The world experiences an abrupt and unthinkable cataclysm on the morning of October 29, 2018. Kevin March, high school band trombonist and wannabe writer playing hooky, is witness to its beginning. To stay alive, Kevin embarks on a journey that promises to change everything yet again. On his journey, into a digital recorder he chronicles his...

An Amazon Charts bestseller. A deeply moving story of carrying on even when it seems impossible. Life is over in an instant for sixteen-year-old Finn Miller when a devastating car accident tumbles her and ten others over the side of a mountain. Suspended between worlds, she watches helplessly as those she loves struggle to survive.

It is summer, and as tourists, drawn by the legend of a priceless missing artefact, disembark on the sun-drenched quay of Mithros, the languid calm of the island is broken by the unorthodox arrival of a stranger who has been thrown overboard in the bay. Lacking money or identification, he is forced to remain on Mithros. But is he...

A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of the powerful novel set in the First World War, from the author of War Horse. This is the story of Thomas ‘Tommo’ Peaceful, a young soldier who finds himself in Belgium, in the trenches of the First World War, with his brother Charlie. It is also the story of Tommo’s life, growing up in Devon with his...

This is a BBC Radio 2's action-packed deafening romp - with 40 minutes of previously unbroadcast peril Sexton Blake! The name that spells hurtling adventure! The name that spells doom for villainy! In a series of thrilling adventures packed with incident and hilarity, Sexton Blake, (Simon Jones, "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy") ...

In the heyday of the Roman Empire, a small accounting error has left Marcus Didius Falco sharing a cell with a large rat. But, the Empire's most hard-done-by investigator is finally bailed out, and promptly accepts a commission to help a family of freed slaves fend off a professional bribe...This is a third instalment of the Marcus Didius...

Jack Reilly, a dodgy ex-Boston cop, is trying to make ends meet as a private investigator. When a client is killed, execution style, Reilly finds himself in a whole world of pain. Someone wants him dead - but why? To find out, Reilly must weed through thirty years of duplicity, corruption, and killing...a web of politicians dirtier than...

Stumbling headlong into a passionate fling and an impromptu marriage to music star Trey, Maeve's life is about to change beyond recognition. Trey wants to whisk her off to his country house in North Carolina and Maeve follows him without a backward glance. But when she first lays eyes on her new home -- a dilapidated old cabin in...

Told simultaneously from the perspective of humans and chimpanzees, A Beautiful Truth - at times brutal, other times deeply moving - is about the simple truths that transcend species, the meaning of family, the lure of belonging, and the capacity for survival. Looee is forever set apart, a chimp raised by a well-meaning and...

San Francisco art patron Bibi Chen has planned a journey of the senses along the famed Burma Road for eleven lucky friends. But after her mysterious death, Bibi watches aghast from her ghostly perch as the travelers veer off her itinerary and embark on a trail paved with cultural gaffes and tribal curses, Buddhist illusions and...

A model for the ideal state includes discussion of the nature and application of justice, the role of the philosopher in society, the goals of education, and the effects of art upon character.

Ray Bradbury's endearing, lyrical tale of boyhood and an idyllic Midwestern summer is presented here as a full-cast audio dramatization by The Colonial Theatre on the Air, complete with sound effects and a brilliant music score. Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole world that...

Volume two of Churchill's famous account of English-speaking peoples Between 1485 and 1688, England became a Protestant country under Henry VIII. His daughter, Elizabeth I, battled for succession and supremacy at home, and the discovery of "the round world" enabled a vast continent across the Atlantic to be explored.

The first volume in Churchill's epic history of English-speaking peoples The English-speaking peoples comprise perhaps the greatest number of human beings sharing a common language in the world today. These people also share a common heritage. For his four-volume work, Sir Winston Churchill took as his subject these great...

Christmas is the season of good cheer and harmony among men, but things are not working out quite that way in the Bunker household. As a motley collection of friends and relatives fill the house with their own wishes, dreams and attitudes, the stage is set for seasonal disharmony and romantic intrigue. It’s Christmas Eve and...

Unfortunately, schoolgirl Julia Upjohn knows too much… Late one night, two teachers investigate a mysterious flashing light in the sports pavilion, while the rest of the school sleeps.

The villagers of Chipping Cleghorn, including Jane Marple, are agog with curiosity over an advertisement in the local gazette which reads: ‘A murder is announced and will take place on Friday October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6.30 p.m.’ A childish practical joke? Or a hoax intended to scare poor Letitia...

"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

When editor Susan Ryeland is given the tattered manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has little idea it will change her life. She's worked with the revered crime writer for years and his detective, Atticus Pund, is renowned for solving crimes in the sleepy English villages of the 1950s. As Susan knows only too well, vintage crime sells...

handsomely. It's just a shame that it means dealing with an author like Alan Conway...

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.

In Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens created one of his most penetrating satires on the weaknesses of government in the Victorian era. He chose Marshalsea debtors prison as the setting, where his own father had been imprisoned. The story revolves around a complex mystery involving conspiracy... Naxos

Miss Marple senses danger when she visits a friend living in a Victorian mansion which doubles as a rehabilitiation centre for delinquents.

Wilkie Collins' classic story, The Woman in White, is one of the great mystery thrillers of the nineteenth century and beyond. Read with outstanding skill by Glen McCready, Rachael Bavidge and the Naxos Cast.

After participating in the Jacobite Rising of 1745, Robin and Prudence, brother and sister, become engaged in a swashbuckling, romantic adventure. Our hero and heroine must cross-dress and switch genders if they are to escape prosecution a humorous move that allows Heyer to explore the manners...

The accomplished Corinthian Sir Richard Wyndham is wealthy, sophisticated, handsome and supremely bored. Tired of his aristocratic family constantly pressuring him to get married, he determines to run away after meeting the delightful, unconventional heroine Penelope Creed.

Jane Austen's most popular novel, originally published in 1813, some 17 years after it was first written, presents the Bennet family of Longbourn. Against the background of gossipy Mrs Bennet and the detached Mr Bennet, the quest is on for husbands for the five daughters.

Two stories from Rosamunde Pilcher's bestselling collections Flowers in teh Rain and The Blue Bedroom, available for the first time on CD performed beautifully by Lynn Redgrave.

Long, long ago, when Craggy Island was still uninhabited... there was a radio comedy program about a wily if massively inefficient Priest.. who, oddly enough, was assisted by a young, naive and dense Novice, and also had a retired drunken old Priest living with them.

Carla Lemarchant was a child of five when her mother was accused and convicted of poisoning her father, the famous painter Amyas Crale. After Caroline Crale dies in prison, Carla is sent to live with her uncle and aunt in Canada. Only on her twenty-first birthday does Carla learn of her family history when she...

Famous crime novelist Ariadne Oliver, visiting her friend Judith Butler in the little town of Woodleigh Common, is invited to a Hallowe'en Party put on by society hostess Mrs Rowena Drake for the local teenagers. During her preparations for the party, the conversation turns to Ariadne's grisly novels. One of...

In 1940s London, Hercule Poirot is cornered by the club bore and learns of a mysterious death - one which sets him off on one of his most intriguing cases. When Gordon Cloade is killed in a London air raid his vast fortune passes to his young wife Rosaleen. Cloade's relatives are desperate to get their hands on his money, and Rosaleen begins...

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...

Tyrannical millionaire Simeon Lee has been estranged from most of his family for years. But now, on Christmas Eve, the old man calls them all together once more. Unable to disobey, the children gather uneasily and wonder what their father's intentions are. Does he want to clear up past misunderstandings or...

Alice Ascher, a poor, elderly shopkeeper, is murdered in Andover. Betty Barnard, a young waitress, is strangled with her own belt at Bexhill-on-Sea. Next comes Carmichael Clarke, collector of Chinese art, clubbed to death in Churston. Only in Doncaster does the pattern vary: the man found stabbed in the Regal Cinema is called George Earsfield.

It is 1916. Captain Hastings has been invalided out of the Great War and goes to convalesce at Styles Court, the family home of his great friend, John Cavendish. By an extraordinary coincidence, billeted in the village is a brilliant little retired detective with an egg-shaped head, who made a considerable...

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation starring John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot. When Poirot arrives in France, following an urgent appeal for help, he finds he is too late. His client, a South American millionaire, has been stabbed to death and his body flung into a freshly dug open grave on the golf course adjoining...

Poirot has always hated visiting the dentist, but this time his check-up is painless and soon over. As he leaves Mr Morley's surgery, he observes a woman wearing patent leather shoes with large buckles. She catches one of the buckles on the taxi door and wrenches it off, and as Poirot hands it back, he is reminded of the children's rhyme 'One, two...

Two recently-rediscovered Hercule Poirot short stories by Agatha Christie, read by David Suchet. In 2004, a remarkable archive was unearthed at Agatha Christie’s family home, Greenway - 73 of her private notebooks, filled with pencilled jottings and ideas. Hidden within this literary treasure trove were two...

Ariadne Oliver, Queen of Crime Fiction, has been asked to devise a Murder Hunt for a fête at Nasse House, the home of Sir George Stubbs. But she begins to suspect that someone is manipulating the scenario of her game and fears that something very sinister is being planned. She sends for her old friend...

Pride and Prejudice is the best-known novel by English regency author Jane Austen. The novel is a coming of age tale following the emotional growth of Elizabeth Bennet as she navigates subjects such as manners, education, money, and marriage during the British Regency.

At the Bendictine monastery in Shrewsbury in 1138, the gardens are flourishing under the expert tending of Brother Cadfael. His shelves boast all sorts of medication for every kind of ailment. But then a local landowner is poisoned with Cadfael's own concoction intended for aching joints.

Barchester Towers, Trollope's most popular novel, is the second of the six Chronicles of Barsetshire. Trollope continues the story, begun in The Warden, of Mr Harding and his daughter Eleanor.

** These tapes are 40 years old - there are a few drop outs but they don't effect the story ** A fantastic recording of Lionel Jefferies reading these wonderful stories. There are very few recordings of Lionel Jefferies available now and this one has to be one of his best.

His Dark Materials Trilogy Read by Philip Pullman and Full Cast The epic, award-winning trilogy following two children as they wander through a series of parallel universes is brought to thrilling life by the author and a full cast of narrators. The Sally Lockhart Quartet Read by Anton Lesser Young Sally Lockhart...

On his many reconnaissance missions in Europe and the Far East, the young Bogarde experienced the terror of enemy attack and the horror of its aftermath, together with the intense camaraderie and bitter humour of the battlefield. He also had, like countless others, a feeling of utter hopelessness at the war's end, when, as suddenly as the fighting...

An experienced psychologist, Maggie carefully maintains emotional distance from her patients. But when she meets a young Indian woman who tried to kill herself, her professional detachment disintegrates. Cut off from her family in India, Lakshmi is desperately lonely and trapped in a loveless marriage. Moved by her plight, Maggie treats...

Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography 2011 Drawing on a lifetime of writing about theatre and film, Callow takes us behind the curtain and behind the camera to introduce us to the performers and performances that have shaped him as an actor and as a public persona. They include giants like Orson Welles, Charles Dickens...

Roald Dahl - the grand master of the short story - turns his pen to anything, twisting everyday life into powerful, and sometimes terrifying fantasies. Seven superb stories, full of Roald Dahl's usual magic, mystery and suspense: meet the boy who can talk to animals, the man who can see with his eyes closed, and find out about the treasure, buried...

Demons, vengeful spirits, insanity, premature burials and lesbian vampires, In a Glass Darkly contains five diabolical tales of horror and mystery that will get the heart racing. Each story, including the famous 'Green Tea' and 'Carmilla', is presented as a case from the posthumous papers of Dr Martin Hesselius, a metaphysical physician who has no...

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...

A delightfully witty and utterly charming novel that will have resonance for anyone today who has ever had, or contemplated...Having the Builders In. Dame Constance de Clair has a remarkable talent for getting what she wants. And, at this precise moment she wants to transform her beloved yet overly square castle, Vine Regis, by adding an...

An instant New York Times best seller! “Rapinoe's 'signature pose' from the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup is synonymous to the feeling we got when finishing this book: heart full, arms wide and ready to take up space in this world.” (USA Today) Megan Rapinoe, Olympic gold medalist and two-time Women's World Cup champion, reveals for the first...

2012 marks the centenary of the birth of novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell, one of the leading writers of the post-war years. Born in India and resident at various times in England, Greece, Egypt, Cyprus and France, Durrell was a cosmopolitan, whose work was greatly influence by the Mediterranean places and cultures he experienced.

Taken from the short story collection Seven by Five, these 2 stories are performed brilliantly by Martin Jarvis. They are both very modern stories dealing with fedelity and themes that came to the fore front in the 1960s and 70s, this is the only copy of this title I have seen in many years. A great collectors item.

Kipling's masterpiece Kim is his final and most famous work and one of the first and greatest espionage stories ever written. It explores the life of Kimball O'Hara, an Irish orphan who spends his childhood as a vagrant in Lahore. When he befriends an aged Tibetan lama his life is transformed as he is requested to accompany him on a...

Always the matchmaker, Emma has arranged successful relationships among her friends and acquaintances time and time again, but when she must find her own mate, she soon discovers unanticipated inadequacies in her romantic capacities. The bulk of Emma, widely regarded as the most accomplished of Jane Austen’s six novels, is the story of...

These six cassettes contain a Radio 4 dramatization of Dickens's darkly comic novel. Jonas and Martin Chuzzlewit are cousins whose characters and destinies form a stark contrast. Jonas descends into a life of unrelenting evil, while Martin, by sheer good fortune, escapes a similar fate.

With a wide variety of great poetry from many famous poets this item is the only copy I have found in several years. A brilliant set for both a lover of poetry and listeners who enjoy Sean Barrett's wonderful performances.

Within the insular world of the English countryside, among struggling clerical families, husband-hunting mothers and daughters, country fools and snobs, Jane Austen found the raw material she needed to write brilliant novels widely admired for their satiric wit, subtlety and perfection of style. Sense and Sensibility is one of the best of these.

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.

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!

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...

Costa Award winner and Guardian Prize winning author Patrick Ness delivers an extraordinarily moving novel about coming to terms with loss. The monster showed up after midnight. As they do. But it isn't the monster Conor's been expecting. He's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he's had...

Pam Ayres' early childhood in Stanford in the Vale was idyllic in many ways. In her early work life she found herself in a sealed room where women operated clattering machines like enormous typewriters. After I had catastrophically and erroneously applied all the wrong information to several trolley loads of documents and lumbered the...

Unconventional, warm and witty, this Georgian romance by Georgette Heyer unusually begins with a marriage rather than ending with one. When Horatia Winwood steps in to marry the Earl of Rule, the disappointed suitor of her elegant sister, it is the luxuries of high society life that she becomes entranced...

Half the British Army never left Britain during the Second World War and became, with the civilian population, the Home Front. In WARTIME the danger, courage, deprivation, exhaustion, fear, humour and, sometimes, boredom that the population endured for six years is vividly brought to life....

A Genius Performance by Derek Jacobi! It is November 1890 and London is gripped by a merciless winter. Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are enjoying tea by the fire when an agitated gentleman arrives unannounced at 221b Baker Street. 

National Book Awards Autobiography of the Year 2013.

Born the son of a Billingsgate market porter at the height of the Second World War, David Jason spent his early life dodging bombs and bullies, both with impish good timing. Giving up on an unloved career as an electrician, he turned his attention to acting and soon, through a natural talent for making people laugh, found himself working with the leading lights of British comedy in the 1960s and '70s: Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Bob Monkhouse and Ronnie Barker. Barker would become a mentor to David, leading to hugely successful stints in Porridge and Open All Hours.

Born Vera Welch on 20 March, 1917 in the East End of London, Dame Vera Lynn's career was set from an early age - along with her father, who also did a 'turn', she sang in Working Men's Clubs from just seven years old. She had a successful radio career with Joe Loss and Charlie Kunz in the 1920s and '30s, but it was with World War II that she...

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 ...

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, a kind of last testament to his remarkable forebears.

'It is a book of such meditative calm, such spiritual intensity that is seems miraculous that her silence was only for 23 years; such measure of wisdom is the fruit of a lifetime. Robinson's prose, aligned with the sublime simplicity of the language of the bible, is nothing short of a benediction.

Milkman is extraordinary. I've been reading passages aloud for the pleasure of hearing it. It's frightening, hilarious, wily and joyous all at the same time.' - Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep...

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...

Another title in the ever popular Agatha Christie series. The suave and debonair Colonel Race must solve a question, not of ‘accidental death or suicide’, but ‘murder or double murder’. Pretty, young Anne came to London looking for adventure. In fact, adventure comes looking for her – and finds her immediately...

At 4pm on a dark, wet winter's evening in November 1862, a cheap coffin was buried in eerie silence: no lamentations, no panegyrics, for as the British Commissioner in charge of the funeral insisted, 'No vesting will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.'

Bond is back. With a vengeance. ‘There’s something I need your help with. The details are a little hazy at the moment, but I sense that it’s going to be something big. Very big indeed. Have you heard of Dr Julius Gorner?’ It’s a name that will become seared into James Bond’s consciousness. The name of ...

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.

As a boy, Daniel Rooke was always an outsider. At school he learned to hide his clever thoughts from his cruel peers; at home his parents were bemused by their bookish son. Daniel could only hope - against all the evidence - that he would one day find his place in life. By 1788, Daniel has become Lieutenant Rooke, astronomer with the First Fleet as...

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....

A Genius Performance by Hugh Fraser! A repugnant Amercian widow is killed during a trip to Petra… 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.

A Genius Performance by Hugh Fraser!

The Gipsy’s Acre was a truly beautiful upland site with views out to sea – and in Michael Rogers it stirred a child-like fantasy. 

The Leonides are one big happy family living in a sprawling, ramshackle mansion - until the head of the household, Aristide, is murdered with a fatal barbiturate injection. Suspicion naturally falls on the old man's young widow, 50 years his junior. But the murderer hasn't reckoned on the tenacity of ...

The Plymouth Express, The Submarine Plans, Problem at Sea, How Does Your Garden Grow? The Market Basing Mystery - David Suchet, Poirot to perfection, returns with five further short stories taken from the collection entitled Poirot’s Early Cases. Each story is entirely self-contained and shows all the essential...

A collection of short stories featuring the redoubtable ‘heart specialist’, Parker Pyne. This volume, in its contemporary Agatha Christie Collection livery, perfectly illustrates Agatha Christie’s critically–acclaimed foray into light-hearted, romantic mysteries. Mrs Packington felt alone, helpless and utterly forlorn.

When a number of leading scientists disappear without a trace, concern grows within the international intelligence community. Are they being kidnapped? Blackmailed? Brainwashed? One woman appears to have the key to the mystery. Unfortunately, Olive Betteron now lies in a hospital bed, dying from injuries..

A classic Christie story read by Hugh Fraser, who plays Captain Hastings in the popular TV series. Sir Stafford Nye’s journey home from Malaya to London takes an unexpected twist in the passnger loungs at Frankfurt – a young woman confides in him that someone is trying to kill her. Yet their paths are to cross again and again – and each time the...

What is the connection between a failed suicide attempt, a wrongful accusation of theft against a schoolgirl, and the romantic life of a famous tennis player? To the casual observer, apparently nothing. But when a houseparty gathers at Gull's Point, the seaside home of an elderly widow, earlier events come to a...

In the last thirty years of his life Albert Einstein searched for a unified theory - a theory which could describe all the forces of nature in a single framework. But the time was not right for such a discovery in Einstein's day. Neither was the time right when, in 1988, Professor Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History...

Still protecting the identity of a killer six months after the death of a small-time criminal, Detective Sarah Pribek deals with two very different cases--a missing young man and an unlicensed doctor providing care for the underclass.