Showing results by narrator "Diana Quick" in All Categories

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 today. And yet her own colorful life, including her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica, remains too little explored, until now.

One 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.

Daphne du Maurier was one of the 20th century’s most popular writers. Extraordinarily prolific, she produced a string of bestsellers, many of which were adapted as award-winning films. From romance and adventure yarns to psychological thrillers and supernatural tales, the breadth and imaginative variety of her storytelling continues to thrill us today. This bumper collection features her most famous works and some lesser-known gems, beginning with full-cast adaptations of seven of her much-loved novels.

Undue Influence is the 19th novel by Anita Brookner, the Booker Prize-winning author of Hotel du Lac. Enigmatic Claire is 30 and lives alone. When she meets Martin Gibson, a faded scholar, she becomes inordinately interested. She is even more interested when she meets his wife, a far more spectacular personality. But the unexpected news of this woman's death releases emotions that were not entirely foreseen.

Elizabeth Gaskell's compassionate, richly dramatic novel features one of the most original and fully-rounded female characters in Victorian fiction, Margaret Hale. It shows how, forced to move from the country to an industrial northern town, she develops a passionate sense of social justice, and a turbulent relationship with mill-owner John Thornton. North and South depicts a young woman discovering herself, in a nuanced portrayal of what divides people, and what brings them together.

First broadcast in 1990, this monumental adaptation of John Galsworthy's Nobel Prize-winning novel series was a radio event. It was the most expensive drama serial ever produced, featured one of the biggest, most star-studded casts and dominated the Radio 4 schedules for more than five months, attracting more than a million listeners each week. Comprising all nine books in Galsworthy's Forsyte Chronicles, it spans 50 years - from 1886 to 1936 - and tells the irresistible story of an upper-class dynasty torn apart by a terrible feud.

Locked up at the age of 16 for the bloody murders of her employer and his housekeeper, Grace Marks was lucky not to have been hung. But the questions remain: innocent or guilty, instigator or innocent dupe? Sixteen years later, Dr Simon Jordan, an expert in amnesia, is given access to Grace, who now spends most of her days as a servant in the home of the prison Governor, befriended by the Governor's wife who believes in her innocence.

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....

Miranda Seymour’s biography reveals a proud and fiercely independent artist, one who experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil—and yet was never a victim. I Used to Live Here Once enables one of our most excitingly intuitive biographers to uncover the hidden truth about a fascinatingly elusive woman. Persuasive, surprising and compassionate, this unforgettable biography brings Jean Rhys to life as never before.

Emma Harte was the heroine of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s multi-million copy bestseller, A Woman of Substance. Now she is eighty years old and ready to hand over the reins of the vast business empire she has created. To her favourite grandchild, Paula McGill Fairley, Emma bequeaths her mighty retailing empire with these heartfelt words: ‘I charge you to hold my dream.’

A forgotten past hides the key to the future. Meredith Stratton, a 44 year old owner of six elegant international inns, is about to celebrate her daughter’s engagement. But her happiness is threatened as she begins to suffer from a strange illness that baffles everyone. Her doctor cannot find a physical cause for her debilitating symptoms. Desperate for answers, Meredith seeks the help of a psychiatrist. Through therapy Meredith peels back the layers of her life to discover the truth behind her most careful creation - herself.

A BBC Radio 4 drama of mesmerising delicacy from Julia Blackburn, winner of the Pen Ackerley prize for memoir 2009, and daughter of poet Thomas Blackburn. Originally broadcast as the 'Afternoon Play' on 29 March 2011. Thomas Blackburn was an alcoholic before he became a poet, but in spite of his drunken rages, his erratic behaviour and his crazy obsession with death, Julia always knew that he loved her.

Anna Karenina is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature. Her overwhelming charm dominates a novel of unparalleled richness and density. Tolstoy considered this book to be his first real attempt at a novel form, and it addresses the very nature of society at all levels - of destiny, death, human relationships and the irreconcilable contradictions of existence.

Once it had been the great forest of Lythe - a vast and impenetrable thicket of green.And here, in the beginning, lived the Fairfaxes, grandly, at Fairfax Manor, visited once by the great Gloriana herself. But over the centuries the forest had been destroyed, replaced by Streets of Trees. The Fairfaxes have dwindled too; now they live in 'Arden' at the end of Hawthorne Close and are hardly a family at all.

Mallory Keswick is a woman with the world at her feet. Then, out of the blue, that world is shattered by tragedy and she loses all that she holds dear. Torn by grief, Mal knows that she must find a way to rebuild. 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 cafe and shop selling gourmet food and kitchenware and turns it into a highly successful venture. >But there still remains an aching void - a grief that no individual, nor her new-found business acumen, can assuage.

Set against a background of political turbulence in Kerala, Southern India, The God of Small Things tells the story of twins Esthappen and Rahel. Amongst the vats of banana jam and heaps of peppercorns in their grandmother’s factory, they try to craft a childhood for themselves amidst what constitutes their family: their lonely, lovely mother; their beloved Uncle Chacko (pickle baron, radical Marxist, and bottom-pincher); and their avowed enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grand-aunt).

Television war correspondent Nicky Wells is a media superstar. Courageous, beautiful, and renowned for her hard-hitting reports from the world’s most dangerous trouble spots, her life is shattered when she loses the only man she ever truly loved - a dashing English aristocrat, Charles Devereaux. Nicky seeks solace in her work and in her friendship with photographer Cleeland Donovan and, after a romantic interlude in Provence, begins to think she may fall in love again.

In 1905 a young kitchen maid leaves Fairley Hall. Emma Harte is sixteen, single and pregnant. By 1968 she is one of the richest women in the world - ruler of a business empire stretching from Yorkshire to the glittering cities of America and the rugged vastness of Australia. A Woman of Substance is as impossible to put down as it is to forget. This multi-million copy bestseller is truly a novel of our times.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's classic poem, read by Diana Quick.

Written in blank verse, Aurora Leigh is Browning's self-styled ‘novel in verse', a first-person narration of the lives of Marian Erle and the eponymous Aurora.

Travelling across Florence, London, and Paris, and playing off the works of Anne Louise Germaine de Staël and George Sand, Aurora Leigh is one of the greatest poems of the 19th century.

For lecturer Sophie Rivers a writing course on the outskirts of Birmingham is a bit of a busman’s holiday. Still, creative inspiration might strike. But then, knowing Sophie’s luck, so might a murderer… She can hardly believe it when a fellow student is found dead in her room. And when a course tutor goes missing, it’s clear that one of the students might be interested in death as a reality rather than a literary concept. But who is responsible? Sophie can’t control her investigative instincts.