, horses and hunting, and the story is told through his gentle and comic adventures at point-to-point races or village cricket matches in...

The first episode, initially created as a prequel, of C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series, sees 17-year-old Horatio as he embarks upon a navy career aboard HMS Justinian. Older than most other seamen training to become naval officers, Hornblower is initially ridiculed for his dull...

Written with great energy and authority and using the newly available personal archives of Napoleon himself-the first volume of a majestic two-part biography of the great French emperor and conqueror All previous lives of Napoleon have relied more on the memoirs of others than on his own ...

Finding himself alone on a desert island when everything and everyone he knows and loved has been washed away in a huge storm, Mau is the last surviving member of his nation. He's also completely alone - or so he thinks until he finds the ghost girl. She has no toes, wears strange lacy trousers like the...

A workhouse orphan, Oliver experiences the terror and brutality of the criminal underworld. His companions, a thief, a whore, a pickpocket, and a fence, are destined for gruesome ends, but Oliver emerges unscathed from the darkness of the underworld.

In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.

A Genius Performance by Philip Franks! Amateur detective Albert Campion is summoned to Cambridge to assist the Faraday family with a mystery. He must untangle a web of family resentments and discover the truth behind the disappearance of one of the Faraday cousins, vanished without a trace one Sunday...

Three classic BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisations.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Murder at the Vicarage and The Sittaford Mystery

From Queen of Tarts to the nation's heart, Mary Berry shares her Recipe for Life. Read by the actress Patricia Hodge. In the words of my father, my birth caused no end of trouble...' From the moment she came into the world - two weeks early, throwing her parents' lives into disarray - Mary has gracefully but...

Marcia Willett's uplifting novel Second Time Around tells the tale of three cousins who are brought together, each in desperate need of a sense of belonging. The perfect read for fans of Liz Fenwick and Harriet Evans. When Mathilda Rainbird bequeaths her beautiful house in a Devonshire cove to three unknown...

Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science - as well as religious and cultural institutions - has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity.

What was life like for Shakespeare's first audiences? In a time of political and religious unrest and economic expansion, how did Elizabethan play-goers make sense of their changing world? What did the plays mean to the public when they were first performed? In this fascinating series, Neil MacGregor attempts to...

Ever since he made his first appearance in A Study In Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes has enthralled and delighted millions of fans throughout the world. Now Stephen Fry, a lifelong fan of Doyle's detective fiction, has brought to life Arthur Conan Doyle's complete works – four novels and five collections....

Stepsisters Olivia and Emily are at daggers drawn until the arrival of their half-sister, Rosie, when they unite in their hatred of the newcomer. Rosie can look after herself, though, and cunningly throws secret spanners in the works for her sisters.

A Genius Performance by Andrew Sachs!

Part 2 of Dirk Bogarde's autobiography, begun in "A Postillion Struck by Lightning". The book begins with the trials of an army training camp at Catterick and covers his career to the point where he starred in the film "Death in Venice".

In the beginning, there was nothing but endless flatness. Then came the Carpet.... That's the old story everyone knows and loves (even if they don't really believe it). But now the Carpet is home to many different tribes and peoples, and there's a new story in the making: the story of Fray, sweeping a trail of...

Albert Campion is summoned to the village of Kepesake to investigate a particularly distasteful death. The body turns out to be that of Pig Peters, freshly killed five months after his own funeral. Soon other corpses start to turn up, just as Peters's body goes missing. It takes all Campion's coolly incisive powers...

There are tales of Middle-earth from times long before The Lord of the Rings. The story told in this book is set in the great country that lay beyond the Grey Havens in the West: lands where Treebeard once walked, but which were drowned in the great cataclysm that ended the First Age of the World.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this novel about a resilient and courageous woman has become a Broadway show and a cultural phenomenon. A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick Celie has grown up poor in rural Georgia, despised by the society around her and abused by her ...

When the most eligible Earl of Rule offers for the hand of the beauty of the Winwood family, he has no notion of the distress he causes his intended. For Miss Lizzie Winwood is promised to the excellent, but impoverished, Mr Edward Heron. Disaster can only be averted by the delightful impetuosity of her ...

A Genius Performance by Philip Franks!

When George Abbershaw is invited to Black Dudley Manor for the weekend, he has only one thing on his mind - proposing to Meggie Oliphant. Unfortunately for George, things don't quite go according to plan.

In The Cruise of the Arctic Star, Scott O'Dell takes a voyage up the length of the California coast in his cedar-hulled offshore cruiser named Arctic Star. With his wife Elizabeth along as skilled navigator and cook, a friend Del as cohort and deckhand, and an unpredictable hired hand named Rodney Lambert, the crew...

A nineteenth century French priest discovers something in his mountain village at the foot of the Pyrenees which enable him to amass and spend a fortune of millions of pounds. The tale seems to begin with buried treasure and then turns into an unprecedented historical detective story, a modern Grail quest...

An exciting collection of the first four Isadora Moon adventures...the ideal choice for listeners who want their magic and sparkle with a bit of bite! Half vampire, half fairy, totally unique! Isadora Moon is special because she is different. Her mum is a fairy and her dad is a vampire and Isadora is a bit of both.

The Journey of Not Knowing is a fast-paced, entertaining book that gets to the heart of a critical state in today's business climate and society overall: the constantly changing, ambiguous 21st century and the uncharted waters ahead. This book will inspire leaders of any size organization to come to grips with...

The third of Lauren St John's heartwarming White Giraffe series, in which Martine and Ben must save the world's rarest leopard. Martine is looking forward to the holidays and riding Jemmy, her white giraffe, until an accident sends her and Ben on a journey to the Matobo Hills wilderness in Zimbabwe. It is a lawless..

Award-winning writer Paul Theroux draws upon personal experience of living in Malawi in his eye-opening novel, about one man's return to an Africa he no longer recognises, The Lower River. Decades ago Massachusetts salesman Ellis Hock spent four years in Africa - and the continent has never left him.

Maggie Tulliver has two lovers: Philip Wakem, son of her fathers enemy, and Stephen Guest, already promised to her cousin. But the love she wants most in the world is that of her brother Tom. Maggies struggle against her passionate and sensual nature leads her to a deeper understanding and to tragedy.

Mary Wimbush stars as unconventional psychoanalyst sleuth Mrs Bradley in these two full-cast dramatisations of stories by Gladys Mitchell. Colourful, cynical, intimidating and extremely intelligent, Mrs Bradley is one of the most unorthodox detectives in the history of Golden Age crime fiction. The heroine ...

The love story to end all love stories from the internationally best-selling author Nicholas Sparks. Now a major motion picture starring Ryan Gosling (Golden Globe-winning and Oscar-nominated star of La La Land) and Rachel McAdams. How far can love endure? Noah Calhoun has just returned from World War...

Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America....' So speaks the mysterious stranger at a Lahore cafe as dusk settles. Invited to join him for tea, you learn his name and what led this speaker of immaculate English to seek...

The 13 stories in this entertaining set chart the activities of the world's greatest private detective from his sudden re-appearance after his supposed death at the Reichenberg Falls. Faithful Dr Watson recounts the "Adventure of The Empty House", the "Adventure of the Dancing Men" and others...

Churchill: A Life follows Winston Churchill from his earliest days to his moments of triumph. Here, the drama and excitement of his story are ever-present. Martin Gilbert gives us a vivid portrait, using Churchill's most personal letters and the recollections of his contemporaries, both friends and enemies, to go...

Life in a dismal bureaucratic cul - de - sac is not what Robert Amiss expects when the British civil service lends him for a year to the British Conservation Corporation. In fact, he finds himself condemned to a non - job in a backwater, managing disgruntled and demoralized time - servers who deeply resent him.

Dubbed ' the founder of modern geology' by Stephen Jay Gould, the 17th century Danish scientist Nicolaus Steno was the first man to to suggest that the existence of fossils demanded a much longer history for the earth than the roughly six thousand years suggested by the Bible.

The wonderful adventures of a family theatre-troupe, touring Victorian England by train – a high-octane, high-drama romp, with a colourful company of characters. Dark and deadly deeds, piratical plots, lost heiresses and poor little orphans – Vivian French conjures up the very spirit of Victorian theatre in a...

A literary crime thriller with “a clever plot that always surprises, told with dark humor and dry wit” (The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice), this brilliant debut follows a famous author whose wife—the brains behind his success—meets an untimely death, leaving him to deal with the consequences.

That night he dreamed in Technicolor. He saw the ochre-skinned, scantily clad siren in her black, arrowed stockings. And in Morse's muddled computer of a mind, that siren took the name of one Joanna Franks.... The body of Joanna Franks was found at Duke's Cut on the Oxford Canal at about 5:30 a.m.

Delderfield offers us one of the best stories about life between the wars. David Powlett Jones, miners son and scholarship boy, is invalided out of the trenches and sent to convalesce as a teacher at a minor public school. From this fairly mundane start we are then catapulted into a journey of discovery. The many ...

Volume 1 of To Serve Them All My Days has been another popular success from the writer R.F. Delderfield, whose novels also include the trilogies A Horseman Riding By and the Swann Saga (God is an Englishman, Theirs Was the Day and Give Us This Day), Diana and Come Home.

When his brother catches measles, Tom is sent away for the summer to stay with his uncle and aunt and is thoroughly fed up about it. What a boring summer it's going to be. But then, lying in bed one night, he hears the old grandfather clock in the hall strike the very strange hour of 13 o'clock. What can it mean?

Recounts the author's efforts to rebuild in the face of a failing literary career and his wife's abandonment for another man, describing how his love for his young son inspired the confrontation of his own painful childhood memories.

"Outside! What's it like?" Masklin looked blank. "Well," he said. "It's sort of big." To the thousands of tiny nomes who live under the floorboards of a large department store, there is no outside. Things like day and night, sun and rain are just daft old legends. Then a devastating piece of news shatters their...

As the holidays settle in around Houston, Texas, young Austin has but one wish - for a Christmas Daddy. When his mother, Felicia Madaris, learns of his wish, she turns to childhood-rival-turned-family-friend, Trask Maxwell, to help fulfill her young son’s wish. But soon, Felicia realizes that it's not just Austin’s...

When the one you've always wanted... At 16, Annabelle Morgan hoped her crush on Jake Wilder was just a passing phase. Now she's 29 and nothing has changed - except Jake. The once-carefree Marine has come home with a giant chip on his shoulder. He insists a single mom like Annie deserves more than...

First published 1981, this is Dirk Bogarde's second novel. The fabulous but wavering old Lady “Cuckoo” Peverill, lives with her husband, Napoleon-mad military historian, Archie. Dissatisfied and overcome by sheer boredom, she ventures down to the lake at the edge of their estate, pockets filled with stones...

In this darkly imaginative debut novel full of myth, magic, romance, and mystery, a Princeton freshman is drawn into a love triangle with two enigmatic brothers and discovers terrifying secrets about her family and herself - a bewitching blend of Twilight, The Secret History, Jane Eyre, and A Discovery of...

It wasn't a thing, it was a bit of shaped sky. Somewhere in a place so far up that there is no down, a ship is waiting to take the nomes home, back to wherever they came from. And one nome, Masklin, knows that they've got to try and contact the ship. It means going to Florida (wherever that is), then getting to the...