Venetia Aldridge QC is a distinguished barrister. When she agrees to defend Garry Ashe, accused of the brutal murder of his aunt, it is one more opportunity to triumph in her career as a criminal lawyer. 

A great collection of 44 sketches and other pieces from this extraordinary performer

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 Beginning with an unlikely stowaway's account of life on board Noah's Ark, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters presents a surprising and subversive fictional-history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. Noah disembarks from his ark but he...

Faith Watkins loves Christmas, which is why she’s thrilled that her new hotel in the Lake District will be open in time for the festive season. But what she didn’t bank on was her first paying customer being someone like Adam Hunter. Rugged, powerfully built and with a deep sadness in his eyes, Adam is a man that...

Stella Rode has twice disturbed the ancient cloisters of Carne School: firstly by being the wrong sort, with her doilies and china ducks, and secondly by being murdered. George Smiley, who has his own connection with the school, is asked by an old Service friend to investigate. Smiley knows that Stella feared her...

A Genius performance by Penelope Keith!

No happily ever after for her! Recently married to neighbour James Lacey, Agatha quickly finds that love is not all it's cracked up to be - soon the newly-weds are living in separate cottages and accusing each other of infidelity.

All the money in the world doesn't mean a thing if we can't get out of bed. And the healthiest body in the world won't stay that way if we're frazzled about five figures worth of debt. TODAY Show financial expert Jean Chatzky and the Cleveland Clinic's chief wellness officer Dr. Michael Roizen explain the vital...

Dufty Dufty Popple & Dunn is a traditional solicitors firm in the small Midlands town of Hockam (pronounced Hokum, as the local residents are at pains to point out). This heart-warming collection of stories revolves around the lives, relationships, triumphs and failures of the good people of Hockam...

Billy Bunter is not numbered amongst the brightest pupils at his school - except for one rare talent - his remarkable gift of ventriloquism! And the sole talent lands him in the worst trouble of his fat life - expulsion from his alma mater.

Information is power, and whoever controls the feed rules the world in this all-too-plausible follow-up to the science fiction thriller Bandwidth. Exiled from Washington after a covert operation gone wrong, Diana is building a new life as a freelance spy, though her obsessive secrecy is driving away the few friends...

A hacker is drawn out of hiding and into an epic geopolitical showdown in the frighteningly plausible conclusion to Eliot Peper’s critically acclaimed Analog Series. When you’ve betrayed your revolutionary cadre, an off-grid fight club on a remote tropical island is a good place to hide - or die. For notorious...

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012 Winner of the 2012 Costa Book of the Year Shortlisted for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction ‘Simply exceptional…I envy anyone who hasn’t yet read it’Daily Mail ‘A gripping story of tumbling fury and terror’Independent on Sunday With this historic win for Bring Up the Bodies...

George Smiley had liked the man and now the man was dead. Suicide. But why? An anonymous letter had alleged that Foreign Office man Samuel Fennan had been a member of the Communist Party as a student before the war. Nothing very unusual for his generation. Smiley had made it clear that the...

Alexander McCall Smith talks about his life as an author. This performance was recorded live at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Arts in New York City.

The New York State Library looms as a silent sanctuary of knowledge: a hundred-year-old labyrinth of towering bookcases, narrow aisles, and spiral staircases. But for Dr Stephen Swain and his eight-year-old daughter Holly it is a place of nightmare. Because, for just one night, this historic building is to...

A Genius Performance by Michael Jayston! On the bleak coast of East Anglia, atop a sweep of low cliffs, stands the small theological college of St. Anselm's. 

Anthony Trollope once said, "A novel should give a picture of common life enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos." Trollope admirably fulfills his own criteria in this charming third novel in the Chronicles of Barsetshire.

One of the first words we learn. Perhaps the best friend we'll have. An animal so much part of our lives that we speak to it like a child and spend small fortunes on its well-being and wardrobe. Dogs and humans: in the last 200 years no inter-species relationship has developed so fast nor come so far.

Harry Flashman: the unrepentant bully of Tom Brown’s schooldays, now with a Victoria Cross, has three main talents – horsemanship, facility with foreign languages and fornication. A reluctant military hero, Flashman plays a key part in most of the defining military campaigns of the 19th century...

Harry Flashman: the unrepentant bully of Tom Brown’s schooldays, now with a Victoria Cross, has three main talents – horsemanship, facility with foreign languages and fornication. A reluctant military hero, Flashman plays a key part in most of the defining military campaigns of the 19th century....

In Framley Parsonage, the fourth novel of Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire, the author leaves the confines of Barchester and looks to the countryside, where he relates the moral difficulties of Mark Robarts, the young clergyman who has recently been appointed Vicar of Framley. Desperate to keep up...

The Reverend Mark Robarts makes a mistake. Drawn into a social set at odds with his clerical responsibilities, he guarantees the debts of an unscrupulous Member of Parliament. He stands to lose his reputation, and his family, future, and home are all in peril.

This story of mistaken love is a romantic fiction set in the English Regency period. It centers on Lord Sheringham who has been rejected by the woman he loves but the woman who has secretly loved him since childhood is waiting.

Full Bloom The temperature’s on “sizzle” again in Beaumont, South Carolina, where peach trees are in season and ripe for the picking. So is its newest entrepreneur, Annie Fortenberry, who has inherited her grandmother’s B&B (and its eccentric handyman Erdle Thorney). Full Scoop There’s a whole lot of...

One of the greatest writers of the 20th century, George Orwell left an enduring mark on our language and culture, with concepts such as "Big Brother", "Room 101", and "Newspeak". His reputation rests not only on his political shrewdness and his sharp satires, but also on his clear writing style and his essays.

Poisoned port . . . pet cats in peril . . . purloined pearls . . . Lord Peter Wimsey solves the mysteries of the man who was blown into the fourth dimension and the murder in fancy dress. He pursues miscreants across several countries and into unexpected hiding places.

NOW, what I want is, Facts. One of Dickenss most famous opening lines sets the scene for this powerful novel which questions the harsh, rational attitudes predominating in a world of fierce industrial growth. Naxos

A Genius Performance by Stephen Fry! When Harry and his best friends go back for their third year at Hogwarts, the atmosphere is tense. There's an escaped mass-murderer on the loose and the sinister prison guards of Azkaban have been called in to guard the school.

Fourteenth-century Italy: a country in upheaval as desperate cities struggle against both each other and venal Papal rule. Unable to rely on their own citizens to fight their battles, cities and Popes are forced to pay vast amounts of money to mercenary captains to fight on their behalf. Hawkwood, a valiant...

In this pulse-pounding debut novel, two women are pulled into the darkness of a terrifying plot that could threaten both their lives. No one has forgotten the unsolved kidnapping of four-year-old Nicolás Acosta. It galvanized Madrid, shaking it to its core. Two years later, another young child—similar in age and...

A Genius Performance by Michael Jayston!

The atomic submarine Dolphin has impossible orders: to sail beneath the ice-floes of the Arctic Ocean to locate and rescue the men of weather-station Zebra, gutted by fire and drifting with the ice-pack somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. But the orders do not say what the Dolphin will find if she succeeds – that the fire at Ice Station Zebra was sabotage, and that one of the survivors is a killer…

In pre-Homeric times, the Greek heroes united one last time to hunt down the Boar of Kalydon. Three and a half millennia later, the hunt for the Boar of Kalydon is re-enacted, and once again re-told. In the final months of WWII, Greek partisans pursue their quarry, an SS officer, in the same mountains the...

These wonderful tales were filmed back in the 1980s to considerable accaim. These wonderful books are beautifully brought to life by Tim Piggot-Smith in probably his best performance in audio format. These tales of the french countryside portray a family tragedy, betrayal and revenge.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Joyful, written and read by Ingrid Fetell Lee. Have you ever wondered why we stop to watch the orange glow of a sunset or flock to see cherry blossoms in the spring? We are often made to feel that the physical world has little or no impact on our inner joy.

Samuel West reads ten of Rudyard Kipling’s famous tales, as broadcast on BBC Radio 4. How the Whale Got His Throat, How the Leopard Got His Spots, The Beginning of the Armadillos, How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin, The Cat That Walked By Himself, How the Camel Got His Hump, The Crab That Played With...

Who is the attractive stranger who knocks on the Cornells' door one snowy Christmas eve? Lucy discovers the answers to a tragic family secret - and finds lifelong romance... Charlotte and Bill are happily married - until they have children, forcing Charlotte to choose between being a loving wife or a caring...

One of the great works of 19th-century England as well as one of the masterpieces of English fiction, this novel is set in the Midlands, 1830-32, in the fictitious town of Middlemarch. It is concerned with the blighted marriage of a young idealistic woman, but also presents a vivid portrait....

Viewed by many as the greatest science fiction writer on any planet, Philip K. Dick has written some of the most intriguing, original and thought-provoking fiction of our time. Now a major feature film, Minority Report tells the story of a less than reliable special unit which employs those with the power of...

Sherlock Holmes is dead. Days after Holmes and his arch-enemy Moriarty fall to their doom at the Reichenbach Falls, Pinkerton agent Frederick Chase arrives in Europe from New York. The death of Moriarty has created a poisonous vacuum which has been swiftly filled by a fiendish new criminal mastermind who...

Retired policeman Luke Fitzwilliam meets one of its residents on a train. She tells him that someone is killing off the residents one by one and she is on her way to tell Scotland Yard about it. However before she can do so she is killed by a hit and run driver.

Luke Fitzwilliam could not believe Miss Pinkerton's wild allegation that a multiple murderer was at work in the quiet English village of Wychwood, or her speculation that the local doctor was next in line. But, within hours, Miss Pinkerton had been killed in a hit-and-run car accident.

I can never understand how the scribbles of such an ordinary person ... can possibly have value.' So wrote Nella Last in her diary on 2 September 1949. Sixty years on, tens of thousands of people have read and enjoyed the first two volumes of her uniquely detailed and moving diaries, written during World War II...

Outwardly Nella's life was probably seen as ordinary; but behind this mask were a lively mind and a persistent pen - a pen that never gave up over almost three decades, reporting, describing, pondering, and disclosing. Nella, 55 when the war ends, writes of what ordinary people felt during those years of...

In September 1939, housewife and mother Nella Last began a diary whose entries, in their regularity, length and quality, have created a record of the Second World War which is powerful, fascinating and unique. When war broke out, Nella's younger son joined the army while the rest of the family tried to adapt to...

From the bestselling author of The Convenient Groom (now a beloved Hallmark Original movie) comes the final book in Hunter’s Blue Ridge Romance series. Pastor Jack McReady has secretly carried a torch for Daisy for two long years. She’s a member of his congregation, after all, and she’ll never see him as more...

Adam Dalgliesh takes on a baffling murder in the rarefied world of London book publishing in this masterful mystery. Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team are confronted with a puzzle of seemingly impenetrable complexity. A murder has taken place in the offices of the venerable Peverell Press.

As a young schoolboy, David Essex dreamed of becoming a professional footballer and was signed up by his beloved West Ham United. But as a teenager, he developed a passion for music, which set him on a very different path, and ultimately led to superstardom. It wasn't, however, an easy start. Scraping a...

Even for Private Investigations, the world’s top detective agency, it’s tough to find a man who doesn’t exist . . . Craig Gisto has promised Eliza Moss that his elite team at Private Sydney will investigate the disappearance of her father.

In the summer of 1941, at the height of the war in the Western Desert, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, came up with a plan that was imaginative, radical and entirely against the rules: a small undercover unit that would wreak havoc behind enemy lines. Despite intense opposition, Winston...

What is science fiction? Are science fiction writers under-appreciated compared to literary novelists? Is their prime mission to predict the future or to comment on the present? These and other questions are discussed by major writers including Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, Brian Aldiss, .....

A Genius Performance by Simon Callow, Edward Petherbridge and Prunella Scales! These wonderful BBC Radio 4 productions are of exceptional quality. Includes 2 plays - An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution. Brilliant work by all of the actors!

Penguin Audiobooks presents a brand new recording of Someone Like You, Roald Dahl's first collection of his world famous dark and sinister adult stories, brought to life by an all-star cast including Julian Rhind-Tutt, Stephen Mangan, Tamsin Greig, Derek Jacobi, Richard Griffiths, Will Self, Jessica Hynes ....

Karin Müller, sidelined from the murder squad in Berlin, jumps at the chance to be sent south to Halle-Neustadt, where a pair of infant twins have gone missing. But Müller soon finds her problems have followed her to Halle-Neustadt. She and her team are forbidden by the Stasi from publicising the...

One summer could expose years of family secrets...or leave them with a happily ever after they never saw coming. One of Southern Living’s 25 Beach Reads Perfect for Summer When her grandmother goes missing from the family beach house, Maddy and her estranged sisters converge in Sea Haven, North...

The Colour of Magic Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the Discworld. Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant idiot. Somewhere on the frontier between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a parallel time and place which might sound and smell very much like our own, but which looks ...

Charts the gradual collapse of Roman rule, from Augustus (23 BC to AD 14) to the first of the Barbarian kings, Odoacer (476-490 AD). It documents the corruption and depravity, and the great achievements of various emperors. The music includes overtures by Schumann and symphonies by Raff.

July, 1829. When a female corpse, dressed in male clothing, is discovered lying in a haystack in the Worcestershire countryside, rumour and superstition abound. For the sighting of a man in white robes fleeing from the scene leads to suspicion that the "Devil's Monk" is responsible for the crime. According to...

The Duke's Children is the sixth and final audiobook in the Palliser series. Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium and former Prime Minister of England, is widowed and wracked by grief. Struggling to adapt to life without his beloved Lady Glencora, he works hard to guide and support his three adult children.

1926. The Great War is over, and Amy Hall is struggling to make a success of the business her late husband has left her. But her strong will and stubborn nature won’t let her give up. With the handsome, ruthless Ralph Porter waiting for Amy to slip up so that he can absorb her ailing business into his empire...

The third novel in Trollope's Palliser series, The Eustace Diamonds is a wonderfully absorbing blend of dark cynicism and humor. Before Sir Florian Eustace dies, he gives his beloved wife Lizzie a beautiful and expensive diamond necklace valued over £10,000.

When this relentless rogue FBI agent comes knocking, her adversaries will have to answer—with their lives—in the latest thrilling Jane Hawk novel by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Corner. “We’re rewriting the play, and the play is this country, the world, the future. We break Jane’s heart...

By day she writes comic books. By night, she lives them. MG Martin lives and breathes geek culture. She even works as a writer for the comic book company she idolized as a kid. But despite her love of hooded vigilantes, MG prefers her comics stay on the page. But when someone in LA starts recreating crime...

When a country doctor comes to Sherlock Holmes with a far-fetched tale of a sudden death, a devil dog and an ancient curse, Holmes is sceptical. Could the demise of Sir Charles Baskerville really have been caused by the gigantic ghostly hound which is said to have haunted his family for generations?

With her darkest nightmare come true and an assassin following her every step, Anna Kronberg must hurry to find the true motivation behind Moriarty's plan to use disease as a weapon. Bit by bit, she and Sherlock Holmes unravel a spider web of crime, espionage, and bioterrorism that spreads across continents.

In the late seventies, an extraordinary document came to light which for fifty years had been held on deposit by the bankers of the deceased John Herbert Watson MD - better known to devotees of Conan Doyle as Dr Watson. A continuous narrative in the doctor's own hand, the story opens in the East End of...

The Two Towers is the second part of JRR Tolkien’s epic masterpiece The Lord of the Rings. Frodo and the Companions of the Ring have been beset by danger during their quest to prevent the Ruling Ring from falling into the hands of the Dark Lord by destroying it in the Cracks of Doom. They have lost the wizard...

The New York Times best-selling author of The Lost Fleet returns to the "strong saga" of a rebellion against a totalitarian regime and the determination of two people to create a better future in the farthest reaches of the colonized galaxy.... The Syndicate Worlds continue to splinter as more star systems pledge...

Acacia Santos excels at her job as concierge at the prestigious Hotel Victoire in Paris. When her superior, Marcel, is attacked in a supposed random mugging, she is tasked with serving one of the hotel's most mysterious and attractive guests.Nicholas Cassirer checks into the hotel under an assumed name every...

Thomas Hardy's novels about the cruel twists of fate that blight our lives have a timeless power to move us. In The Mayor Casterbridge, a young Michael Henchard makes a rash, alcohol-fuelled decision to sell his wife. Despite abstaining from alcohol from this point forward and living an upstanding life.... Naxos

A wonderfully atmospheric collection of stories from one of our most captivating writers, inspired by ghost stories, traditional folk tales and country legends from England and France. These tales are richly populated by spirits and ghosts seeking revenge; by grief-stricken women and haunted men coming to ...

Three years have passed since Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis Moriarty vanished into the abyss of the Reichenbach Falls. In that time, the criminals of London have been able to sleep safe in their beds. But the capital has never been in greater need of its protector. And so it is that Dr. Watson meets a...

Victor Gollancz personally commissioned Orwell to write about the distressed north of England in January 1936. After Orwell handed in his typescript a little before Christmas Day 1936, he immediately left to fight in Spain. Shortly afterwards the book was selected for publication by the Left Book Club.

Cows are as varied as people. They can be highly intelligent or slow to understand; vain, considerate, proud, shy or inventive. Although much of a cow's day is spent eating, they always find time for extracurricular activities such as babysitting, playing hide and seek, blackberry picking or fighting a tree.

The fifth novel in the Chronicles of Barsetshire , The Small House at Allington concerns the lives of the two Dale girls, Lily and Bell, who live at the Small House. While Bell is in love with the local doctor James Crofts, Lily is pursued by two men: the worldly, rich, and handsome Adolphus Crosbie and the poor...

When Brigade-Major Harry Smith met the beautiful Juana María, an instant spark formed between the two fiery, energetic souls. The two fell deeply in love with one another from the first moment and the Spanish bride accompanied him throughout all his campaigns, where she rode freely among the troops.

Stevie Corbett is in jeopardy of losing everything she’s sacrificed and worked so hard for – her career, her future. Her life. She has just two weeks to make a monumental decision, but her fate rides on keeping the truth a secret. It’s Judd Mackie’s job to uncover secrets. And he’s spent the last few years dogging...

Paleo-biologist Jonas Taylor once dared to enter the perilous Marianas Trench, where the Megalodon shark has spawned since the dawn of time, and now that the monster is terrorizing the California coast, he must return to fight his ultimate battle.

Even with the country at war, the show must go on... After the tragic death of her father, aspiring singer Jessie Delaney has been forced to live with her bullying aunt and dreams of getting the break of a lifetime to escape. When she's cast as one of the Variety Girls in a new show at the Empire Theatre, Jessie...

War has not been kind to Carol Porter. It took her husband and baby, and with them her heart. At last she's found some peace, working as a land girl at Coombe Farm. But Carol's sanctuary, the whole local area in fact, is about to be disrupted. When Pauline Reilly hears Carol's news she's worried for her little...

One of the best-known stories in American culture, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has stirred the imagination of young and old alike for over 100 years. Academy Award-winning actress Anne Hathaway (Les Misérables, Rachel Getting Married) lends her voice to this uniquely American fairy tale. Follow the...

Three 30 mins Agatha Christie short story full-cast dramatisations: The 199 pound Adventure , The Gypsy and The Last Seance.

Three of Agatha Christie's most enjoyable stories, revamped for radio. In 'Philomel Cottage', everything looks rosy when Alex and Terry set up their own e-commerce company in Philomel Cottage, until money goes missing from Alex's account. Soon she is questioning her partner - and, indeed, the cottage itself...

p>Three 30 min Agatha Christie short story full-cast dramatisations: In a Glass Darkly, The Dressmaker's Doll and The Case Of The Perfect Carer/Maid.

Three Agatha Christie short story full-cast dramatisations: The Hound of Death/Witness for the Prosecution/The Gate of Baghdad. Agatha Christie is the acknowledged 'Queen of Detective Fiction'.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld, leader of the terrorist organisation SPECTRE, has hijacked an American plane loaded with atomic weapons. Unless his demands are met he will destroy one of the world's major cities. With only one week to locate the missing bombs, Bond goes to the Bahamas where he encounters Blofeld's...

To the Lighthouse is one of Virginia Woolf's most autobiographical works, and since she was an active member of the Bloomsbury Set, it inevitably echoes the once revolutionary thoughts that were to shape our world. Set in the pivotal years spanning the First World War, it describes a gathering of artists...

Two hundred years ago, Napoleon Bonaparte dominated Europe and threatened Britain with invasion. Against him stood the Royal Navy and the already legendary Admiral Horatio Nelson. On 21 October 1805, a massive naval battle off the coast of Spain decided mastery of the seas. Then, over the following...

In this Amazon Charts bestselling novel of psychological suspense, a young mother follows a dangerous path to find her missing husband. Veronica Cavanaugh’s grasp on the world is slipping. Her latest round of fertility treatments not only failed but left her on edge and unbalanced. And her three-year...

A Genius Performance by Michael Jayston!

Maurice Seton was a famous mystery writer--but no murder he ever invented was more grisly than his own death. 

At Vittoria Cottage in the village of Ashbridge, since becoming widowed, Caroline Dering has been content to channel her life into raising her children - sanguine, humorous James; pretty, proper Leda; and energetic, impulsive Bobbie. Then the mysterious Robert Shepperton arrives in the village.

After joining the the Lovat Scouts at the outbreak of the Second World War Donald Angus Gillies is sent on a mission to the Alps, where he meets Francoise, a young French Canadian SOE agent. The pair immediately form a close bond, but when Francoise is injured and captured, DA realizes his feelings for her are...