Showing results by publisher "BBC Audio" in Literary Fiction

A new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatization of Neil Gaiman's best-selling 2006 novel about Fat Charlie Nancy and his spider God father and brother taking over his life, and generally doing a better job of it than him. But will Charlie be able to get his life back without entering a whole new world of pain? Charlie Nancy first appeared in Neil Gaiman's American Gods, now a hit TV series.

It's 2116, and Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson are token rebels in an irretrievably corrupted society where promiscuity is the norm, eugenics a respectable science, and morality turned upside down. There is no poverty, crime or sickness - but no creativity, art or culture either. Human beings are merely docile citizens: divided into castes, brainwashed and controlled by the state and dependent on the drug soma for superficial gratification.

Barbara Pym is one of the 20th-century's wittiest, and most underrated, novelists. Her perceptive comedies of manners, centred around the domestic lives and loves of unassuming middle-class Englishwomen, won her many devoted readers and saw her hailed as a modern-day Jane Austen. Yet she spent 15 years out of print in the 1960s and '70s, until Philip Larkin championed her work in the Times Literary Supplement. Her seventh novel was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and writers from Jilly Cooper to Alexander McCall Smith continue to laud her talent today.

A Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation starring June Whitfield as the deceptively mild Miss Marple with Ian Lavender, Joan Sims and Susannah Harker. Elspeth McGillicuddy is down from Scotland for a holiday and boards the 4:50 train from Paddington station to visit her friend, Miss Marple. During the journey, another train pulls alongside, and through the window Mrs McGillicuddy witnesses a tall, dark man strangling a blonde woman. She reports what she has seen, yet no one takes any notice.

Fee Drummond has taken over the running of the Carnbeg Hydro Hotel following the death of her husband in a speedboat accident. But Fee is not short of enemies who would love to see her fail. Can she hold her nerve? Meanwhile, the staff of the Hydro are having their ‘Potential Superfactors’ assessed by a management guru, a distinguished concert violinist suffers stage fright on the eve of the Edinburgh Festival, and the bank drops a legal bombshell.

Renowned novelist and poet Thomas Hardy is best known for his fatalistic, often tragic novels set in the 'realistic dream-country' of Wessex, in south and south-west England. Drawing on his own life, he created some of the most memorable characters and stories in Victorian literature—many of which are included here. In five dramas taken from Radio 4's 'Hardy's Women' season, we meet a few of Thomas Hardy's most compelling female protagonists.

Aspiring actor Robert is always on the look out for work, and isn’t too fussy about what he takes. Chauffeur, prison performer, children’s TV, part-time teacher - he’ll take it all, and one day he’ll be famous. Maybe the next job will be his big breaK. From the writer behind The Vicar of Dibley, this lively comedy stars John Gordon Sinclair, Caroline Quentin, Gary Waldhorn and Gina McKee.

From the echo of the first line ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ to the final ‘It is a far far better thing that I do than I have ever done’, Dickens’ classic novel of the French revolution tells a story of the redemptive powers of love in the face of cruelty, violence and neglect.

Arundhati Roy's debut novel The God of Small Things took the literary world by storm, winning the Booker Prize in 1997. It went on to sell over six million copies in 40 languages, and was named as one of the BBC's 100 'Novels That Shaped Our World' in 2019. Set in Kerala in both the present and 1969, it tells the compelling tale of fraternal twins Rahel and Estha, whose lives are shattered by the 'Love Laws' that dictate 'who should be loved, and how.

Tom Baker stars as the fourth Doctor in this double-bill of adventures, in which he's ably assisted by Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah-Jane Smith.

Stephen Fry narrates this full-cast dramatisation of the famous Victorian comic novel, a portrait of English society and its mores, with Emma Fielding as Becky Sharp. Duration: 5 hours approx.

A collection of full-cast dramatisations and readings from the best-selling author. Maeve Binchy was one of Britain's best-loved storytellers, and this compilation of her finest fiction, as heard on BBC Radio, demonstrates all the warmth, wit and compassion that made her so popular.

It is 1943. Two huge German guns in the grim, impregnable fortress on a huge beautiful island off the coast of Turkey are having a devastating impact on Allied shipping and preventing the evacuation of hard-pressed British troops from the nearby island of Kheros. The Germans are poised to overrun and unless the guns can be put out of action within a matter of days, a thousand men will die. All previous attempts to attack the fortress of Navarone have failed.

A BBC radio collection of full-cast dramatisations, bringing together Edith Wharton’s most popular and best-loved works.

Challenged to retrieve a fallen star, Tristran Thorn leaves the sleepy English village of Wall and crosses into the land of Faerie and the realm of Stormhold. Locating the star, he discovers it is no meteorite but a young woman, Yvaine. When Yvaine evades him and escapes, Tristran discovers he is not the only one in pursuit of the star: there are dark forces in this magical land, and he must find Yvaine before she falls into their clutches.

Ronald Pickup, Paul Ritter and Kate Duchêne star in Nick Warburton’s comedy about one community’s attempts to resist change. When Richard and Clare Wells inherit a clifftop house in Yorkshire, they also inherit a sitting tenant, John Hector, who treats their home as his own and the local town as his own personal fiefdom.

Left penniless by the death of his father, nineteen-year-old Nicholas Nickleby seeks help, along with his mother and sister, from Uncle Ralph Nickleby. The hard-hearted money lender takes an instant dislike to his nephew and gets rid of the boy by securing him a teaching position at Dotheboys Hall, where the evil Wackford Squeers presides. Horrified by the barbarity he sees there, Nicholas defies Squeers and is forced to flee.

Young Robinson Crusoe has a burning ambition to be a sailor. Paying no attention to his parent's warnings he runs away to sea to embark on an extraordinary series of adventures: struggles with Barbary pirates, a shipwreck and the extraordinary meeting with Man Friday. Roy Marsden plays the older Robinson Crusoe looking back on a life of recklessness, daring and adventure - and the survival of 28 years, two months and 19 days on a desert island.

Michael Hordern stars as Jeeves with Richard Briers as Bertie in a BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation. Mayhem has broken out at Brinkley Court and there would seem to be a desperate need for Jeeves. But Bertie is fed up with the assumption that he is merely an addendum to his personal attendant. There are more brains in the Wooster household than just Jeeves, you know! Stand back, Bertram Wooster is on the case.

A Suitable Boy is Vikram Seth's epic love story set in India. Funny and tragic, with engaging, brilliantly observed characters, it is as close as you can get to Dickens for the twentieth century. The story unfolds through four middle class families: the Mehras, Kappoors, Khans, and Chatterjis. Lata Mehra, a university student, is under pressure from her mother to get married. But not to just anyone she happens to fall in love with.