David Morrissey stars as Billy Rucker in these two gritty urban noir thrillersEx-copper turned private investigator Billy Rucker scours the seamy underbelly of London, hunting for runaways - and murderers. Tough, worldly-wise and street-savvy, he can go where the police can't: and once he's on the trail, he won't stop until he finds the truth...Shut Eye - When an airline pilot is found brutally murdered with a champagne bottle, his...

The full-cast BBC Radio adaptation of C. P. Snow's epic series about the English establishment across the twentieth century**'**A vivid portrait of British academic, political and public life' Guardian'A very considerable achievement... It brings into the novel themes and locales never seen before (except perhaps in Trollope)' Anthony BurgessIn 1920s Leicester, Lewis Eliot must escape the drudgery of a council clerk's office and his provinc...

Two full-cast adaptations from the iconic Australian feminist novelist, Miles FranklinThese stunning dramatisations recount the life of an impassioned, ambitious Australian heroine, frustrated by rural bush life at the turn of the last century.Born in 1879, writer Stella Miles Franklin grew up in poverty in the Australian outback, with limited education. She completed her first book at the age of just nineteen: the ironically titled My Brilliant Career

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast production of Homer’s epic seafaring adventure, dramatised by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and starring Tim McInnerny, Benedict Cumberbatch, Amanda Redman & Adjoa Andoh.JOURNEY THROUGH ONE OF THE GREATEST ADVENTURES IN WESTERN STORYTELLING AND GREEK MYTHOLOGY'As irresistible as gravity ... a production so thrilling that it rapidly becomes unthinkable to press the stop - or even the pause - button' - Independent on Sunday...

Frank Cottrell Boyce’s series of plays about the punk generation 30 years onWhat if punk heroes The Adverts had played a gig in Camberley in 1977, to an audience of 27 people? And what if, three decades later, someone tried to bring that audience back together for a reunion? That’s the premise of these five linked plays by award-winning screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce, telling the stories of some of those audience members as they look back on that life-changing n...

An unforgettable look at a truly pioneering, but thoroughly modern, American hero.Finalist for the National Book Award 2002In this rousing examination of contemporary American male identity, acclaimed author and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert explores the fascinating true story of Eustace Conway. In 1977, at the age of seventeen, Conway left his family's comfortable suburban home to move to the Appalachian Mountains. For more than two decades he has lived there, making fire with sticks, wear...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER‘It is good to meet the real Jane Austen at last’ Independent on Sunday'Brilliantly illuminating … by focusing, chapter by chapter, on one thread or another of Austen’s experience, Byrne allows us to grasp the richness of her inner life’ GuardianWho was the real Jane Austen? A retiring spinster content with quiet village life? Or a strong-minded woman who chose ...

Prohibition. Al Capone. The President Harding scandals. The revolution of manners and morals. Black Tuesday. These are only an inkling of the events and figures characterizing the wild, tumultuous era that was the Roaring Twenties. Originally published in 1931, Only Yesterday traces the rise of post–World War I prosperity up to the Wall Street crash of 1929 against a colorful backdrop of jazz, flappers, speakeasies, the first radio, and the scandalous rise of skirt hemlines. In th...

An exceptional father-son story from the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. Most of ...

A sublime comedy of contemporary manners, this is the novel Jane Austen might well have written had she lived in twenty-first- century California.Nothing ever moves in a straight line in Karen Joy Fowler's fiction, and in her latest, the complex dance of modern love has never been so devious or so much fun. Six Californians join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. Wit...

Pagans explores the rise of Christianity from a surprising and unique viewpoint: that of the people who witnessed their ways of life destroyed by what seemed then a powerful religious cult. These "pagans" were actually pious Greeks, Romans, Syrians, and Gauls who observed the traditions of their ancestors. To these devout polytheists, Christians who worshiped only one deity were immoral atheists who believed that a splash of water on the deathbed could erase a lifetime of sin....

New York Times BestsellerThe remarkable true story of an extraordinary relationship between psychologist Irene M. Pepperberg and Alex, an African Grey parrot who proved scientists and accepted wisdom wrong by demonstrating an astonishing ability to communicate and understand complex ideas.""You be good. I love you,"" were Alex's final words to his owner, research scientist Irene Pepperberg, before his premature death at age thirty-...