Showing results by narrator "Louise Brealey" in All Categories

Edinburgh, 1847. Will Raven is a medical student, apprenticing for the brilliant and renowned Dr Simpson. Sarah Fisher is Simpson’s housemaid and has all of Raven’s intelligence, but none of his privileges. As bodies begin to appear across the Old Town, Raven and Sarah find themselves propelled headlong into the darkest shadows of Edinburgh’s underworld. And if either of them are to make it out alive, they will have to work together to find out who’s responsible for the gruesome deaths.

Brought to you by Penguin. In a hyper-competitive world obsessed with rankings, super-wealth and greatness, how can we live up to democratic ideals of equality? Erica Benner has spent a lifetime thinking about these questions from different angles in different countries - from post-war Japan...

On the first day of her new job, Harris is called to the scene of a brutal murder at the heart of Surrey society. A shocking crime, with a meticulous killer: the victim’s eyes have been removed and the body drained of blood, with no forensic evidence left at the scene. Her boss insists it must be the return of a killer who escaped justice several years ago, leaving a trail of bloody ritualistic killings. Harris isn’t so sure: both sets of victims have had their eyes removed, but other details are significantly different.

An anthology of plays and original radio dramas from the prolific playwright Born and brought up in the East End of London, Bernard Kops came to fame in the late 1950s as part of British drama’s ‘New Wave’. A lyrical chronicler of Jewish family life, he is often compared to Arnold Wesker...

The '90s was the decade when British culture reclaimed its position at the artistic centre of the world. Not since the 'Swinging Sixties' had art, comedy, fashion, film, football, literature and music interwoven into a blooming of national self-confidence. It was the decade of Lad Culture and Girl Power, of Blur vs Oasis. When fashion runways shone with British talent, Young British Artists became household names, football was 'coming home' and British film went worldwide.

London, chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous province of Oceania. It's 1984 and Julia Worthing works as a mechanic fixing the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Under the ideology of IngSoc and the rule of the Party and its leader Big Brother, Julia is a model citizen - cheerfully cynical, believing in nothing and caring not at all about politics. She routinely breaks the rules but also collaborates with the regime whenever necessary. Everyone likes Julia.

Composed in the early 1350s, in the wake of the Black Death, The Decameron comprises 100 short stories from all over the world, reset by Boccaccio among the flourishing merchant classes of Renaissance Italy. Their universal themes—love, sex, religion, fate, morality—resonate with us to this day, and their witty, satirical, bawdy voice sounds utterly modern. Monty Python star and medieval historian Terry Jones presents ten BBC Radio dramatisations of tales from Giovanni Boccaccio's humane and comic masterpiece

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Louise Brealey, known for her roles in Sherlock, Clique and Death in Paradise. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Angeline Goreau. When her family becomes impoverished after a disastrous financial speculation...

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a prolific author of novels, short stories and poetry, who also wrote a biography of T. H. White, translated Proust and was an authority on Tudor church music. A sharp, insightful storyteller, she was one of the 20th Century's most acute observers of English mores, and her work is infused with subversive themes reflecting her feminist and Marxist views. This comprehensive anthology includes dramatisations of her two best-known novels.

Every year, Tess and Maggie meet up to try a different activity, something they've never done together before. This year, it's baking, and for a few hours each Friday afternoon, they put the rest of their lives on hold to make cakes. And not just ordinary cakes, but spectacular, unique and glorious gateaux, to celebrate special occasions and commemorate landmark events. When they help a neighbour in distress, they create their first showstopper - a dark, sultry bitter chocolate cake.

Sarah Hargreaves doesn't share her husband Matthew's desire to join the Puritan exiles, but when their son Benjamin is arrested on a trumped-up charge, they have little choice but to go. Things go rapidly from bad to worse and they decide to leave everything behind. Hoping to find peace and like-minded souls in a new religious community in America, they spend everything they have left on a ticket to sail on the Mayflower.

For almost a decade, Rachel Caine has turned her back on home, kept distant by family disputes and her work monitoring wolves on an Idaho reservation. But now, summoned by the eccentric earl of Annerdale and his controversial scheme to reintroduce the grey wolf to the English countryside, she is back in the peat and wet light of the Lake District. The earl's project harks back to an ancient idyll of untamed British wilderness.

A PEOPLE Magazine Must-Read Book for Fall 2023 | An Esquire Best Book of Fall 2023 | A Guardian Biggest New Book of 2023 | A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2023 An imaginative, feminist, and brilliantly relevant-to-today retelling of Orwell’s 1984, from the point of view of Winston Smith’s...

Set between Moscow, Russia and St Andrews, Scotland, it tackles the metaphysics of golf, the mindset of the classic Russian novels and the power of art and music to rewrite reality, as Aneliya comes into contact with an angelic presence named Xstabeth who simultaneously fulfils and disappears both her father and her lover. Written in a tender, mythical key, it is a love letter to the books of Chandler, Nabokov and Dostoevsky and also a musical text, with chord progressions appearing at key points in the action, so that the audiobook may be sung, played or otherwise accompanied.

The story begins in 1970. The day after Jimi Hendrix's death...dairy farmer Michael Eavis invites revellers to his field in Somerset to attend a 'Pop, Folk & Blues' festival. Tickets are £1 each, enticing more than a thousand customers with the promise of music, dance, poetry, theatre, lights and spontaneous entertainment - as well as free milk from his own Worthy Farm cows. Fast forward through five tumultuous decades, and the Eavises' vision now encompasses a gigantic 'city in the fields', with a total annual population nearing a quarter of a million.

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NOMINEE ""An extraordinary work that will stand as blazing witness to the age that bore it.” -- Sarah Perry A ""masterpiece"" (Daisy Johnson) of mortality, passion, and human connection, set against the backdrop of a deadly global virus—from the...

A hilarious, heartfelt sequel to How to Build a Girl, the breakout novel from feminist sensation Caitlin Moran who the New York Times called, ""rowdy and fearless . . . sloppy, big-hearted and alive in all the right ways."" You can’t have your best friend be famous if you’re not famous. It...

Venture beyond the familiar and discover the fragile line between tranquility and turmoil in 12 gripping and unnerving short stories, masterfully crafted by Tove Jansson. From a professor stranded in a picturesque Spanish village to a holiday in Finland disrupted by an intrusive child, each tale unravels the unsettling facets of journeys that veer off course. Brilliantly evoking the shifting scenes and restlessness of summer, "Travelling Light" is guaranteed to surprise. Finnish-Swedish writer and artist Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is globally cherished for creating the Moomin universe.