Frederick Jaeger and Phyllis Logan star in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel. Summoned to the forbidding heart of the Carpathian mountains in Transylvania, Jonathan Harker journeys to Castle Dracula. There he becomes the unwitting prisoner of a mysterious nobleman whom local legend suggests is Nosferatu, the vampire, a night-stalking beast whose immortality depends on the slaking of his insatiable thirst for human blood. Able to transform himsel...

We enter the world of a fictional town of Plassans in Zola's native region of Provence and we are introduced to the eccentric heroine Adelaide Fouque, later known as Tante Dide, who becomes the common ancestor for both the Rougon and Macquart families. Her legitimate son from her short marriage to her late husband, a labourer named Rougon who worked on Dide's land, is forced to grow up alongside two illegitimate children.

Against the backdrop of political and legal corruption in Second Empire France, La Bête Humaine (1890) contrasts the technological advancements of the Machine Age with the primitive and timeless human impulse to possess through killing and to kill through possession. The lives of two railwaymen on the Paris to Le Havre line are fatally entwined by their love for the same woman in this shocking account of brutal violence, greed, revenge and repression. In the wider cast of Zola’s characters...

**“If Carpentier is ever to get a new reading in English, it should be now. . . . West’s translations . . . reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction.” —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of BooksThe best-known book by Cuba’s most important twentieth-century novelist, in its first new English translation in more than sixty years and featuring a new introduction by Leonardo PaduraA Penguin Classic**Dissatisfied with his em...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Dark secrets, forbidden love, and the shadow of the Inquisition fill the pages of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic masterpiece, The Italian. First published in 1797, this novel cemented Radcliffe’s reputation as one of the foremost pioneers of Gothic fiction, weaving mystery, suspense, and romance into an unforgettable tale of terror and passion.The story follows Ellena Rosalba, a young woman of beauty a...

Andrée Blouin—once called the most dangerous woman in Africa—played a leading role in the struggles for decolonization that shook the continent in the 1950s and '60s, advising the postcolonial leaders of Algeria, both Congos, Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea, and Ghana.In this autobiography, Blouin retraces her remarkable journey as an African revolutionary. Born in French Equatorial Africa and abandoned at the age of three, she endured years of neglect and abuse in a colonial orphanage, ...