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.
Dr Julius No is a man with a mysterious past. Nobody knows what secrets are hidden on his Caribbean island, and all those who have attempted to investigate further have disappeared.
A Genius Performance by Simon Callow, Edward Petherbridge and Prunella Scales! These wonderful BBC Radio 4 productions are of exceptional quality. Includes 2 plays - An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution. Brilliant work by all of the actors!
"A rich, complex and beautifully crafted novel." P. D. James "Compulsively readable a carefully devised plot unfolded with the most cunning art. Wilkie Collins and Dickens would have admired it." Sunday Times Like most families they had their secrets and they hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that prim Vera Hillyard and her beautiful, adored younger sister, Eden, were locked in a dark...
By the writer of the Wexford novels and read by George Baker
Someone must have had good reason to murder Mrs Elizabeth Nightingale on a dark September night. And as Detective Chief Inspector Wexford investigates, he discovers sinister undercurrents and dramatic secrets beneath the placid surface of the Nightingales' lives…
In 2010, the BBC and the British Museum embarked on an ambitious project: to tell the story of two million years of human history using one hundred objects selected from the Museum’s vast and renowned collection. Presented by the British Museum’s Director Neil MacGregor....
A girl missing. A woman searching. A killer planning.... A thrilling new FBI series for fans of Tess Gerritsen and Karin Slaughter. FBI Agent Elsa Myers finds missing people. She knows how it feels to be lost.... Though her father lies dying in a hospital north of New York City, Elsa cannot refuse a call for help.
When a woman is discovered in the basement of a psychotherapy clinic with a chisel through her heart, Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh investigates. What are the secrets hidden by the facade of the Georgian terrace? Is the killer a patient or healer? Dalgliesh uncovers a labyrinth of intrigue.
Terrified, a young prisoner in the Second World War closes his eyes and pictures himself going out to bat on a sunlit cricket ground in Hampshire. Across the courtyard in a Victorian workhouse, a father too ashamed to acknowledge his son. A skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar; her voice sends shivers through the skull.
A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations are two much-loved novels by Charles Dickens. Tale of Two Cities is is a novel set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The main characters — Doctor Alexandre Manette, Charles Darnay, and Sydney Carton — are all recalled to life, or ...
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness" starts this novel and, after many wonderful hours, our hero declares, "It is a far, far better thing that I do now than I have ever done; It is a far, far better rest that I go to now than I have ever known".
Drowned brides are like buses: nothing for ages, then two come along at the same time . . . ! Abandoned by husband James, Agatha hops on a plane to the South Pacific, hoping to mend her broken heart.
Feeling jilted and cross, Agatha follows a fortune-teller's advice and rents a cottage in the pretty village of Fryfam, where she hopes good fortune and true love will come chasing after her for a change. Unfortunately, her romantic notions are soon dispelled by the strange goings-on in the village.
A Genius performance by Penelope Keith! Winter Parva, a traditional Cotswolds village next door to Carsely, has decided to throw a celebratory hog roast to mark the beginning of the winter holiday festivities and Agatha Raisin has arrived with friend and rival in the sleuthing business, Toni, to enjoy the merriment. But as the spit pig is carried towards the bed of fiery charcoal Agatha - and the...
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...
Sometimes I whisper it over to myself: Murderess. Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt along the floor.' Grace Marks. Female fiend? Femme fatale? Or weak and unwilling victim? Around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s, Margaret Atwood has created an...
Lecturers having it away with students, witches’ sabbaths on the sand dunes, a body buried under a statue in the gardens, and a fresh rash of killings.
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 ...
Miss Abigail Wendover's efforts to detach her spirited niece Fanny from a plausible fortune-hunter are complicated by the arrival in Bath of Miles Caverleigh. The black sheep of his family, a cynical, outrageous care-for-naught with a scandalous past – that would be a connection more shocking even than Fanny's...
With a record five-and-a-half million listeners and thirty years as BBC Radio 2's top presenter, Sir Jimmy Young left the BBC at Christmas 2002. It was a controversial departure behind which lies a story he is only now prepared to reveal. In an extraordinary career which first brought him fame ...
C. S. Lewis was one of the twentieth century’s best-known authors. The Narnia Chronicles, The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity are among his most loved works. Shadowlands tells the unique story of Lewis’s tragic love. In Joy Davidman he truly found love and was drawn out of his shell.
In this unabridged reading by Paul Panting, fourteen-year-old Matt Freeman thinks his days of battling evil are over after his experiences at Raven's Gate. But soon he is pulled into another horrifying adventure when he discovers a second gate exists.
Actors Prunella Scales and Samuel West read the works of author Charles Dickens, with music of Dickens' time played on Victorian musical boxes and cylinder pianos alternates between the spoken work passages. It contains extracts from "Oliver Twist" (1839), "David Copperfield" (1850), "Little Dorrit" (1857), and the climax, three marvelous scenes from "Great Expectations" (1861).
It was the night of May 16th, 1943. Nineteen specially adapted Lancaster bombers take off from RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, each with a huge nine thousand pound cylindrical bomb strapped underneath them.
"Enthralling and suspenseful, EVERNEATH is pure indulgent escapism!" - Becca Fitzpatrick, NYT Bestselling Author of Hush, Hush Last spring, Nikki Beckett vanished, sucked into an underworld known as the Everneath, where immortals Feed on the emotions of despairing humans. Now she's returned- to her old life, her family, her friends- before being banished back to the underworld... this time forever. She has six months before the Everneath comes to claim her...
When a young trooper is shot in the head at the Regiment’s renowned Killing House, Nick Stone is perfectly qualified to investigate the mysterious circumstances more deeply. He has just returned from Moscow – still trying to come to terms with the fact that his girlfriend and baby son are safer there without him – so combines an unrivalled understanding of the Special Forces landscape with a detachment that should allow him to remain in cover. But less than forty-eight...
Joanna Trollope’s much-anticipated contemporary reworking of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility will launch The Austen Project and be one of the most talked about books of 2013. Two sisters could hardly be more different. Elinor Dashwood, an architecture student, values discretion above all. Her impulsive sister Marianne displays her creativity everywhere as she dreams of going to art school. But when the family finds itself forced out of Norland Park, their beloved...
Best-selling, National Book Award-winning author Ha Jin displays his impressive storytelling gifts in this richly textured examination of contemporary China and the civil unrest at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Professor Yang, a respected literature scholar, suffers a stroke and is confined to a hospital bed. Now Jian Wan, Yang’s brightest student and future son-in-law, must suspend his rigorous studies to care for his mentor. Jian dutifully keeps watch as Yang begins raving...
As a novelist, essayist, critic and playwright, Graham Green was one of the leading English literary figures of the 20th century. This CD provides an overview pf Greene's life and achievements in his own words. The recordings are drawn from rarely heard BBC broadcasts together with extracts from the longest private interview he gave.
What happens to us after we die? Chris Nielsen had no idea, until an unexpected accident cut his life short, separating him from his beloved wife, Annie. Now Chris must discover the true nature of life after death. But even heaven is not complete without Annie, and the divided soul mates will do anything to reach each other across the boundaries between life and death. When tragedy threatens to divide them forever, Chris risks his very soul to save Annie from an eternity...
A powerful unforgettable journey through China with one of our greatest travel writers. An achievement of great and lasting brilliance' Patrick Leigh Fermor Having learned Mandarin, and travelling alone by foot, bicycle and train, Colin Thubron set off on a 10,000 mile journey from Beijing to the borders of Burma. He travelled through the wind-swept wastes of the Gobi desert and finished at the far end of the Great Wall. What Thubron reveals is an astonishing diversity...
Here's a high-fashion, jet-setting novel from the best-selling author of Pants on Fire and Mad About the Boy. Stella Fain has a rule for men she likes: make them wait. But the gorgeous Jay proves an exception to the rule when he bowls Stella off her Prada wedges at a press junket on the Cote d'Azur. He might seem to have everything going for him, but Stella is about to realize that while jetset lifestyles can be fabulous, her career as a journalist isn't something she wants...
The attractive town of Caxley became prosperous through its connection with the wool trade, and on market day it is a hive of activity as the townspeople and neighboring villages from Fairacre, Beech Green, and Bent come to shop, chat, and watch the world go by. Families have lived here for generations, but it is the story of the Norths and the Howards in particular that is told in this delightful book. "The Howards of Caxley begins on a fine May morning in the fateful year of...
Simon Gray is determined to give up smoking. Really. At last. Can he kick the habit of sixty years? Will he, sometime soon, be able to leave his house without nervously feeling for his two packets of twenty and his two lighters, and add no more singes to his cardigan? As this wonderful, wayward record of Gray's life progresses, these questions are overtaken by much larger ones. What is that lady on the plane to Athens doing with her nose? What was sex like before 1963?
With this long-awaited and utterly unique debut novel, Shaun Prescott announces himself as a compelling new voice. The Town is magnetic, revealing the true depth of Australia: the good, the bad and the captivatingly ugly. But there had been a war. Everyone was certain of it, though it had been a long time since. This is Australia: an unnamed dead-end town in the heart of the outback. A young writer arrives in New South Wales to research local settlements that are slowly...
Even as a very young child, Simon King was passionate about the natural world. Being savaged by a rabid cheetah, charged at by rhinos and elephants and defecated upon by a long list of birds and other animals may sound like hell to some. But these, along with countless other experiences alongside all things furry, scaly, slimy and feathery have provided him with an enormously rich bank of tales to relive and retell. With his professional life starting aged ten, acting in a...
Well what would you say if your brother kept whacking you with a spoon, or the spider made it all the way up the toilet bowl or your mum made you wear that horrible shirt?
Find out in this fantastically funny collection of poems all about growing up from the brilliant Michael Rosen, Children's Laureate 2007 - 2009.