Showing results by narrator "Juliet Stevenson" in All Categories

Wealthy Maggie Verver has everything she could ever ask for - except a husband and a title. While in Italy, acquiring art for his museum back in the States, Maggie’s millionaire father, Adam, decides to remedy this and acquire a husband for Maggie. Enter Prince Amerigo, of a titled but now poor aristocratic Florentine family. Amerigo is the perfect candidate.

In this moving collection, Shaun Usher gathers together some of the most powerful letters about love ever written. Whether inspired by love’s first blush or the recriminations at its ending, the regrets of unrequited feelings and the joys of passions known, Letters of Note: Love is essential listening for anyone with a heart.

Published in 1928, Orlando is a fictional biography that spans several centuries and follows the protagonist, Orlando, an Elizabethan nobleman who undergoes a mysterious gender transformation. The novel explores themes of gender identity, fluidity and the constraints imposed by societal norms. It challenges traditional notions of gender roles and raises questions about the nature of identity and the passage of time.

In Madame Bovary, one of the great novels of 19th-century France, Flaubert draws a deeply felt and sympathetic portrait of a woman who, having married a country doctor and found herself unhappy with a rural, genteel existence, longs for love and excitement. However, her aspirations and her desires to escape only bring her further disappointment and eventually lead to unexpected, painful consequences. Flaubert’s critical portrait of bourgeois provincial life remains as powerful as ever

It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment? Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.

Eve and Liza, Mother and Daughter, live a quiet life in their remote home; a rustic gatehouse of a country mansion. At first glance their lives appear quite ordinary, except that Liza has almost no knowledge of the outside world, has never played with a child her own age and has witnessed her mother commit murder, on multiple occasions.

Letters of Note, the book based on the beloved website of the same name, became an instant classic on publication in 2013, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. This new edition sees the collection of the world's most entertaining, inspiring and unusual letters updated with 14 riveting new missives and a new introduction from curator Shaun Usher.

For 70 years now Desert Island Discs has managed that rare feat - to be both enduring and relevant. By casting away the biggest names of the day in science, business, politics, showbiz, sport, and the arts, it presents a cross-sectional snapshot of the times in which we live. As the decades have passed, the programme has kept pace; never frozen in time yet always, somehow, comfortingly the same.

BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs celebrates its 70 birthday in 2012.

A fast-paced Victorian thriller that will delight audiences today as it did 100 years ago, Lady Audley's Secret has subterfuge, kidnapping, jealousy, and fraud, all thrown into the mix and shaken up for good measure.

A mystery which keeps a listener guessing until the last moments, this production is a must-listen for anyone who enjoys playing detective.

Joan’s voice is almost a whisper. ‘Nobody talked about what they did during the war. We all knew we weren’t allowed to.’ Joan Stanley has a secret. She is a loving mother, a doting grandmother, and leads a quiet, unremarkable life in the suburbs. Then one morning there is a knock on the door, and suddenly the past she has been so keen to hide for the last fifty years threatens to overturn her comfortable world. Cambridge University in 1937 is awash with ideas and idealists

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Noonday by Pat Barker, read by Juliet Stevenson, Stephen Boxer, John Sackville, Anne Reid & Finlay Robertson From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls The final novel in Pat...

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.

Following the death of her beloved mother Jennifer Worth in 2011, Suzannah Worth discovered amongst her manuscripts a folder simply labelled 'Fifth Book'. Imagine her excitement when she sat down to read and her mother's distinctive voice came flooding back. This enchanting new collection from...

Brought to you by Penguin. Amory's first memory is of her father doing a handstand. She has memories of him returning on leave during the First World War. But his absences, both actual and emotional, are what she chiefly remembers. It is her photographer uncle Greville who supplies the emotional...

Brought to you by Penguin. Set at the outbreak of World War II, Lady Sophia Garfield dreams of becoming a beautiful spy but manages not to notice a nest of German agents right under her nose. Until the murder of her maid and the kidnapping of her beloved bulldog force them on her attention, with...

Brought to you by Penguin. THE BOOK THAT INSPIRED THE MAJOR BBC DRAMA STARRING BAFTA AWARD-WINNING ACTRESS GLENDA JACKSON How do you solve a mystery when you can't remember the clues? Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn't remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets...

'There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party....' As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they first appear....

As the First World War takes hold, a young girl comes of age in a troubled London. Capturing the longing, excitement and poignant comedy of adolescence, The Beautiful Visit is the debut novel from the beloved author of the Cazalet Chronicles, Elizabeth Jane Howard. 'She helps us to do the...

The Girls of Slender Means is the third Muriel Spark audio release of 2012, following The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Complete Short Stories. It is 1945; a time of cultural and political change, and also one of slender means. Spark's evocative and sharply drawn novel focuses on a group of women living together in a hostel in Kensington who face new challenges in uncertain times. The novel is at once dramatic and character-based, and shows Muriel Spark at the height of her literary powers.

The Old Curiosity Shop follows young Nell Trent and her grandfather, an eccentric and kind-hearted shopkeeper, as they struggle to survive in the shadow of poverty. The old curiosity shop, filled with strange and forgotten treasures, becomes a symbol of their fragile world—one that is constantly threatened by forces beyond their control. With its unforgettable characters and Dickens’ trademark blend of humor and pathos, this novel remains one of his most beloved works.