Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase 'antiquarian book-sellers' scares me somewhat, as I equate 'antique' with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very...
Following the success of his diary, Sir Alec has written something between a commonplace book and a diary - longer pieces on anything that takes his fancy, loosely related to his daily activities but not as rigid as a daily diary.
For all those captivated by the trials of Jane Eyre, Anne Brontës heroine Agnes Grey is the ideal counterpoint. Agnes Grey is widely considered to be the best record of the precarious position of the governess in Victorian society, and the insolence, neglect and dependence that the gentle ....
In the number one bestselling series by Anthony Horowitz, 14-year-old Alex Rider is forcibly recruited into the deadly world of espionage and sent on his first mission. But mortal danger is never far away and the reluctant teenage spy soon finds himself in demand again by MI6. The ever popular and explosive...
This is a perfect example of why Brainfood Audiobooks exists! William (Willie) Rushton brings all of his comedic talent to bear on this wonderful tale. This audio set comes with a complimentary Audio CD version of this book.
This is a perfect example of why Brainfood Audiobooks exists! William (Willie) Rushton brings all of his comedic talent to bear on this wonderful tale. This audio set comes with a complimentary Audio CD version of this book.
After completing work on Visconti's Death in Venice, the celebrated actor seeks a refuge from 20 years of 'continual motion'. This dream of a peaceful retreat materialises itself in the form of a neglected farmhouse in the South of France. However, before he is rewarded with the calm he craves, he is forced to...
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.
Barchester Towers is Anthony Trollope's comic masterpiece. Ranged either side of the unfathomable Victorian divide between the High Anglican clergy and their modern, evangelical brethren we meet the saintly Septimus Harding and the furious Archdeacon Grantly and, opposing, the fearsome ...
Dickens' first historical novel is set in 1780s England at the time of the Gordon Riots. In a case of mistaken identification, Barnaby Rudge, a pale half-wit with long red hair who dresses all in green and carries a large raven on his back, is arrested as the leader of a mob of anti-Catholic rioters. Naxos
Neely Crenshaw was once star quarterback for Messina High School's football team. His playing days ended with a sickening injury. Afterwards his life went nowhere: his marriage foundered and his real estate business drifted. For fifteen years he's been trying to forget his glorious past as sporting hero but...
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...
Mr Shaitana was famous as a flamboyant party host. Nevertheless, he was a man of whom everybody was a little afraid. So, when he boasted to Poirot that he considered murder an art form, the detective had some reservations about accepting a party invitation to view Shaitana's private collection.
This title contains ten classic short stories featuring Jeeves and Wooster from P. G. Wodehouse. It is read by Jonathan Cecil - described as having 'one of the best-loved voices in audiobooks' by the P.G. Wodehouse Society - this recording includes all ten short stories from the book "Carry On, Jeeves".
Charles Dickens was a prolific writer of letters throughout his life. There are extant more than 13,000 letters that he wrote to friends, family, fellow authors and actors as well as many letters written to people involved in good causes he espoused. In the hands of actor and writer Simon Callow, one of the most...
Big, generous-hearted Benny and the elfin Eve Malone have been best friends growing up in sleepy Knockglen. Their one thought is to get to Dublin, to university and to freedom... On their first day at University College, Dublin, the inseparable pair are thrown together with fellow students Nan Mahon, beautiful but selfish, and handsome Jack Foley. But trouble is brewing for Benny and Eve's new circle of friends, and before long, they find passion, tragedy - and the independence they yearned for.
Three classic radio productions from the BBC archives starring Nigel Hawthorne, Miriam Margolyes, Geraldine McEwan and a host of celebrated acting talent. These three legendary plays, performed by some of the best-known theatrical actors of the 20th century, are the perfect way to commemorate England's...
Three classic radio productions from the BBC archives starring Hannah Gordon, Tim Pigott-Smith, Paul Scofield and a host of celebrated acting talent. These three legendary plays, performed by some of the best-known theatrical actors of the 20th Century, are the perfect way to commemorate England's greatest...
Lord Peter Wimsey, noted detective, scholar and bon vivant, calls upon all his skills when murder strikes close to home. Too close. The victim? His sister's fiancé. The accused? The Duke of Denver, Lord Peter's brother. As the Duke goes on trial for his life in the House of Lords, Lord Peter, together with his...
From seat No.9, Hercule Poirot was ideally placed to observe his fellow air passengers. Over to his right sat a pretty young woman, ahead, across the gangway in seat No.8, a detective writer was being troubled by an aggressive wasp. What Poirot did not yet realize was that behind him, in seat No.2, sat the ...
In the dead of the night, a man is found murdered, locked in the stocks on the village green. Unfortunately for Superintendent Hannasyde, the deceased is Andrew Vereker, a man hated by nearly everyone, especially his odd and unhelpful family members. The Verekers are as eccentric as they are corrupt, and it...
The tranquillity of a cruise along the Nile was shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway had been shot through the head. She was young, stylish, and beautiful. A girl who had everything...until she lost her life. Hercule Poirot recalled an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: "I'd like to put my dear little ...
Simon Jones, who played Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, presents a look back at the life and work of a writer who has captivated the imagination of millions When Douglas Adams created The Hitchhiker's Guide for BBC Radio 4, it was the genesis of a science fiction comedy legend.
It was not unusual to find the beautiful bronzed body of the sun-loving Arlena Stuart stretched out on a beach, face down. Only, on this occasion, there was no sun...she had been strangled. Ever since Arlena's arrival at the resort, Hercule Poirot had detected sexual tension in the seaside air. But could ...
Ethan Coen makes his long-awaited fiction debut with a series of stories that mix the same offbeat humour, brutal irony, and razor-sharp wit of his films. Gates of Eden features characters struggling to comprehend their place in the world, and trying to understand the situations fate has placed in front of them.
A Genius Performance by Ian Carmichael! A must-listen for fans of Agatha Christie's Poirot and Margery Allingham's Campion Mysteries, Lord Peter Wimsey is the immortal amateur sleuth created by Dorothy L Sayers. Harriet Vane has never dared to return to her old Oxford college. Now, despite her scandalous...
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.
After a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl, The Pythons made their last performance together in 1983 in the hugely successful MONTY PYTHON'S MEANING OF LIFE. Writing and acting in films and television then took over much of Michael's life, culminating in the smash hit A FISH CALLED WANDA ...
A classic Christie mystery. Read by Hugh Fraser who plays Hugh Fraser in the popular TV series. At a Hallowe'en party, Joyce - a hostile thirteen-year-old - boasts that she once witnessed a murder. When no-one believes her, she storms off home. But within hours her body is found, still in the house, drowned in..
Penelope Grand has scrapped her failed career as an artist in Pittsburgh and moved back to Brooklyn to keep an eye on her ailing father. She’s accepted that her future won’t be what she’d dreamed, but now, as gentrification has completely reshaped her old neighborhood, even her past is unrecognizable.
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.
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...
Stop living in your own shadow and the sun the joy immediately shines.' Barry Long Reveal the real being behind your personality. Shed the tensions and burdens of living and bring the life back in to your life. To do this requires new energy and a willingness to live responsibility and consciously under the law...
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...
In this intimate, haunting literary memoir and New York Times Notable Book of the year, an American icon tells her own story for the first time -- about a challenging and lonely childhood, the craft that helped her find her voice, and a powerful emotional legacy that shaped her journey as a daughter ...
All that was left of the garage was a heap of charred and smouldering beams. In the driving seat of the burnt-out car were the remains of a body... An accident, said the police.
One of the greatest love stories ever written, Jane Eyre is the tale of a young woman entangled with the powerful Mr Rochester. What lurks in the attic at Thornfield, the ancestral home of the surly Mr Rochester? Will the governess Jane Eyre discover his secret - and having discovered it, live to regret that...
Jane Eyre, one of the most widely read English novels, has extraordinary emotional and narrative power. It introduces a new type of hero and heroine with an unconventional love story. Jane, a penniless orphan who survives the miseries of a charitable school, is employed at Thornfield Hall as a governess to...
It is 1910 - Maia, orphaned at 13, travels from England to start a new life with distant relatives in Manaus, hundreds of miles up the Amazon. She is very unhappy with her exceptionally bizarre new family but befriends Finn, a mysterious English boy who lives with the local Indians and shares her passion for the jungle.
A stunning collection of Just William stories, selected and read by Martin Jarvis ‘There’s nothing to touch them’ - Independent on Sunday Richmal Crompton’s stories featuring irrepressible schoolboy William Brown have been firm favourites with both young and old for decades. Perpetually scruffy, mud-stained...
When spirited, independent Miss Annis Wynchwood embroils herself in the affairs of a runaway heiress, she is destined to see a good deal of Mr Carleton, Lucilla's uncivil and high-handed guardian. And, chafing at the restrictions of Bath society, Annis has to admit that at least Mr Oliver Carleton is never boring.
Poirot had been present when Jane bragged of her plan to "get rid of" her estranged husband. Now the monstrous man was dead. And yet the great Belgian detective couldn't help feeling he was being taken for a ride. After all, how could Jane have stabbed Lord Edgware to death in his library at exactly the same...
In the Angler's Rest, drinking hot scotch and lemon, sits one of Wodehouse's greatest raconteurs. Mr Mulliner, his vivid imagination lubricated by Miss Postlethwaite the barmaid, has fabulous stories to tell of the extraordinary behaviour of his far-flung family ...
An archaeologist’s wife is murdered on the shores of the River Tigris in Iraq. It was clear to Amy Leatheran that something sinister was going on at the Hassanieh dig in Iraq; something associated with the presence of ‘Lovely Louise’, wife of celebrated archaeologist Dr Leidner. In a few days’ time Hercule...
Just after midnight, a snowdrift stopped the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train was surprisingly full for the time of the year. But by the morning there was one passenger fewer. An American lay dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside.
In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.
Nick Buckley was an unusual name for a pretty young woman. But then she had led an unusual life. First, on a treacherous Cornish hillside, the brakes on her car failed. Then, on a coastal path, a falling boulder missed her by inches. Later, an oil painting fell and almost crushed her in bed.
In the fourth of the Palliser stories, Trollope follows Phineas Finn's return to the dangerous world of Westminster politics after the death of his wife, Mary. His career takes a turn for the worse when his political rival is murdered. With all the circumstantial evidence pointing at Phineas, he is thrown under suspicion...
In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed a fortune by smuggling marijuana across the border between Canada and Idaho. As the years passed, Richard went straight and ...
Kindly Rip Van Winkle, loved by all, lives a quiet existence in a small village at the foot of the Catskill Mountains. Until one day, travelling in the mountains, he somehow falls asleep. Upon waking, he finds that twenty years have passed!
Six people sit down to dinner at a table laid for seven. In front of the empty place is a sprig of rosemary - in solemn memory of Rosemary Barton who died at the same table exactly one year previously. No one present on that fateful night would ever forget the woman's face, contorted beyond recognition - or ....
The murderer is also playing a game with Hercule Poirot, alerting him in advance to the locations of the murders. But each time Poirot arrives it is already too late. Intrigued by the psychopath’s mind and methodology Hercule Poirot...
Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away.
A Genius Performance by Andrew Sachs plus Anna Massey and others! Madame Ranyevskaya and her daughter Anya have returned home from Paris to discover that their family estate - which includes their beloved cherry orchard - has to be sold to cover the family's debts. They believe a miracle can save...
Sharply observant and wickedly funny, E.F. Benson's six Mapp and Lucia novels satirize the upper-middle-class social climbers in 1920s and '30s rural England. Games of bridge and cups of tea fuel hilarious gossip and vindictive plots a-plenty. It is a masterfully sustained spotlight on the minutiae of village life...
Sharply observant and wickedly funny, E.F. Benson's six Mapp and Lucia novels satirise the upper-middle-class social climbers in 1920s and '30s rural England. Games of bridge and cups of tea fuel hilarious gossip and vindictive plots a-plenty. It is a masterfully sustained spotlight on the minutiae of village life a...
Sharply observant and wickedly funny, E.F. Benson's six Mapp and Lucia novels satirise the upper-middle-class social climbers in 1920s and '30s rural England. Games of bridge and cups of tea fuel hilarious gossip and vindictive plots a-plenty. It is a masterfully sustained spotlight on the minutiae of village life a...
Naomi and Sally Durance are daughters of a dairy farmer from the Macleay Valley. Bound together in complicity by what they consider a crime, when the Great War begins in 1914 they hope to submerge their guilt by leaving for Europe to nurse the tides of young wounded. They head for the Dardanelles on...
A high court judge living a carefree life in St Petersburg is one day beset by pains and soon has to come to terms with the fact that he will die. He must learn to face death without fear and yet feel compassion for the family he is leaving behind.
At the top of his class at Harvard Law, he had his choice of the best in America. He made a deadly mistake. When Mitch McDeere signed on with Bendini, Lambert & Locke of Memphis, he thought he and his beautiful wife, Abby, were on their way. The firm leased him a BMW, paid off his school loans, arranged...
The fracas in the McClellan Arms was inevitable after a drop too much whisky. When one of the brawlers was found dead next morning many people thought it too was inevitable, for Campbell had a knack of making enemies. Six in particular. And all members of the local artists' colony.
Murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue combine into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel. Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden's wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth.
Bewitched by trains since childhood, this is Paul Theroux's account of an epic train-hopping journey in the 1970s from London to Japan and back again. His perceptions and anecdotes transport the listener beyond the unfolding landscape into a world of traveller's tales and mysterious events.
Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel. In 1990s New York, Clarissa Vaughan goes shopping for flowers for a party for her AIDS-suffering poet-friend. This novel meditates on artistic behaviour, love and madness.
How do you confront your husband when you don't want to know the truth? Twenty years ago Dennis Danson was arrested and imprisoned for the brutal murder of a young girl in Florida's Red River County. Now he's the subject of a true-crime documentary that's whipping up a frenzy online to uncover the...
Vincent Marzello reads this suspenseful story from the master of the legal thriller, John Grisham. The Office of the Public Defender is not known as a training ground for bright young litigators. Clay Carter has been there for too long and dreams of a better job in a real firm. When he reluctantly takes the case of a...
THE LAND OF PAINTED CAVES concludes the story of Ayla, her mate Jondalar, and their little daughter, Jonayla, taking readers on a journey of discovery and adventure as Ayla struggles to find a balance between her duties as a new mother and her training to become a Zelandoni
“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...
A mystery, a love story, and a search through a shadowy past. Two strangers unite in this novel of family secrets by international bestselling author Marc Levy, the most read contemporary French author in the world. When London journalist Eleanor-Rigby Donovan receives an anonymous letter alluding to a crime...
Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past.
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...
A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation starring John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot. Mrs Farrars is found dead of an apparent overdose one year after the death of her husband. The villagers of King's Abbot are suspicious. The rumour is that she poisoned her husband and was in love with Roger Ackroyd. When he is...
Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected also that someone had been blackmailing her. Now, tragically, came the news that she had taken her own life with a drug overdose. But the evening post brought Roger one last fatal...
In her first published mystery, Agatha Christie introduces readers to the heroic detective, Hercule Poirot. This is a classic murder mystery set in the outskirts of Essex. The victim is the wealthy mistress of Styles Court. The list of suspects is long and includes her gold-digging new spouse and stepsons, her ....
A millionaire strikes a deal on the seedier side of Paris and a priceless cache of rubies becomes destined for his beloved daughter, Rachel. Two days later Rachel is dead - murdered on a train on her way to the Riviera to meet her scoundrel lover: a mysterious, dark man. The suspects line up only master slueth...
"The Portrait of a Lady" tells the compelling and ultimately tragic tale of a beautiful young American woman's encounter with European sophistication. Set principally in England and Italy, we follow Isabel Archer's fortunes as a variety of admirers vie for her hand.
A Genius Performance by Anton Lesser! From the author of The Wind in the Willows comes this story of a boy who befriends a lazy, but quite pleasant dragon that takes up residence nearby. When the townspeople call in St. George, the eminent dragon-slayer, to do battle, it's up to the boy to sort things out .....
Penniless Elinor is rather surprised at the carriage that meets her from the stage, and more so at the decayed grandeur of the house to which she's transported. Realising that there has been a case of mistaken identity she agrees to an audacious plan.
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.
Little did Anthony Cade suspect that a simple errand on behalf of a friend would make him the centrepiece of a murderous international conspiracy. Someone would stop at nothing to prevent the monarchy being restored in faraway Herzoslovakia. The combined forces of Scotland Yard and the French...
When a practical joke played on Gerry Wade involving alarm clocks turns out to be murder the case is taken up by Lady 'Bundle' Brent and Jimmy Thesiger. Trying to work out the significance of the seven clocks found at the murder scene, they come across the Seven Dials Club.
A breathtaking epic, the award-winning His Dark Materials trilogy spans a multitude of worlds. The second installment, The Subtle Knife, introduces Will Parry – a young boy in search of his long-lost explorer father.
'The heart of the magic was sealed with Firefrost, the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, should Nastrond destroy the stone, then the magic will die away.' When Colin and Susan are pursued by eerie creatures across Alderley Edge, the Wizard Cadellin Silverbrow takes them to safety deep in the caves of Fundindelve.
From the best-selling author of countless legal thrillers, former lawyer John Grisham has done it again with this riveting thrill ride through Florida's justice system. The richly complex plot has plenty of twists and turns involving a corrupt judge, bribes, gangsters and even homicide in a dangerous game that...
Richard Burton narrates this famous dramatic chronicle of the English Crown, a treasure of the BBC radio archive published on audible for the very first time. Vivat Rex is the landmark drama series first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1977. Over the course of 26 instalments, each one narrated by Richard Burton with...
This is a wonderful example of Felicity Kendal's ability to connect with all childern. This wonderful short story springs into life in a production that is now sadly extremely rare. A young deer named Bambi learns about the dangers of the world when he and his mother encounter hunters in a field.
The naked body of a middle-aged stranger is discovered in the bath in a London architect's flat. It is Sir Reuben Levy, the well-known financier, who has recently disappeared? Is it a tramp dragged from the dissecting rooms of St Luke's Hospital?
While playing an erratic round of golf, Bobby Jones slices his ball over the edge of a cliff. His ball is lost, but on the rocks below he finds the crumpled body of a dying man. With his final breath the man opens his eyes and says, 'Why didn't they ask Evans?' Haunted by these words, Bobby and his vivacious...
Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father.