A Genius Performance by Philip Franks! Campion returns from three years work for the War Office in Europe to find that Lugg, his manservant, has brought him an unusual gift: the black silk nightdress-clad body of a dead woman, an apparent suicide. Wanting only to get away to a well-deserved rest, Campion...
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...
A Genius Performance by Philip Franks! The slashing of a valuable painting at the renowned Ivory Gallery in London, followed by the murder of the proprietor's son-in-law, Robert, sets the stage for another finely tuned Allingham mystery. The proprietor's mother, 90-year-old Gabrielle Ivory, holds the...
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.
Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming.
Stephen King's epic fantasy series, The Dark Tower, is being made into a major movie starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. Due in cinemas February 17, 2017 USA. For listeners new to The Dark Tower, The Wind Through the Keyhole is a stand-alone novel, and a wonderful introduction to the series. It is a story within a story, which features...
The novel was first published in 1862 in serial form. This production marks the first audio release of one of Victorian England's most sensational reads. Dealing with bigamy, murder and madness it begs the question: can women and men ever really depend on one another, even within marriage...?
This brand-new unabridged audio book of J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved The Hobbit is read by the BAFTA award-winning actor, director and author, Andy Serkis Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely travelling further than the pantry of his hobbit-hole in Bag End. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard...
The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy features all five complete and unabridged audiobooks of this much-loved 'trilogy' in a CD pack. On 12 October 1979 the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor (and Earth) was made available to humanity. This was ...
Jealousies, distrust, and hidden rivalries uncover dark secrets, then a dozen vials of a deadly virus go missing. As a blizzard whips out of the north on Christmas Eve, several people converge on a remote family house. Stanley Oxenford, director of a pharmaceutical research company, has everything riding...
"Buy my stepfather's ghost, read the e-mail." So Jude did. He bought it, in the shape of the dead man's suit, delivered in a heart-shaped box, because he wanted it - because his fans ate up that kind of story. It was perfect for his collection: the genuine skulls and the bones, the real honest-to-God snuff movie...
Nobody likes The Complaints - they're the cops who investigate other cops. Complaints and Conduct Department, to give them their full title, but known colloquially as 'the Dark Side', or simply 'The Complaints'. Malcolm Fox works for The Complaints. He's just had a result, and should be feeling good about himself. But he's middle-aged, sour and...
Winner of the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction! This is Thomas King’s first literary novel in 15 years and follows on the success of the award-winning and bestselling The Inconvenient Indian and his beloved Green Gr, Running Water and Truth and Bright Water , both of which continue to be taught in Canadian schools and...
Quirky, comic, honest' MARIAN KEYES Funny and charming' JUDY BLUME Wise and wonderful' ALICE HOFFMAN Written with such humour and heart' STYLIST A must read' RED If you've ever wondered whether you love your dog more than your partner... Life hasn't gone according to Judy's plan. Her career as a children's book author has taken a...
Three generations of women - and the love, loss, sacrifice, and secrets that can bind them forever or tear them apart. Millicent Glenn is self-sufficient and contentedly alone in the Cincinnati suburbs. As she nears her ninety-first birthday, her daughter Jane, with whom she’s weathered a shaky relationship, suddenly moves back home. Then Millie’s...
How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzáles-Torres’s artworks - piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles - as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality. From the back porches of Buffalo, to the...
Over the course of ten previous novels, Daniel Silva has established himself as one of the world's finest writers of international intrigue and espionage a worthy successor to such legends as Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré (Chicago Sun-Times) and Gabriel Allon as one of the most intriguing heroes of any thriller series. (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
The “Queen of Suspense” Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke are here with their fifth enthralling mystery in the New York Times bestselling Under Suspicion series as television producer Laurie Moran must solve the murder of a celebrity doctor—before a mysterious stalker plots his next move. Television producer Laurie Moran recently...
Romulus Gaita fled Yugoslavia aged thirteen, and came to Australia with his wife and their son soon after World War II. Tragic events were to overtake the boy’s life, but Raimond Gaita has an extraordinary and moving tale to tell of growing up with his father in country Victoria. Romulus, My Father is the much-loved story of how...
Born to elegant but frivolous parents, Harriet grows up ignored and unguided, and retains a curious innocence that neither her marriage to Freddie Lytton, nor her friendship with the beautiful Tessa can dispel. Freddie is far older than she is - a companion rather than a lover - and slightly disapproving of Tessa and her irresponsible, attractive...
Fools of Fortune by William Trevor - a classic early novel from one of the world's greatest writers Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year Murder and revenge during the Irish Civil War The Quintons have lived in the old house in Cork for hundreds of years. Though Anglo-Irish Protestant, they sympathize with the cause of...
Death-row prisoners with nightmare pasts and no future.... Until they were selected for a secret experiment....to create something more than human. Now they are the future and humanity's worst nightmare has begun. The Twelve is the epic sequel to The Passage. Read by Scott Brick who has performed on...
Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, one hundred and eighteen cardinals from all over the globe will cast their votes in the world’s most secretive election. They are holy men. But they have ambition. And they have rivals. Over the next seventy-two hours one of them will become the most...
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a book with the invaluable words on the cover which inform the reader not to panic. It can also tell you everything you need to know about anything - which might be very useful for Arthur Dent who is in the unfortunate position of being one of the few humans still alive...
A Genius Performance by Philip Franks! Fact catches up with fiction when the secret of telepathic communication is discovered. But the device at the centre of the mystery is in the possession of two schoolboys and whether they stole it or invented it, there are powerful interests who will kill to get hold of it. Albert Campion faces as deadly a...
With World War II at an end, Charles Hayward is finally free to marry the woman he loves, Sophia Leonides. However, she refuses - the unexplained death of her grandfather, wealthy businessman Aristide Leonides, draws her back to the suffocating environment of her family home.
A classic Marple title now available in CD for the first time. First, the mystery man in the church with a bullet-wound… then, the riddle of a dead man’s buried treasure… the curious conduct of a caretaker after a fatal riding accident… the corpse and a tape-measure… the girl framed for theft… and the suspect accused of stabbing his wife with a dagger. Six gripping cases with one thing in common...
A Genius Performance by Philip Franks! Timothy Kinnit needs Albert Campion's help. He is rich, handsome and successful but his past is a mystery to him and he needs Campion to find out how it connects him to the notorious Turk Street Mile slum. In addition, his illustrious adoptive family has a sinister secret of...
A Genius Performance by Philip Franks! In a masterpiece of storytelling, Margery Allingham sends her elegant and engaging detective Albert Campion into the eccentric Palinode household, where there have been two suspicious deaths. And, if poisoning were not enough, there are also anonymous letters, sudden...
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...
Ian Hart stars in these BBC Radio 4 dramatisations of Patricia Highsmith's five "Ripley" novels. Tom Ripley detests murder unless it is absolutely necessary. He prefers someone else to do the dirty work. But if he's called on to act there is no one more cool, calculating and clever. In these dramatisations, BBC Radio 4...
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.
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 Genius Performance by Philip Franks! Way back during the crusades Richard I presented the Huntingforest family with the tiny Balkan state of Averna. Since that time the kingdom has been forgotten, until circumstances in Europe suddenly render it strategically important to the British Government.
Sir Peter Ustinov's beautifully crafted autobiography is told with exquisite wit and insight. From his birth in April 1921, it spans his extraordinary career as actor, playwright, film star and director, confirming his early belief that he is 'irrevocably betrothed to laughter'.
Drake: Shakespeare is ordered to protect him. With Drake on land fitting out his ships, he is frighteningly vulnerable. If he dies, England will be open to invasion. In a London rife with rumour, Shakespeare must decide which leads to follow, which to ignore. When a high-born young woman is found mutilated and murdered at an...
This fascinating collection of archive interviews with the celebrated footballer begins in the 1970s, when George Best is enjoying success at a young age. It continues into the 1980s, by which times he has become a husband and father and has also had to come to terms with alcoholism.
Widely considered one of the most-beloved children's authors of all time, Dick King-Smith's stories of animals and farm life, many inspired by his own farming experiences, have been cherished by children around the world for generations. This unmissable audio collection contains nine of King-Smith's beloved...
Dee loves her children very much, but now they are all grown up, shouldn't they leave home? Rosie moved out when she got married, but it didn't work out, so now she is back with her parents. Helen is a teacher, and doesn't earn enough for a place of her own.
Lucy Honeychurch, accompanied by her vigilant cousin Charlotte Bartlett, makes her first foray into the world, touring Italy. Thrown into new and exhilarating situations, Lucy experiences a very different life to her usual existence in the countryside of southern England. As her horizons widen and many of her...
A full-cast dramatisation specially recorded for BBC Audiobooks, starring Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey. When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the ‘Gaudy’, the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies and poison-pen letter...
A Genius Performance by Edward Petherbridge! Lord Peter has just shared the secrets of that mystery with his wife Harriet Vane. Then the new young Lord Attenbury - grandson of Lord Peter's first client - seeks his help again, this time to prove who owns the gigantic emerald that Wimsey last saw in 1921.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. Performed with exceptional color by Robert Sean Leonard!
Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so he may find new blood and spread undead curse, and the battle between Dracula and a...
Agatha Raisin's neighbouring village of Ancombe is usually the epitome of quiet rural charm, but the arrival of a new mineral-water company - which intends to tap into the village spring - sends tempers flaring and divides the parish council into two stubborn camps...
A Radio 4 dramatization of the first of Ursula Le Guin's four "Earthsea" fantasy novels. A brilliant piece by Bert Coules it is both wonderfully entertaining and deeply meaningful. It is a tale of high magic, courage, and the eternal struggle between good and evil. A young boy, Duny, nicknamed Sparrow, has magical...
The first title of the GORMENGHAST trilogy of fantasy novels. Titus groan is born the heir to Gormenghast castle, and finds himself in a world predetermined by complex rituals that have been made obscure by the passage of time. Along the corridors of the castle, the child encounters some of the dark characters who will shape his life.
At her dying mother's bedside, Rebecca Bayliss is shattered to learn of a family she never knew existed. Determined to find them, Rebecca journeys to Boscarva, a beautiful mansion in Cornwall, to meet a family torn by passion and greed.
Performed by the author and five of Britain's leading actresses, Alan Bennett's tales are full of quirky, insightful detail that bring the characters vividly to life. From Julie Walters' portrayal of an actress seeking fame to Anna Massey's alcoholic vicar's wife, these individuals are linked by their self-delusion desperation and vulnerability. In these compelling pieces, Bennett displays the wry observation, knowing irony and...
Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011 - Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly...
Internationally bestselling historian Antonia Fraser's new book brilliantly evokes one year of pre-Victorian political and social history - the passing of the Great Reform Bill of 1832.
Through thick mist and a cold east wind, Lavinia returns to Scotland. Up at the big house Mrs Farquhar is dying. Seeing Lachlan again,. Lavinia remembers her childhood holidays there: swimming in the loch, the picnics, bottle-feeding the lambs down at the farm and the evenings when they danced reels.
Inspired by the real-life memoirs of a Victorian Inspector in Scotland, James McLevy prowls the dark streets of 1860s Edinburgh bringing criminals to justice, with the assistance of Constable Mulholland.
Virginia Woolfs masterwork Mrs Dalloway was at the vanguard of experimental, modernist novel-writing, and remains one of the supreme examples today. As Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a party in the evening, seemingly trivial incidents prompt her to undertake a searching reconnaissance into her...
Thomas Hardy is one of the sacred figures in English writing, a great poet and a novelist with a world reputation. His life was also extraordinary: from the poverty of rural Dorset he went on to become the Grand Old Man of English life and letters, his last resting place in Westminster Abbey.
For Judith Dunbar, her first glimpse of Nancherrow, her friend Loveday's beautiful family estate on the Cornish coast, is love at first sight - after the rigours of boarding school it spells luxury. She falls in love, too, with all Loveday's family. They treat Judith as one of them.
You will love this best-selling novel by Sunday Times best-selling author Fern Britton. The perfect escape to Cornwall, for fans of Katie Fforde and Celia Imrie. READ BY FERN BRITTON Helen Merrifield decides to start afresh and put her old life behind her in the picture-postcard Cornish village of Pendruggan. Throwing herself into the local scene...
From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion, to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. The Pigeon Tunnel gives us a glimpse of...
No one is more surprised than Lem Altick when it turns out he's actually good at peddling encyclopedias door to door. He hates the predatory world of sales, but he needs the money to pay for college. Then things go horribly wrong. In a sweltering trailer in rural Florida, a couple Lem has spent hours pitching to is shot dead before his eyes, and the...
Women Food and God is Geneen Roth's masterwork, the final book she intends to write about the subject that has fascinated her since she wrote the bestselling When Food is Love two decades ago. From the very beginning, the listener is in the grip of an intelligent, humorous and thoughtful teacher who unravels the beginning of addiction until...
The Beecheys were a close-knit family, eight brothers and five sisters under the loving eye of their widowed mother, Amy. As the First World War raged across Europe and beyond, the brothers were one-by-one swept up into its devastating path. Some of them were keen to enlist from the start, others were conscripted, and some dead against.
When novelist Charles Condomine invites a medium into his house in order to learn about the occult for his new book, the last thing he or his second wife dream is that the seance will bring back his first wife, Elvira, who wants Charles all to herself! This is considered to be one of Coward's best and most unusual farces.
This release comprises four 45 minute BBC Radio 4 plays adapted by John Mortimer from four stories in his collection, "Rumpole and the Primrose Path". Rumpole is a wine-imbibing friend of the South London criminal classes, and the scourge of all QCs. Acting as narrator, he tells a series of stories...
The British Library and the Royal Shakespeare Company publish this remarkable treasury of live Shakespeare recordings. Selected from an extensive collection of recordings made by the British Library Sound Archive, this set offers scenes and speeches from some of the most celebrated productions in the history of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
From the Sunday Times bestselling author Gervase Phinn comes a fourth book of reminiscences about life as a Yorkshire Dales school inspector that will continue to delight and charm fans across the globe. Life for the Gervase Phinn is about to become not unlike the rambling hills of the Dales themselves -
This box set contains all four titles from the critically acclaimed and extremely popular historical crime fiction series by C. J. Sansom. Matthew Shardlake, lawyer and reformist in London during the reign of Henry VIII. His investigation skills are tested in four cases where both his life and the lives of others are threatened. In Dissolution he travels to...
A vivid love story and adventure tale, Oroonoko is a heroic slave narrative about a royal prince and his fight for freedom. The eponymous hero, Oroonoko, deemed royalty in one world and slave in another, is torn from his noble status and betrayed into slavery in Surinam, where he is reduced to chains, fetters and shackles. But his high spirit and...
Naples '44 is an unflinching autobiographical account of a year in Naples after the armistice and Allied landings in Sorrento in 1943. Working as a British counterintelligence officer under the Allied occupation, Lewis documents the rich pageant of life in the city and its surrounding areas. There is suffering and squalor: criminal gangs are on the rise...
This is a story of a boy's adventures growing up on the banks of the Mississippi river. The cheerful, adventurous hero plays truant to form a pirate band and, together with his best friend Huckleberry Finn, finds fun, excitement and buried treasure along the shores of the great river.
Swift's allegorical satire about religion and politics follows the lives of three brothers, Martin, Peter, and Jack, each of who represents a faction of the Christian faith - Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, and the dissenting faiths, respectively. Each brother inherits a coat (representing religious practice) from their father (God) on the condition...
One abandoned, one unfinished, these short works show Austen equally at home with romance (a widowed clergyman with four daughters must needs be in search of a husband or two in The Watsons) and with social change (a new, commercial seaside resort in Sanditon).
The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories is a bizarre and colourful collection containing the finest short stories by the iconic Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. From the witty and Kafkaesque The Nose, where a civil servant wakes up one day to find his nose missing, to the moving and evocative The Overcoat, about...
Arrogant, self-willed and egotistical, Emma is Jane Austen's most unusual heroine. Her interfering ways and inveterate matchmaking are at once shocking and comic. She is 'handsome, clever and rich' and has 'a disposition to think too well of herself'. When she decides to introduce the humble...
When psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at the scientific research station hovering high above the surface of Solaris, he finds the place deserted except for two scientists, who have been driven mad by some unknown horror. The researchers had been trying to investigate the ocean planet, and probe the secrets of...
Her palace shimmered with gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Cleopatra, the wealthiest ruler of her time and one of the most powerful women in history, was a canny political strategist, a brilliant manager, a tough negotiator, and the most manipulative of lovers. Although her life spanned...
This is the story of the return of Odysseus from Troy. Championed by Athene and hounded by the wrathful sea-god Poseidon, Odysseus encounters the ferocious Cyclops, escaping Scylla and Charybdis to reclaim his threatened home on Ithaca. The pack includes an introduction in book form.
Back in 1964, tragedy had struck when Peter Redburn and his friends were playing together. Now an adult, Peter has never been able to escape his feelings of guilt. A funeral forces him to confront the rivalries and secrets of the past
Tam often takes refuge in the ruins of Thowt It Farm when he is unhappy at home. One day he follows an old beggar woman and her dog to the farm and is transported back to the Second World War. There he makes friends with May, who has been rescued from a bombed-out house and now refuses to eat or sleep indoors. When Tam gets into...
1066 – Senlac Ridge, England. William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, defeats Harold Godwinson, King Harold II of England, in what will become known as the Battle of Hastings. But England will not be conquered easily, the Anglo-Saxons will not submit meekly to Norman rule. Although his heroic deeds will nearly be lost to legend, one man...
Shortlisted for the British Book Awards, Biography of the Year, 2008. Richard Hammond describes his childhood and adolescence and the emergence of the adrenalin junkie, the first ridiculous stunts on his tricycle, and an increasing and near-obsessive attraction to speed and the smell of petrol. He finds an attractive girl, Mindy, who shares his...
The lives of four sensuous, bold and remarkable women intersect in the year AD 70, in the desperate days of the siege of Masada, when supplies are dwindling and the Romans are drawing near. All are dovekeepers, and all are keepers of secrets - about who they are, where they come from, who fathered them and whom they love.
Is the Greek alphabet all Greek to you? Is geometry your Achilles heel and does your knowledge of Homer have more to do with The Simpsons than the Sirens? From engineering and architecture to drama and democracy, the world around us is founded on the principles and discoveries of the Ancient World, yet our understanding of it is...
When the three witches - now old, remarried and widowed - decide to go back to Eastwick to spend a summer together, many things have changed. Darryl Van Horne is gone. Their husbands and lovers have gone. The lithe and supple bodies with which they wrecked marriages and wreaked havoc many years before have gone - and have been...
An animated version of The Lost Thing is being produced by Oscar Award-winning Passion Pictures, based in London. A kid finds a lost "thing" on the beach where he's scavenging for his bottle top collection. The thing is a large, freakish creature but no one else really notices it, it's simply not a part of their familiar day-to-day reality.
Bernard Cribbins reads Charles Kingsley's much-loved tale about a little chimney-sweep who is turned into a water baby. Tom the chimney-sweep has a hard life. He is beaten by his master, the cruel Mr Grimes, and forced to climb up dark flues where he bruises his knees and elbows and gets soot in his eyes. He is always hungry, for there is never...
Penelope Wilton narrates BBC Radio 4’s epic dramatisation of the treasured family saga, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s five book chronicle of the upper-middle class. Cazalet family begins in 1938, as siblings Hugh, Edward, Rupert, and Rachel join together for another family holiday at Home Place, their house in the Sussex countryside. During the course...
Multi-millionaire Anthony Spencer is trapped in a coma and finds himself in a surreal world that reflects the skewed priorities of the life he's lived on earth where he meets a stranger who turns out to be Jesus and a grandmother who is the Holy Spirit. Pleading for a second chance, he is sent back to earth to redeem himself. There he must fight to...
Sir Harry Secombe was one of Britain’s best loved entertainers. After his death in April 2001, at the age of 79, the former Prime Minister John Major paid tribute to him as: ‘one of the loveliest of men and a comic genius who gave pleasure to millions.’ In this second volume of autobiography, the sequel to his highly praised Arias and Raspberries, he...
When Norm Cooper, the straightlaced new dean of Canon Flubert, turns up dead, Robert Amiss and the Baroness find themselves investigating radical gay priests, feminist witches, and evil cult members, who all had much to gain from Norm Cooper's demise.
American soldiers serve willingly. They risk their lives so the rest of us can be safe. The one small thing they ask is that they not be sent into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. But after being lied to about weapons of mass destruction and about the connection between al Qaeda and Iraq; after being forced by stop-loss orders to extend...
Justly regarded as a seminal masterpiece of Russian literature, Gogol's 1842 novel of an opportunistic schemer who tours the provinces drawing in his gullible countrymen by means of their own prejudices and pretensions has lost none of its trenchant force. Reader Boulton deftly navigates the playful digressions of a stylist who raised the...
"In this hapless state I looked myself over and saw that I was now no bird, but an ass...." In this ancient picaresque adventure, Lucius, an insatiably curious young man, finds himself transformed into a donkey after his fascination with black magic and witchcraft goes awry. While trapped in his new body, he becomes the property of thieves, farmers...
This collection from Sherrilyn Kenyon features all the beloved Dark-Hunter short stories that she's written over the years, as well as a new, previously unreleased story! Stories that have been published exclusively on Sherrilyn's website will also be available in print for the first time, including:...
Steven Scott is relatively new to horses. A successful, wealthy inventor, he takes up horse racing as a hobby – a hobby that soon brings him winner after winner under the inspired guidance of his trainer, Jody Leeds. Currently both their reputations are wrapped up in a beautiful black hurdler named Energise.