Two novels by the award-winning Canadian writer Carol Shields, dramatised for BBC RadioCarol Shields was one of Canada’s most renowned contemporary authors. Often compared to Jane Austen, her deft, witty and compassionate works depicting the everyday lives of ordinary people won her numerous literary honours. Included here are adaptations of her Pulitzer Prize-winning tour de force, The Stone Diaries, and her final novel Unless, which was nominate...

Nate and Vanessa started The War, but only their son Matthew can end it! Young Matthew’s world shatters when his parents split up and put him in the middle of their custody battle. Desperate to escape their never-ending conflicts, Matthew imitates his hero, Luke Skywalker, and launches an against-all-odds mission to stop Mom and Dad’s war of vengeance! Will Matthew’s little brother Thomas Rabbit help blow up the Divorce War Death Star, or will he hide and play with his bun...

This audiobook brings together original pieces on Thoreau by twenty-seven of today's leading writersWith narration by William Hope, Barbara Barnes, Kaliswa Brewster, Kate Harper, Peter Marinker, and Ako MitchellFeatures essays by Jennifer Finney Boylan • Kristen Case • George Howe Colt • Gerald Early • Paul Elie • Will Eno • Adam Gopnik • Lauren Groff • Celeste Headlee • Pico Iyer • Alan Lightman • James Marcus • Megan Marshall • Michelle Nijhuis • Zo...

A breathtaking epic, the award-winning His Dark Materials trilogy spans a multitude of worlds. The second instalment, The Subtle Knife, introduces Will Parry – a young boy in search of his long-lost explorer father. Will’s discovery of an extraordinary ‘window in the air’ near the Oxford ring road leads him out of our world and into the strange and unsettling Cittàgazze. There he meets Lyra, a girl who is herself searching for something: the secret of the mystical substan...

Since America's founding, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued a vast number of decisions on a staggeringly wide variety of subjects. And hundreds of judges have occupied the bench. Yet as Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and bestselling co-author of Nudge, points out, almost every one of the Justices fits into a very small number of types regardless of ideology: the hero, the soldier, the minimalist, and the mute. Heroes are willing to invoke the Constitution to invalidate state l...

Full-cast adaptations of four works by Nathaniel HawthorneNathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts. A descendant of judge John Hathorne, who oversaw the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, he wrote several works inspired by Puritan New England, with themes of guilt, sin and retribution. This collection contains his classic novel, The Scarlet Letter, as well as Wakefield, Rappaccini's Daughter and The Blithedale Romance.

For years legendary broadcaster Alistair Cooke brought America to the rest of the world with incomparable wit and wisdom. This is his classic "personal history" of America, guiding us through centuries of changing life in the USA. Beginning with his own arrival in America as a graduate in the 1930s, Alistair Cooke discusses the explorers who put their new-found land on the map, the pioneers who tamed the Wild West, the soldiers who fought for independence and the tycoons who built fortunes...

Samuel Beckett, one of the great avant-garde Irish dramatists and writers of the second half of the twentieth century, was born on 13 April 1906. His centenary will be celebrated throughout 2006 with performances of his major plays, including Waiting for Godot. Here are the two most famous plays for solo voice. Krapp’s Last Tape finds an old man, with his tape recorder, musing over the past and future. Not I is a remarkable tour de force for a single actress, as a woman emits memories and ...

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of David Shields highly persuasive Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Read by the actor Peter Marinker.Reality Hunger is a manifesto for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists who, living in an unbearably artificial world, are breaking ever larger chunks of 'reality' into their work. The questions Shields explores - the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real - play out constantly around...

In the bitter winter of 1847, from an Ireland torn by injustice and natural disaster, the Star of the Sea sets sail for New York. On board are hundreds of fleeing refugees, all braving the Atlantic in search of a new home. But a camouflaged killer is stalking the decks, hungry for the vengeance that will bring absolution. The twenty-six day journey will see many lives end, whilst others begin afresh…

The different ways that social change happens, from unleashing to nudging to social cascades. How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely kept out of mainstream discourse; now there is no shortage of media outlets for them. In this book, with the help of behavioral economics, psychology, and other fields, ...

**SUNDAY TIMES BESTELLER**This book is about learning to live.Echoing Socrates' statement that the unexamined life not worth living, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz draws on his twenty-five years of work and more than 50,000 hours of conversations to form a collection of beautifully rendered tales that illuminate the human experience.These are stories about everyday lives: from a woman who finds herself daydreaming as she retur...