Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but here she was, stuck in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patrica aged five, greedy cross-patch Gillian who refused to be ignored, and Ruby...Ruby tells the story of The Family, from the day ...

Married to a man of importance in 19th century St.Petersburg, Anna's world crumbles when she falls passionately in love with the handsome Count Vronsky, and is forced to choose between her lover and her young son. Her tragedy lies in the cruelty meted out to her in high society by those who had been her friends.A masterpiece of 19th century fiction, Tolstoy's classic romantic tragedy remains as moving and powerful as ever. Evocative and emotional reading by Diana Quick.

A captivating story of family and friends, innocence and corruption.Four friends swore eternal friendship when all they had was each other. Now their dazzling careers, their seemingly successful lives, are to be disrupted by a devastating singer – and by the shadow of their past.Rosie Madigan is the angel… an award-winning costume-designer, she is blessed with worldly goods yet troubled by personal commitments.Gavin Ambrose is the Hollywood megastar: talented and id...

A gripping story of triumph over tragedy from the author of A Woman of SubstanceMallory Keswick is a woman with the world at her feet. Then out of the blue, that world is shattered by violent tragedy and she loses all that she holds dear.Torn by grief, Mal knows that she must rebuild her life. She flees to a village on the Yorkshire moors where she learns to draw on the deepest reserves of her spirit.Returning to Connecticut, Mal opens a ca...

A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Virgil's sweeping epic, starring Ralph Fiennes as Aeneas and Derek Jacobi as the Narrator. One of the classics of all time, The Aeneid was Virgil's last and greatest work. In it, he recounts in vivid imagery the legendary origin of the Roman Empire. The story begins after the Greeks have destroyed the city of Troy. The Trojan Prince Aeneas, defeated and depressed, leads his remaining citizens to a new land and a new destiny foretold by the Gods. The journey t...

A collection of full-cast dramatisations of Sophocles’ finest Greek tragediesOne of the three great tragic playwrights of ancient Greece, Sophocles wrote over 120 plays during his 60-year career, though only seven survive today. The most famous of these are the Theban Plays, all three of which are included in this collection alongside adaptations of Electra and Philoctetes, brought to life by celebrated writers, poets, and playwrights....

As an actress, Diana Quick was forever trying on the mask of other people's lives - raiding her own memory to service the character she was playing. Coming from a large, noisy family in Kent that seemed to be plain-speaking and straightforward, she was astonished to find on her beloved father's death that his childhood in India was far from idyllic. She was then thunderstruck to hear that he was to have a requiem mass. She had no idea he was Catholic. She discovered that his stepmother had...

Towering over the other characters, Tolstoy’s beautiful tragic heroine, Anna Karenina, dominates the action of the great book which bears her name. Anna is sensitive, generous, warm-hearted and intelligent, but all her virtues count for nothing when she is overcome by passionate love for Count Vronsky. Handsome and sensual, Vronsky is everything Anna’s dry, legalistic husband is not. Their love, which flouts the rigid laws of marriage, proves disastrous. Russian high society will not forgi...

Sixteen years after being locked up, at the age of sixteen, for the bloody murders of her employer and his housekeeper, Grace Marks is examined by Dr Simon Jordan, an expert in amnesia.As the days and weeks pass Simon tries to prise open the memories Grace claims to have lost and reveals a life of love and betrayal, poverty and abuse, drawing the listener in to the rooms of Grace’s mind.

Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize. The richly exotic story of the childhood the twins Esthappen and Rahel craft for themselves amongst India’s vats of banana jam and mountains of peppercorns.Here, perhaps, is the greatest Indian novel by a woman. Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’ is an astonishingly rich, fertile novel, teeming with life, colour, heart-stopping language, wry comedy and a hint of magical realism.Set against a background of political turbulence in Keral...

An intimate, profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea.Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. Memories of her Caribbean girlhood haunt the four short and piercingly brilliant novels that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England, a body of fiction—above all, the extraordinary Wide Sargasso Sea—that has a passionate following tod...

‘An absolute belter of a biography’ MARINA HYDE A Times Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2022 An LA Times Best Book of the Year 2022An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea.An obsessive and troubled genius, Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and unnerving writers of the twentieth century. Memories of a con...