Showing results by narrator "Indira Varma" in All Categories

When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.

Exhausted single mother Rebekah Murphy leaves her daughters with a friend in the city to accompany her brother on a work assignment on a picturesque island. An hour after arriving, her and her brother are attacked. He vanishes, she's left for dead and, by the time she makes it back to safety, it's already too late: the island has closed for the season - and it'll be seven months before anyone returns. But even with her brother missing, even with no boats, phones or people, Rebekah will soon realise that finding a way back to the mainland is only the start of her nightmare.

Down market lanes crammed with too many people, dogs, and rickshaws lies a jumble of tin-roofed homes where nine-year-old Jai lives with his family. From his doorway, he can spot the glittering lights of the city’s fancy high-rises, and though his mother works as a maid in one, to him they seem 1,000 miles away. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line plunges listeners deep into this neighborhood to trace the unfolding of a tragedy through the eyes of a child as he has his first perilous collisions with an unjust and complicated wider world.

After losing her parents, young Mary Lennox is sent from India to live in her uncle's gloomy mansion on the wild English moors. She is lonely and has no-one to play with, but one day she learns of a secret garden somewhere in the grounds that no one is allowed to enter. Then Mary uncovers an old key in a flowerbed - and a gust of magic leads her to the hidden door. Slowly she turns the key and enters a world she could never have imagined.

Mary is a difficult grandmother for Durga to love. She is sharp-tongued and ferocious, with more demons than there are lines on her palms. When Durga visits her in rural Malaysia, she only wants to endure Mary and the dark memories home brings for as long as it takes to escape. But a reckoning is coming. Stuck together in the rising heat, both women must untangle the truth from the myth of their family's past.

Cornwall, 1972. Three lighthouse keepers vanish from a remote rock, miles from the shore. The entrance door is locked from the inside. The clocks have stopped. The principal keeper's weather log describes a mighty storm, but the skies have been clear all week. What happened to those three men, out on the tower? The heavy sea whispers their names. Black rocks roll beneath the swell, drowning ghosts. Can their secrets ever be recovered from the waves?

Often described as ‘the father of realism’, Henrik Ibsen was a pioneer of modernist drama. He influenced playwrights as diverse as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, and is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. Included in this collection are adaptations of his tragicomic masterpiece The Wild Duck, his complex and compelling play Rosmersholm, the epic drama Brand and the tragedy John Gabriel Borkman.

We follow the fortunes of Mickey Bliss and his fellow signallers from the Lahore Division of the British Indian Army as they experience life - and death - on the front line. Meanwhile, Dr Celestine de Tullio battles to save soldiers suffering from gas gangrene and trench fever - and experiences the fighting firsthand when she enlists in the Serbian Army and commands a dangerous offensive. They are all cogs in an immense machine, one which connects situations across the whole theatre of the war, over four long years.

Cardiff Bay. The government has ordered the excavation of the wreckage of a secret underground base. DCI Tom Cutler is watching from a distance, fascinated by the process. There are people in his dreams. People he feels he should know. The disbanded Torchwood Institute spent a century accumulating non-terrestrial artefacts and catching aliens. Who knows what - or who - might still be intact down there. But by the time they find the first body, Suzie Costello is long gone. Based on the hit series created by Russell T. Davies, Long Time Dead is a prequel....

The way we communicate has changed. Today many of our interactions are digital, but until recently writing letters was the norm. Drawing from over 100 miles of records held at the UK's official government archive, The National Archives at Kew, this collection of letters, postcards and telegrams will shine a spotlight on a range of significant historical moments and occurrences, recapturing a lost world in which correspondence was king.

Late 21st century and Earth has been reduced to an uninhabited wasteland. What was left of humanity was evacuated into overpopulated space stations, or 'Habitats'. A hotbed for crime and strange new religious sects, the Habitat Security Division has no shortage of work. No-nonsense Investigator Bridget Kurtis soon finds herself embroiled in a life or death struggle with a sinister cult, and what she uncovers has disturbing implications for the future of the human race.... 

Katherine Mansfield is remembered as one of the great modernist short-story writers, who managed to pack a huge amount of creative work into her 34 years before she died of TB in 1923. This impressive collection includes brand-new full-cast BBC dramatisations of 'Bliss', 'Something Childish but Very Natural', 'Marriage a la Mode', 'Daughters of the Late Colonel', 'The Garden Party', 'Life of Ma Parker and Her First Ball', plus many more readings brought to life by a wealth of narrators.

The 5 shortlisted titles for the BBC National Short Story Award 2011 administered in partnership with Booktrust, containing: Rag Love by M. J. Hyland, read by Mike Sengelow; The Heart of Denis Noble by Alison MacLeod, read by Tim Pigott-Smith; Wires by Jon McGregor, read by Lydia Wilson; The Human Circadian Pacemaker by K. J. Orr, read by Indira Varma; The Dead Roads by D. W. Wilson, read by Trevor White.