Showing results by narrator "Fenella Woolgar" in All Categories

There's a chill in the air and the days are growing shorter.... It's the perfect time to curl up in front of a crackling fireplace with this winter-themed collection from legendary mystery writer Agatha Christie. But beware of deadly snowdrifts and dangerous gifts, poisoned meals and mysterious guests. This compendium of short stories, some featuring beloved Detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, is an essential omnibus for Christie fans and the perfect gift for mystery lovers.

For lovers of the supernatural and the macabre comes this collection of ghostly and chilling tales from Agatha Christie. Acknowledged the world over as the undisputed Queen of Crime, in fact she dabbled in her early writing career with mysteries of a more unearthly kind - stories featuring fantastic psychic visions, spectres looming in the shadows, encounters with deities, eerie messages from the Other Side, even a man who switches bodies with a cat....

In 1940, 18-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathisers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever. Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat.

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?

Cherry, Maggie and Rose are mother, daughter and granddaughter, each with their own hopes, dreams and even sorrows. They have always been close, so when, in a moment of impulse, Cherry buys a gorgeous but run-down pub in the village she grew up in, it soon becomes a family affair. All three women uproot themselves and move to Rushbrook, deep in the heart of Somerset, to take over The Swan and restore it to its former glory. Cherry is at the helm, Maggie is in charge of the kitchen, and Rose tends the picturesque garden that leads down to the river.

M. R. James was the master of the uncanny. His classic supernatural stories have haunted readers and listeners for over a century and been adapted countless times for radio, TV and film. This collection features dramatisations of 12 of his most popular stories: The Mezzotint, Casting the Runes, The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, A Warning to the Curious, Rats, Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad, The Tractate Middoth, Lost Hearts, The Rose Garden, Number 13, Martin’s Close and Count Magnus.

When a paragraph in an evening newspaper reveals a decades-old tragedy, most readers barely give it a glance. But for three strangers, it's impossible to ignore. For one woman it's a reminder of the worst thing that ever happened to her. For another it's the dangerous possibility that her darkest secret is about to be discovered. And for a third, a journalist, it's the first clue in a hunt to uncover the truth. The Child's story will be told.

Not the End of the World is Kate Atkinson's first collection of short stories. Playful and profound, they explore the world we think we know whilst offering a vision of another world which lurks just beneath the surface of our consciousness, a world where the myths we have banished from our lives are startlingly present and where imagination has the power to transform reality.

From the globally best-selling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring. It is 1932, and the losses of the First World War are still keenly felt. Violet Speedwell, mourning for both her fiancé and her brother and regarded by society as a ‘surplus woman’ unlikely to marry, resolves to escape her suffocating mother and strike out alone. A new life awaits her in Winchester. Yes, it is one of draughty boarding-houses and sidelong glances at her naked ring finger from younger colleagues; but it is also a life gleaming with independence and opportunity.

A collection of BBC dramatisations and readings of William Boyd's award-winning novels and short stories. One of Britain's foremost contemporary writers, William Boyd is renowned worldwide for his bestselling novels, which have been translated into over 30 languages. He has won numerous awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award (for A Good Man in Africa), the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for An Ice-Cream War) and the Costa Book Award (for Restless).

Eleven BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramas telling the stories of Mary Queen of Scots and the Stuart royals. Under the Stuarts, Britain entered the modern world. But with great change came turmoil, and for 111 years, the Stuart monarchs faced dynastic struggles, religious conflict, the rise of parliamentary democracy - and civil war. These dramas chart that turbulent epoch through its royal family, from Mary, Queen of Scots to the ‘last Stuart’, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s daughter Charlotte.

Dot's had quite enough of making tea in the Cabinet War Rooms. When she finds a cryptic message in the newspaper she enlists the help of her gals - will this be the big break Dot's been waiting for? Follow Dot as she gets squiffy over Agent Bertie Whiff-Whaff, concocts stirring yet pithy slogans for the war effort and goes on a mission to St Horribly Vulture’s School for Boys to enlist a teacher for...'shhhh...Bletchley Park!'

Upon inheriting the Moonstone, a huge and priceless diamond, Rachel Verinder's delight turns to dismay when the gem suddenly disappears. But this is no ordinary theft. Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard is called in and immediately suspects an intricate plot. However, not even his powers of detection can penetrate fully the mysteries surrounding the diamond.

Opportunistic, shrewd and beautiful, Ethelberta resolves to disguise her humble beginnings and elevate her position in society. Crafting her career as a society poet and staging her family as her servants, she proves admirably adept at sustaining her own web of deceit as she reinvents herself and navigates the attentions of four different suitors. The wealthiest is not the one she loves... what will she do? This is a light-hearted urban tale, offering a different side of Thomas Hardy.

First published between 1870 and 1893, Émile Zola’s 20-book cycle chronicling four generations of the Rougon-Macquarts was a shocking exposé of the decadence, degradation and moral decay of 19th-century France. It included some of his greatest novels, among them his masterpiece, Germinal. These innovative, ambitious dramas, first broadcast on Radio 4 over 24 hours in 2015-16, are a radical reimagining of Zola’s classic series, introducing us to 104-year-old matriarch, Dide, imprisoned in an asylum in southern France.

Every year, on the winter solstice, the small town of Melcombe observes an annual custom, the roots and meaning of which are lost in the mists of time. A torchlit procession to the ancient tomb of Cairndale Knapp, overlooking the town, puts the old sun to bed and greets the new sun in the morning, restoring balance to the year. This year, however, Mr Sam Notice has bought the Knapp and has set about landscaping it.

Becky Brandon (née Bloomwood) thought motherhood would be a breeze and that having a daughter was a dream come true – a shopping friend for life! But it’s trickier than she thought – two-year-old Minnie has a quite different approach to shopping. She can create havoc everywhere from Harrods to Harvey Nicks to her own christening. She hires taxis at random, her favourite word is ‘Mine‘, and she’s even started bidding for designer bags on ebay.

Three separate women, living in different locations and eras, are linked by their passion for Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. As they each live through a Tuesday in June, their thoughts and experiences mirror each other and become interwoven. In Richmond in 1923, Virginia Woolf struggles to write a novel whose protagonist is Mrs Dalloway. In Los Angeles in 1949, Laura ignores her chores and small son to sit in bed reading Mrs Dalloway. In 1990s New York, Clarissa goes to buy flowers for a party, mirroring the start of the fictional Mrs Dalloway’s day.

Written as a "report into the circumstances surrounding the decision to introduce salmon into the Yemen", this is a novel that is made up of e-mails, letters, diary extracts, records of the prime minister's Question Time, interviews, and chapters from the memoirs of a fantastically weaselly Peter Mandelson-type figure.

The collected BBC dramatisations of the fiction of Virginia Woolf, with star casts including Kristin Scott-Thomas, Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson, Laura Fraser, Robert Glenister and Fenella Woolgar....