Showing results by narrator "Indira Varma" in All Categories

Everybody knows there's no such thing as a female wizard. So when the wizard Drum Billet accidentally passes on his staff of power to an eighth daughter of an eighth son, a girl called Eskarina (Esk, for short), the misogynistic world of wizardry wants nothing to do with her.

Vampires have come to Lancre, but they're not what you'd expect. Sure, they drink blood and view humans as dinner, but they're modern and sophisticated. They've got style and fancy waistcoats. And they're not a bit afraid of garlic. The Magpyr family are out of the casket and want a bite of the future. But they haven't met the neighbours yet. Between them and Lancre stand a coven of four - Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Magrat and young Agnes - and they don't take kindly to murderous intruders....

The witches Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick are travelling to far-distant Genua to stop a wedding and save a kingdom. But how do you fight a happy-ever-after, especially when it comes with glass slippers and a power-hungry Fairy Godmother who has made Destiny an offer it can't refuse? It's hard to resist a good story, even when the fate of the kingdom depends on it....

The Opera House in Ankh-Morpork is home to music, theatrics and a harmless masked Ghost who lurks behind the scenes. But now a set of mysterious backstage murders may just stop the show. Agnes Nitt has left her rural home of Lancre in the hopes of launching a successful singing career in the big city. The only problem is, she doesn't quite look the part. And there are two witches who would much rather she return home to join their coven.

Three witches gathered on a lonely heath. A king cruelly murdered, his throne usurped by his ambitious cousin. A child heir and the royal crown, both missing.

On Midsummer Night, dreams are especially powerful. So powerful, in fact, that they can cause the walls between realities to come crashing down. And some things you really don't want to break through.

Nisha has crossed oceans to give her child a future. Now she spends her days caring for someone else's daughter while her own waits for her return, half a world away. For Petra, it is only natural to hire a domestic worker to keep her house clean and her family fed. Their lives have nothing in common, except the love they feel for their daughters. Then one day, Nisha vanishes. No one cares about the disappearance of a foreign domestic worker, except Petra and Nisha's secret lover, Yiannis, the only connection to her daughter back in Sri Lanka. 

Written by a host of top radio writers and starring some of Britain's finest actors, these sparkling, beautifully crafted comedy dramas are centred around people with unconscious yearnings. From the serial seducer to the lonely mother's boy, each is looking for love - but will they find it?

Inspired by the novels of D.H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love, this ambitious quartet from Booker Prize-winning novelist A.S. Byatt charts the lives of the Potter family between 1953 and 1970. Set against the changing social and political landscape of England in the '50s and '60s, it follows the heroine, Frederica, from precocious teenager to TV talk-show host and from her Yorkshire home to the heart of swinging London.

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.

Daniel Ballantyne: monster and angel, thief and conman, genius - and murderer? Newly released from Wormwood Scrubs, and dying of cancer, notorious art forger Daniel Ballantyne agrees to help art critic Jessica Brown write his biography. But as Jessica digs deeper into his life, she realises that nearly everything he's told her is a lie, and behind his charming persona is a man capable of almost anything. Trapped in a cat-and-mouse game with a master manipulator, Jessica finds herself putting her reputation - and her life - on the line.

This diverse, eclectic collection of plays explores an array of social, political and historical events from a female point of view. In these captivating dramas, we see the world through their eyes, giving us a fresh perspective on a female history that is too often unrecorded, misrepresented or misunderstood.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.... 

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.