"A Christmas Carol" is the best-known and best-loved of Dickens' 'Christmas Books', and the story of the miser Scrooge's redemption has become as much part of the Christmas tradition as plum pudding and carols themselves. Will Tiny Tim live to see another Christmas? Naxos

Every morning in Sadar Bazaar, one of the oldest markets in Delhi, a gang of men gather looking for work in the building trade. For five years, Aman Sethi shared their lives, and in particular that of Mohammed Ashraf. Ashraf is a mazdoor, an itinerant house-painter, but he's not a typical labourer - he's studied...

Eleven-year-old Tiffany Aching wants to be a real witch. But a real witch doesn't casually step out of her body, leaving it empty. Tiffany does and there's something just waiting for a handy body to take over - something ancient and horrible, which can't die. Now Tiffany's got to learn to be a real witch quickly...

Ailsa doesn't trust MCC Berkshire, the mysterious man helping out in her mother's antique shop. He tells wonderful stories about all the antiques, and his stories persuade the customers to buy the items he talks about, but everything he says is a pack of lies, isn't it? The story of Ailsa and MCC is interwoven...

A selection of the letters written by Dirk Bogarde to an American woman between 1967 and 1972. He never saw or spoke to her, yet at certain times during that period he was writing her a letter every day. The correspondences was triggered off when when she saw a photo in a magazine which showed him...

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man brings listeners along on a journey through a man’s life, from his childhood through adulthood. The protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, begins life with fear and confusion of the world, but as he grows older and becomes more educated and world wise. The novel follows him through his days at a Jesuit college with a...

The First Volume of Dirk Bogarde's Autobiography sees the transition from star of stage and screen to a bestselling and internationally acclaimed author.

The story opens in 1940. Harriet Vane - now Lady Peter Wimsey - has taken her children to safety in the country. But the war has followed them: glamorous RAF pilots and even more glamorous land-girls scandalise the villagers; the blackout makes the night-time lanes as sinister as the back alleys of London.

The British Embassy in Bonn is up in arms. Her Majesty's financially troubled government is seeking admission to Europe's Common Market just as anti-British factions are rising to power in Germany. Rioters are demanding reunification, and the last thing the Crown can afford is a scandal. Then Leo Harting -...

Ever since her childhood on a Niagara farm, Debi has dug in the dirt to find resilience. But when her husband, Peter, was diagnosed with cancer in November, it was too late in the season to seek solace in her garden. With idle hands and a fearful mind, she sought something to sustain her through the months ahead. She soon came across Victory...

When burglar Luther Whitney breaks into a Virginia mansion, he witnesses a brutal crime involving the president -- a man who believes he can get away with anything -- and now, Luther may be the only one who can stop him in this #1 New York Times bestselling thriller. In a heavily guarded mansion in the Virginia..

The midnight hour approaches in an almost empty all-night diner. Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. The musician has plans to rehearse with his jazz band all night, Mari is equally unconcerned and content...

When Cora is savagely murdered with a hatchet, the extraordinary remark she made the previous day at her brother Richard’s funeral suddenly takes on a chilling significance. At the reading of Richard’s will, Cora was clearly heard to say: ‘It’s been hushed up very nicely, hasn’t it…But he was murdered, wasn’t he?’

In first-century-AD Rome, during the reign of Vespasian, Marcus Didius Falco works as a private "informer," often for the emperor, ferreting out hidden truths and bringing villains to ground. But even informers take vacations with their wives, so in AD 77, Falco and his wife, Helena Justina, with others in tow, travel...

Superintendent Dalziel had a somewhat cynical view of what college administrations spent his taxes on. But when he and that over-educated Sergeant of his, Pascoe, were sent to investigate a disinterred corpse at Holm Coultram College, he hadn't reckoned on a rash of fresh killings. While Pascoe rekindled an...

They lied to protect their country. He told the truth to save it. A gripping historical thriller from the bestselling author of FATHERLAND. January 1895. On a freezing morning in the heart of Paris, an army officer, Georges Picquart, witnesses a convicted spy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, being publicly humiliated in front..

Pigeons carrying vital messages to and from the beleaguered city during the Siege of Paris; horses and mules struggling through miles of fetid mud to bring ammunition to the front in the Great War; dogs sniffing out mines for the British invasion force in the Second World War - countless brave animals have...

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.

Ten years ago, in his best selling Ethics for a New Millennium, His Holiness the Dalai Lama first proposed an approach to ethics based on universal rather than religious principles. Now, in Beyond Religion, the Dalai Lama, at his most compassionate and outspoken, elaborates and deepens his vision for the nonreligious way.

For William 'Billy' Fisher, an energetic imagination makes life tolerable, but well-nigh intolerable for all around him. He lies his way into and out of every situation, making any promise to get him out of trouble, thereby creating ever more tortuous entanglements to be wriggled out of in the future.

Why do bookshops matter? How do they filter our ideas and literature? In this inventive and highly entertaining extended essay, Jorge Carrion takes his listeners on a journey around the world via its bookshops. His travels take him to Shakespeare & Co in Paris, Wells in Winchester, Green Apple Books in...

Fifty years ago Joy Adamson first introduced to the world the story of her life alongside Elsa the lioness, whom she had rescued as an orphaned cub, and raised at her home in Kenya. But as Elsa had been born free, Joy made the heartbreaking decision that she must be returned to the wild when she was old...

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War. The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles...

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War.

Performed brilliantly by Jeremy Irons

It is nearing the end of the Year of Our Lord 1145. A monk vows to abandon all earthly ties, but how can Brother Cadfael obey when his son is captured in battle? Olivier de Bretagne is one of many young knights taken prisoner in the current power dispute in Britain, but he is also Cadfael's son, and the monk...

In this dark suburban drama, Cheever concerns himself with the two neighbors: Eliot Nailles, who loves his wife and son to distraction, and Paul Hammer, who, according to Nailles, is a bastard named after a common household tool. The pair soon become fatefully linked by the mysterious binding power of their names.

The Discworld is very much like our own – if our own were to consist of a flat planet balanced on the back of four elephants which stand on the back of a giant turtle, that is . . . In this life there are givers and takers. It's safe to say that vampires are very much in the latter camp. They don’t have much time for...

Juanita Carberry was brought up by her father's black servants and white governess. Her mother died when she was three but Juanita did not discover this until, when she was six, a cousin taunted her with the truth. At 15 Juanita became involved in the Lord Erroll affair, but didn't help the police.

A Genius Performance by Derek Jacobi! The year is 1141 and civil war continues to rage. In the battle of Lincoln the sheriff of Shropshire is captured and the king himself taken prisoner by his enemies. An exchange of valuable prisoners is arranged and the sheriff is to be recovered in place of a young...

A full-cast BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of an Agatha Christie story. On a flight from Le Bourget to Croydon, on which Hercule Poirot is an apprehensive passenger, a woman is found dead. A doctor on board is inclined to put it down to a wasp-sting, but Poirot suspects that a poisoned dart is the real cause...

The November 2006 assassination of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko, who was poisoned by the rare radioactive element polonium, caused an international sensation. Within a few short weeks, the fit 43-year-old lay gaunt, bald, and dying in a hospital, the victim of a...

In one of her most popular mysteries, Agatha Christie leads us into a maze of evil as dark and labyrinthine as the ancient tombs of the Pharoahs. Linnet Ridgeway has led a charmed life. Blessed with beauty, enormous wealth and a devoted husband, she has everything anyone could wish for. But as the...

The ice was slippery. Her paws kept splaying outwards until the cold of the ice on her belly made her tiptoe back up to her full height . . . Someone on the bridge threw a lump of coal at her. It skidded across the whiteness, leaving a black trail, then plopped into a fissure: the ice was breaking up.'

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...

Renowned gamester and the first to admit that he is entirely void of a romantic disposition, Max Ravenscar regards all eligible females with indifference and unconcern. But when he meets the woman his young cousin Adrian is bent on marrying - the beautiful Deborah Grantham, mistress of her aunt's gaming...

Locals claim it is haunted and refuse to put a single toe past the front door, but to siblings Peter, Celia, and Margaret, the Priory is nothing more than a rundown estate inherited from their late uncle—and the perfect setting for a much-needed holiday. But when a murder victim is discovered in the drafty...

A Genius Performance by Andrew Sachs! In 1988 Dirk Bogarde returned from two idyllic decades in France to live in England. Shortly afterwards, the then Literary Editor of the Daily Telegraph, admiring the 'lucid frankness' of Bogarde's memoirs, invited him to review some books for the newspaper.

Thirty years ago, Roger Fisher and Bill Ury wrote the groundbreaking book Getting to Yes. It established the mutual gains approach to negotiation, or what the popular media likes to call "win-win negotiation". But there are few, if any, negotiating situations in which everyone can get everything they want.

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...

The Discworld is very much like our own - if our own were to consist of a flat planet balanced on the back of four elephants which stand on the back of a giant turtle, that is . . . OH, THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING IN THE STOCKING THAT MAKES A NOISE, said Death, OTHERWISE WHAT IS 4:30 A.M. FOR?

If you’re a man of a certain age you’ll know there comes a point in life when getting a sports car and over-analysing your contribution to society sounds like a really good idea. With a good job in sales and marketing and a nice house in Manchester that he shared with his wife and kids, John Bishop...

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Robert Graves' brilliant account of the madness and debauchery of ancient Rome, starring Tom Goodman Hill as Claudius and Derek Jacobi as Augustus. The wickedly entertaining inside story of the lives and deaths of the Imperial dynasty from Augustus to Caligula...

When the newly qualified vet, James Herriot, arrives in the small Yorkshire village of Darrowby, he has no idea of the new friends he will meet or adventures that lie ahead. From the author whose books inspired the BBC series All Creatures Great and Small, this first volume of unforgettable memoirs chronicles...

Bestselling author and the most famous woman in a flak jacket Kate Adie sets out on a fascinating journey to discover just who is attracted to living dangerously - and why. Ever since her days as a reporter on the front line in Iraq and the Iranian Embassy siege in London, Kate Adie has earned her...

Nominated for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. Carol Birch's epic novel brings alive the smells, sights and flavours of the nineteenth century, from the docks of London to the storms of the Indian Ocean: a gripping exploration of our relationship to the natural world and the wildness it contains. 1857. Jaffy Brown...

A Genius Performance by Kenneth Branagh! This performance of the masterpiece is truly outstanding. We have rated it slightly lower than the Robert Stephens production but this was a close run thing. Branagh's performance helps the modern listener to fully understand the sense of the text, without losing ....

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...?

What does it take to lead a team to world-class success over a sustained period of time?Sir Alex Ferguson is one of the few leaders who truly knows. In his 38 years in management, Sir Alex won an astonishing 49 trophies and helped grow Manchester United into one of the biggest commercial brands in the world.

Rome, 63 BC. In a city on the brink of acquiring a vast empire, seven men are struggling for power. Cicero is consul, Caesar his ruthless young rival, Pompey the republic's greatest general, Crassus its richest man, Cato a political fanatic, Catilina a psychopath, Clodius an ambitious playboy. The stories of these real...

Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward. It lead to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known. Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for...

A seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, that tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl. Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, it uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation.

Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, the remarkable climactic conclusion to Ulysses, remains, nearly a century after its first publication, one of the most remarkable chapters in world literature. It is night, the end of a long day (16 June 1904) for Leopold Bloom’s wife, Molly. She lies in bed, muses on the events of the day, her life with her husband, her affair...

1885: Five years after his release from prison, Montmorency is working undercover for the government. But his life, and national security, are threatened by his addiction to drugs. Can his friends restore his health in time to discover who is bombing London, and why, on the Scottish island of Tarimond...

A Genius Performance by Hugh Fraser! Mrs McGinty died from a brutal blow to the back of her head. Suspicion fell immediately on her shifty lodger, James Bentley, whose clothes revealed traces of the victim’s blood and hair. Yet something was amiss: Bentley just didn’t look like a murderer. Poirot believed...

The land running down to the River Dean has been farmed by the Meredith family for generations. Robin Meredith bought the farm from his father, just before he married his wife Caro and now he and his brother Joe work on the land. But now Caro has died, as much as a mystery to the family .....

For the first time on CD the unabridged audio edition of the cases that made up Hercule Poirot's formative years as a detective. Read by the inimitable Hugh Fraser and David Suchet. Still in the formative years of his career, Hercule Poirot faces a most taxing case: who killed Lord Cronshaw? Was Coco Courtenay’s...

What could be better than settling down to listen to an elegantly crafted, intricate mystery thriller fraught with tension and excitement? Set in Edinburgh, Ian Rankin's best-selling Inspector Rebus series makes its return with a dark installment that revisits the haunting unsolved murder of a young woman.

Rosamunde Pilcher's stories transport the listener into a delightful world of surprises, the warmth of human nature and the wonderful details of life, and the three audiobooks in this classic collection are no exception. Now on CD for the very first time, these stories are the work of a master storyteller at her very best.

Inspired by great figures from Emerson and Nietzsche to Madonna and Serena Williams, this engaging philosophical essay explores the workings of self-confidence and how to develop it. Where does self-confidence come from? How does it work? What makes it stronger or weaker? Why are some people more confident than others? Is it only a...

A funny and compassionate study of what being a man and a woman really means. Meet the Divots. They seem a happy married couple, in their cozy suburban home in a cozy suburban town. Then, one day, everything begins to change. Nick drops his bombshell. He wants to become Nicola. Alison is...

'An adventure that takes us to the ends of the earth via the rich but often barren landscape of the human heart' The Times Why was an English lawyer shot dead in Turkey by his firm's top client? How can a down-at-heel magician in Devon explain the vast fortune that has mysteriously appeared in his daughter's...

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".

By the summer of 1998, it had become clear that there was something wrong with my hearing. It didn't happen suddenly but softly, so softly, I almost wasn't aware of it happening; sound seemed to have stolen away. For 12 years, Bella Bathurst was deaf. She missed the punchlines and the jokes, avoided busy...

Michael Hordern stars as Jeeves with Richard Briers as Bertie in a BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation. It is the stuff of nightmares for Berties as he is hauled back to Totleigh Towers and the whole loony crew of Madeline, Gussie, Roderick Spode, Stiffy Byng and the dog Bartholomew - stiff upper lip, Jeeves.

The sequel to "Just Practising" continues the early adventures and misdemeanours of the author as a young country vet. It also introduces the RSPCA Animal Hospital at Harmsworth, where Grant is now director.

Ria and Marilyn have never met - they live thousands of miles apart, separated by the Atlantic Ocean: one in a big, warm, Victorian house in Tara Road, Dublin, the other in a modern, open-plan house in New England. Two more unlikely friends would be hard to find: Ria's life revolves around her family and friends while Marilyn's reserve is born of...

A wonderful major motion picture, this heartwarming and inspirational tale follows Enzo, a loyal family dog, and tells the story of his human family, how they nearly fell apart and what he did to bring them back together. Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: he thinks and feels in nearly human ways.

A Genius Performance by Lorelei King! A woman has vanished while digging a dinosaur bone bed in the remote wilderness of Canada. Somehow, the only evidence has made its way to the inbox of Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta, over two thousand miles away in Boston. She has no idea why.

The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe. The field of neuroscience has made remarkable strides in recent years in understanding aspects of the brain, yet we still struggle with seemingly fundamental questions about how the brain works. What lessons can we learn from neuroscience’s...

One of the most inventive and charming retellings of the Arthurian legend, this is the final part of The Once and Future King. In these last two books, the ageing king faces the greatest challenge of his reign, when his own son threatens to overthrow him and destroy everything he has worked for. In The Book of Merlyn, Arthur's tutor Merlyn...

The Collected Short Stories brings together three of Jeffrey Archer’s classic collections of short stories: A Quiver Full of Arrows, A Twist in the Tale and Twelve Red Herrings. Every reader will have their own favourites: the choices run from an imprisoned man who is certain that his supposed murder victim is very much alive, to a female driver pursued...

This is what happened. I saw it, and it is a true tale. So begins the story of Merlin, born the illegitimate son of a Welsh princess in fifth century Britain, a world ravaged by war. Small and neglected, with his mother unwilling to reveal his father's identity, Merlin must disguise his intelligence -

Three of David Attenborough's early adventures are collected here, along with a fascinating collection of archive interviews with the broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough's books and broadcasts have opened up the incredible world of natural history to millions of viewers and listeners.

Read by Ralph Fiennes, this story is set at the end of World War II. It explores the lives of four disparate shell-shocked characters who find themselves holed up together in a ruined villa north of Florence as the war retreats around them.

Nola Brown, the U.S. Army's artist-in-residence--a painter and trained soldier--sees something nobody was supposed to see and earns a dangerous enemy in this novel as powerful as a launched torpedo slashing through 400 pages of deep water before reaching impact...one of the best thrill rides ever...

A Genius Performance by Martin Shaw!

Bilbo Baggins enjoys a quiet and contented life, with no desire to travel far from the comforts of home; then one day the wizard Gandalf and a band of dwarves arrive unexpectedly and enlist his services – as a burglar – on a dangerous expedition to raid the treasure-hoard of Smaug the dragon. Bilbo’s life is never to be the same again.

At the height of the hot summer of 1144, the Earl of Essex succumbs to a fatal arrow, but only after a lingering fever, during which his officials do their best to save him from hellfire by restoring various properties he has annexed, including the abbey of Ramsey.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Our Kind of Traitor; and The Night Manager, now a television series starring Tom Hiddleston. John le Carré’s new novel, A Legacy of Spies, is now available. As the fall of Saigon looms, master spy George Smiley must outmaneuver his ...

Why do we immediately recognize art by Van Gogh and Warhol? What does Beethoven share with Rage Against the Machine and Madonna? What makes us remember the words of Churchill and King (and Domino’s Pizza, for that matter)? With the rise of digital media and advertising, a constant barrage of information makes it nearly impossible to...

In a shabby London suburb, sixteen-year-old Pup Yearman dabbles in magic. But for Pup's older sister Dolly, the magic is more than dabbling. Deformed by a facial birthmark, Dolly desperately wants to be cured and her obsession with Pup's magic sends her on a dangerous ....

“There are just a few writers whose work is so distinctive, definitive, and important their very name describes a whole world, like ‘Orwellian.’ Dennis Glover has written a novel that captures George Orwell as he began to write the book he saw as the culmination of all he’d learned in a bloody century about...

It is a cold February night in 1925 when two teenage sisters - Mollie and Annemarie - escape from their home in a tiny Irish village. Their beloved mother has died and the girls have suffered shocking abuse at the hands of their father.

The Letters of Charlotte Brontë performed by Imogen Stubbs The brief and tragic life of Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) is told through the beautiful and passionate letters written by Charlotte to her best friend Ellen Nussey. Born and brought up in the bleak Haworth parsonage with only her sisters and...

Thora Hird, Roy Hudd and others read seventeen of Marriott Edgar's memorable monologues.

This magnificent story of 1,000 years of English history is told through the lives and deeds of Kings and Queens, from the Normans to the Windsors. Understand how the power of the crown has changed as a result of both the character and ability of each monarch and evolving historical circumstances.

Julia Hunter and Kate Bain have found true happiness with men old enough to be their fathers. Julia organises her husband Hugh and their cherubic twins with ruthless efficiency and Kate has lived with James, for eight years,and although she refuses to marry him, she's apparently devoted to him.

Chester Royde, an American millionaire, travels to Scotland with his new bride Carrie and sister Myrtle, to find out more about Carrie's Scottish ancestry. Their new 'relatives' turn out to be a little more authentically Scottish than they bargained for. Ben Nevis, Laird of Glenbogle Castle, is fiercely protective of his...

When the luxurious Blue Train arrives at Nice, a guard attempts to wake serene Ruth Kettering from her slumbers. But she will never wake again – for a heavy blow has killed her, disfiguring her features almost beyond recognition. What is more, her precious rubies are missing. The prime suspect is Ruth’s estranged..

The Old Curiosity Shop follows the story of Little Nell who lives with her grandfather in his magical shop of curiosities in London. Her grandfather's attempts to secure an inheritance for Nell lead them into financial trouble with the evil dwarf Quilp. Nell manages to flee and lead her grandfather to safety...

When people play the game: Name three or four persons whom you would choose to have with you on a desert island - they never choose the Delaneys. They don't even choose us one by one as individuals. We have earned, not always fairly we consider, the reputation of being difficult guests . . .'

This slipcase contains the first three radio collection volumes of "Porridge" episodes, taken from the BBC television series. They include: "Prisoner and Escort", "No Way Out", "The Desperate Hours", "Pardon Me", "An Evening In", "Heartbreak Hotel" and "The Harder They Fall".

In this extraordinary collection of stories, the world-wide bestselling author of Evening Class once again reveals her incomparable understanding of matters of the heart. In The Return Journey, Maeve Binchy creates powerful compelling stories of love, loss, revelation, and reconciliation.

It is the third summer of perestroika. Niki Landau, philanderer and travelling rep, attends the first Moscow audio fair and is asked by beautiful young Katya to take a parcel back to England. It’s addressed to Barley Blair, jazz-player and drinker, and contains information vital to the defence of the West. But times and...

When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace family had appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world.

These timeless stories are perfect for young fans of mystery, adventure or detective series. In book four, something mysterious is going on at Tigger's Barn and the Secret Seven are intrigued. Peter thinks it's all just gossip, but Jack isn't so sure when he overhears a strange conversation. It looks like the Seven...

On his train back to Scotland for a well-earned rest, Inspector Grant learns that a fellow passenger, one Charles Martin, has been found dead. It looks like a case of misadventure - but Grant is not so sure. Teased by some enigmatic lines of verse that the deceased had apparently scrawled on a newspaper, he...

The 60th birthday party of Silas Kane was marred by argument and dissension among his family. And then, the morning after the celebrations, Kane is found dead at the foot of a cliff. The theory that Silas accidentally lost his way in the fog is confirmed when the coroner returns a verdict of death by misadventure.

It is 1918, and London is gathering in its dead. For undertaker Henry Speake, laying to rest the bodies of those sent home from the Front has become a familiar duty. But what he is seeing now, as influenza claims its victims, is something different.