First published in 1988 and described by Ali Smith as ‘one of Muriel Spark’s most liberating, and meditative novels’ – A Far Cry from Kensington shows Muriel Spark at the mature height of her powers. The narrator is one Mrs. Hawkins. She writes from Italy, a far cry from Kensington indeed, taking us back to her...

There is no one quite like Brian Blessed. He's an actor, film star, trained undertaker, unlikely diplomat, secret romantic, martial artist and mountaineer. He's also a brilliant storyteller who will - and you must brace yourself - simply leap out of the pages at you. Ready? Then open Absolute Pandemonium and you'll...

Among the towering red cliffs of Petra, like some monstrous swollen Buddha, sat the corpse of Mrs Boynton. A tiny puncture mark on her wrist was the only sign of the fatal injection that had killed her.

In Billy Bunter's Postal Order, everyone's favourite rolly-polly hero, 'The Fat Owl of the Remove', is awaiting a postal order from his uncle. So naturally when Bunter receives a letter from his uncle he assumes it contains the long-awaited postal order. Only the letter goes astray and Mr Quelch gets involved...

Jane Bunker returns in Bimini Twist, another thrilling, small-town mystery by Linda Greenlaw set in Down East Maine. It seems like everyone in Green Haven knows that Jane Bunker has scored an invite to the ultra-exclusive Summer Solstice Soiree--and they all assume she'll be in attendance, as one of the few...

A retrospective of the genteel wit of the broadcaster, comedienne, pianist and poet, Joyce Grenfell. Monologues, sketches, songs and letters from the Grenfell archive are performed and read by Maureen Lipman, who portrayed her in the stage show, "Re:Joyce!".

From seat No.9, Hercule Poirot was ideally placed to observe his fellow air passengers. Over to his right sat a pretty young woman, ahead, across the gangway in seat No.8, a detective writer was being troubled by an aggressive wasp. What Poirot did not yet realize was that behind him, in seat No.2, sat the ...

Not bored to death but murder most foul ... Celebrated author John Heppel is known in Lochdubh as a self-important bore, prone to belittling the scribblings of the locals in his creative writing class. So when he's found dead, his mouth oozing ink, it seems a fitting fate. But for PC Hamish Macbeth, the murder is...

Amazing news is spreading like wildfire across the Scottish countryside: the most famous of all Lochdubh, remotely nestling in the Highlands, is perfectly anonymous... until well-known TV reporter Crystal French races into town in her bright new BMW. And PC Hamish Macbeth, dourly wed to duty rather than...

Most newcomers don't stay long in remote Lochdubh – usually boredom, dampness and nosy locals drive them out. But it looks as if artist Effie Garrand has come to stay. When Hamish Macbeth calls on her he's amazed to find the woman in residence after a particularly harsh winter. Unfortunately, Effie is also...

Things turn deadly when the local postmistress is found hanged in her room ... with a vicious note beneath her dangling feet. Though his superiors call it suicide, PC Hamish Macbeth pronounces it murder. But Hamish is soon distracted by Jenny Ogilvie, a friend of his ex-fiancee, who arrives in Lochdubh...

Returning from holiday Hamish becomes unaccountably worried – it's as if he senses a dark cloud of evil hanging over Lochdubh. He soon learns that there is a newcomer to the village, a woman called Catriona Beldame, and that the villagers have decided she is a witch. At first Hamish is charmed by her, but is...

A Genius Performance by Michael Jayston!

When a young girl is found strangled in a field in the Fens, it looks like a routine job for the staff of the East Anglian Forensic Laboratory. 

The tranquillity of a cruise along the Nile was shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway had been shot through the head. She was young, stylish, and beautiful. A girl who had everything...until she lost her life. Hercule Poirot recalled an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: "I'd like to put my dear little ...

1325: England is a hotbed of paranoia under the reign of the increasingly unpredictable Edward II and his lover, Sir Hugh le Despenser. When the queen’s lady-in-waiting is slaughtered and a man’s body, hideously mutilated, is discovered behind the throne, the king demands to be avenged. Sir Baldwin de...

Steve Coogan was born and raised in Manchester in the 1960s, the fourth of six children. From an early age he entertained his family with impressions and was often told he should 'be on the telly'. Failing to get into any of the London-based drama schools, he accepted a place at Manchester Polytechnic School ...

It was not unusual to find the beautiful bronzed body of the sun-loving Arlena Stuart stretched out on a beach, face down. Only, on this occasion, there was no sun...she had been strangled. Ever since Arlena's arrival at the resort, Hercule Poirot had detected sexual tension in the seaside air. But could ...

Have you ever wondered why everybody these days seems so busy? In FINDING SANCTUARY, Father Christopher Jamison, the Abbot from BBC TV's THE MONASTERY and THE SILENCE, offers practical wisdom from the monastic tradition on how to build sanctuary into your life.

Goodbye to All That is Robert Graves' searing autobiography and an emotional first-hand account of life in the Great War trenches. A graphic storyteller, Graves begins with the petty cruelties of his public school upbringing. Then, almost in 'fly-on-the-wall' documentary style, he paints devastating portraits of...

From ancient times to the present day, the story of England has been laced with drama - a rich and vibrant narrative of heroes and villains, kings and rebels, artists and scientists.

When retired actor Buffy decides to up sticks from London and move to rural Wales, he has no idea what he is letting himself in for. In possession of a run-down B&B that leans more towards the shabby than the chic and is miles from nowhere, he realises he needs to fill the beds – and fast.

The breathtaking conclusion of the Smoke & Mirrors Duology. A beautiful, defiant princess. A renowned, sinfully gorgeous Hollywood actor. A love affair that is sure to rock the British Monarchy ... and the world. Their love affair began intensely and passionately. Princess Adeline and Josh Jameson knew any future...

Actress, comedienne and raconteur Joyce Grenfell tells the fascinating story of her life working in radio, film, the stage and war-time entertainment tours with her usual charm and much humour. Her glamorous and madcap American mother, her aunt Nancy Astor and her husband Reggie...

Caroline Lomax is on jury duty and, by sheer coincidence, so is Ted Thomasson. She'd known him when she was twelve and he was fifteen. Back then, she thought he was obnoxious and she hasn't changed her mind. But other things have changed. Ted's become very attractive, for one. And he certainly knows...

Like Fire & Fury, the gossipy real-life soap opera behind a serious show. When Barbara Walters launched The View, network executives told her that hosting it would tarnish her reputation. Instead, within 10 years, she’d revolutionized morning TV and made household names of her cohosts: Joy Behar, Star Jones..

When spirited, independent Miss Annis Wynchwood embroils herself in the affairs of a runaway heiress, she is destined to see a good deal of Mr Carleton, Lucilla's uncivil and high-handed guardian. And, chafing at the restrictions of Bath society, Annis has to admit that at least Mr Oliver Carleton is never boring.

"Forty-four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years," writes Sam Harris. "Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its...

In consequence of a number of stunning catastrophes Arthur Dent is surprised to find himself living in a hideously miserable cave on prehistoric earth. However, just as he thinks that things cannot possibly get any worse, they suddenly do. He discovers that the Galaxy is not only mind-bogglingly big...

A delectable collection of 22 short stories centred around people travelling on the London Underground. We meet a young couple travelling nervously to Seven Sisters for their first wife-swapping party; there's Annie's Pimlico Hotel, which is only open for specially-chosen guests; Rita, the mysterious temp...

Poirot had been present when Jane bragged of her plan to "get rid of" her estranged husband. Now the monstrous man was dead. And yet the great Belgian detective couldn't help feeling he was being taken for a ride. After all, how could Jane have stabbed Lord Edgware to death in his library at exactly the same...

William Golding's classic novel of primitive savagery and survival is one of the most vividly realized and riveting works in modern fiction. The tale begins after a plane wreck deposits a group of English school boys, aged six to twelve on an isolated tropical island. Their struggle to survive and impose order quickly...

Dame Lettie, a blue-blooded reformer, Godfrey - her rather irritating brother, and his once fabulous novelist wife Charmian. But who is the caller? And why are they reminding them of this final truth? It's unsettling and mysterious. The activity increases and soon a witch-hunt is in full force, with nobody beyond...

An archaeologist’s wife is murdered on the shores of the River Tigris in Iraq. It was clear to Amy Leatheran that something sinister was going on at the Hassanieh dig in Iraq; something associated with the presence of ‘Lovely Louise’, wife of celebrated archaeologist Dr Leidner. In a few days’ time Hercule...

Just after midnight, a snowdrift stopped the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train was surprisingly full for the time of the year. But by the morning there was one passenger fewer. An American lay dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside.

All you’ve heard about the crazy world of advertising doesn’t even come close.... From the top ad people all over the world - the ones who create the best television commercials and ads: the ones you love, the ones you remember, the ones you wish you had thought of yourself - come their own stories, in their...

Tommy & Tuppence are hired to track down wartime spies at a seaside resort…

All brought to you by the Genius Narrator - James Warwick!

A heart-stirring novel of family and forgiveness from bestselling author Ashley Farley. In her grand home in Charleston, Willa Bellemore raised two girls during the tumultuous 1970s. One was her daughter, Lady. The other was Lady’s best friend, Nell—adopted after the sudden, heartbreaking death of her mother...

"Paul Temple East of Algiers" is the last Paul Temple recording currently available to BBC Audiobooks to offer consumers. We've published all the dramas available in the archive.

Nick Buckley was an unusual name for a pretty young woman. But then she had led an unusual life. First, on a treacherous Cornish hillside, the brakes on her car failed. Then, on a coastal path, a falling boulder missed her by inches. Later, an oil painting fell and almost crushed her in bed.

In an 18th-Century England of wit, womanising and powdered wigs, provincial Philip Jettan runs the risk of irreproachability. Cleone Charteris stands in no such danger. The golden-haired, headstrong despair of men, she seeks a husband who can duel and dice with the best of them.

Produced by the Shakespeare Recording Society, these full-cast, unabridged performances of As You Like It (starring Vanessa Redgrave), Much Ado About Nothing(starring Rex Harrison), and The Winter's Tale (starring Sir John Gielgud and Dame Peggy Ashcroft) will move and delight Shakespeare aficionados...

A collection of Sherlock Holmes mystery adventures includes "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Red-Headed League," "The Speckled Band," and "The Beryl Coronet."

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....

A Genius Performance by Michael Jayston!

The young woman of Nightingale House are there to learn to nurse and comfort the suffering. But when one of the students plays patient in a demonstration of nursing skills, she is horribly, brutally killed.

“So you won't keep anything from me again?" He put his hand to his chest. "Cross my heart and hope to die." "Okay then. Though you don't actually have a heart," she said. "I know." "And technically, you've already died." "I know that too."

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, an old same, in an emotional match that will last a lifetime.

Just as Arthur Dent's sense of reality is in it's dickiest state he suddenly finds the girl of his dreams. He finds her in the last place in which he would expect to find anything at all, but which 3.976,000,000 people will find oddly familiar. They go in search of God's final message to His Creation...

Six people sit down to dinner at a table laid for seven. In front of the empty place is a sprig of rosemary - in solemn memory of Rosemary Barton who died at the same table exactly one year previously. No one present on that fateful night would ever forget the woman's face, contorted beyond recognition - or ....

Following the publication of his 1986 collection, Other Passports , Clive James has emerged as one of the most prominent poets of his generation, going on to publish new works in such mainstream outlets as the TLS, the London Review of Books, the Spectator, the New Yorker and the Australian Book Review, and...

For many people, Clive James will always be a TV presenter first and foremost, and a writer second -- this despite the fact that his adventures with the written word took place before, during and after his time on the small screen. Nevertheless, for those who remember clips of Japanese endurance gameshows and...

Exeter, 1323. A strange man is entering people’s houses at night, causing panic amongst householders. Although many had thought him harmless, now he seems to have committed murder. A man lies dead in his own home, slaughtered merely for trying to protect his children, and the folk of Exeter want this...

Spanning thirteen centuries from the age of Trajan to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, DECLINE & FALL is one of the greatest narratives in European Literature. David Womersley's masterly selection and bridging commentary enables the reader to acquire a general sense of the progress and argument of...

Lise is thin, neither good-looking nor bad-looking. One day she walks out of her office, acquires a gaudy new outfit, adopts a girlier tone of voice and heads to the airport to fly south. On the plane she takes a seat between two men. One is delighted with her company, the other is deeply perturbed. So begins an...

Clive Merrison and Andrew Sachs star in seven original BBC Radio 4 full-cast adventures for Holmes and Watson. How many times did Dr John Watson tantalise us with passing references to a mystery which his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, never wrote about in full? In these original adventures Bert...

Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions' It is 1945: a time of cultural and political change, and also one of slender means. Spark’s evocative and sharply drawn narrative focuses on a group of women living together in a hostel in Kensington who face new challenges in...

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Haunting, moving, evocative, The Go-Between is L. P. Hartley's heartbreaking novel about social constraints and childhood innocence. During the long, hot summer of 1900, young Leo Colston is invited to stay for a month at a lordly, aristocratic manor in Norfolk.

One Thursday lunchtime Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has just had his house demolished that morning, this is more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only just begun, and the Galaxy is a very large and startling place indeed.

A perfect item for Hitchhikers Collectors. This set includes a wonderful couple of hours where Douglas Adams relates a Guide to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. At present I have not found this in any other BBC issued set. The complete original full cast BBC Radio production. This CD box set contains both ...

“Cleverly crafted and enormously enjoyable.” -Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine When the security director of the posh Hotel California abruptly departs, assistant manager Am Caulfield steps into the role. The newbie hotel detective is quickly overwhelmed when a murder-mystery weekend descends on the...

Roger Mortimer was once the king’s most able commander, but now he is his most hated enemy. Escaping from the tower, Mortimer made his way to France and has hired an assassin to murder the king - but others have the same idea. As the body of a local craftsman and that of a king’s messenger who was...

A Genius Performance by Derek Jacobi The stories include; Silver Blaze; The Yellow Face; The Stock-Broker's Clerk; The "Gloria Scott"; The Musgrave Ritual; The Reigate Puzzle; The Crooked Man; The Resident Patient; The Greek Interpreter; The Naval Treaty; The Final Problem

Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected also that someone had been blackmailing her. Now, tragically, came the news that she had taken her own life with a drug overdose. But the evening post brought Roger one last fatal...

In her first published mystery, Agatha Christie introduces readers to the heroic detective, Hercule Poirot. This is a classic murder mystery set in the outskirts of Essex. The victim is the wealthy mistress of Styles Court. The list of suspects is long and includes her gold-digging new spouse and stepsons, her ....

"You girls are my vocation . . . I am dedicated to you in my prime" So says Miss Jean Brodie, a teacher unlike any other. She is proud and cultured. A romantic, with progressive, sometimes shocking ideas and aspirations for the girls in her charge. When she decides to transform a select group of pupils into the ...

A Genius Performance by Michael Jayston!

Rhoda Gradwyn booked into Mr Chandler-Powell's private clinic in Dorset for the removal of a disfiguring scar. She was never to leave Cheverell Manor alive. 

If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe? Which is exactly what the crew of the Heart of Gold plan to do. There's just the small matter of escaping the Vogons, avoiding being taken to the most totally evil world in the...

“History matters to McCain, and for him America is and was about its promise. The book is his farewell address, a mixture of the personal and the political. ‘I have loved my life,’ he writes. ‘All of it.’ The Restless Wave is a fitting valedictory for a man who seldom backed down.” —The Guardian (US) “A book-length...

When a practical joke played on Gerry Wade involving alarm clocks turns out to be murder the case is taken up by Lady 'Bundle' Brent and Jimmy Thesiger. Trying to work out the significance of the seven clocks found at the murder scene, they come across the Seven Dials Club.

One fine day in AD 70, scruffy, working-class informer Marcus Didius Falco literally runs into a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl on the steps of the Forum. Sosia Camillina is on the run from a couple of street toughs, and after rescuing her, Falco wants to find out why. It soon becomes clear that Sosia knows a...

“Mark Obmascik has deftly rescued an important story from the margins of our history—and from our country’s most forbidding frontier. Deeply researched and feelingly told, The Storm on Our Shores is a heartbreaking tale of tragedy and redemption.” —Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers, In ...

1325: in the gilded cage that is the Palace of Westminster, Isabella, Queen of England, is troubled by court intrigue. Her jealous husband, Edward II, has removed all her privileges, her regal status and even her children. When Isabella is dispatched to France to negotiate peace with the French King, Sir ...

More than forty years after their release from the notorious Hanoi Hilton, three American prisoners of war return to Vietnam to make peace with their most brutal former captor, a guard whom they ve dubbed Mr. Wonderful. The US State Department hopes reconciliation will help cement a major trade ...

A Genius Performance by Ian Carmichael!

It is 1936 and Lord Peter Wimsey has returned from his honeymoon to set up home with his cherished new wife, the novelist Harriet Vane.

Estranged from her family, best friends with her driverless car, partnered with a Frenchman who belives in post-sexual sex, international trend forecaster Sloane Jacobsen is the perfect candidate to lead tech giant Mammoth's conference for affluent consumers who prefer virtual relationships to the real things.