Justine is the first volume in The Alexandria Quartet, four interlinked novels set in the sensuous, hot environment of Alexandria just before the Second World War. Within this polyglot setting of richly idiosyncratic characters is Justine, wild and intense, wife to the wealthy business man Nessim, a mari complaisant. Her emotional and sexual wildness fuels a highly-charged atmosphere which, caught famously by Durrell’s poetic language, made Justine (1957), and the three novels that complet...

In this audiobook, Nigel Anthony narrates the gripping history of the polar continent, from the great discoveries of the nineteenth century to modern scientific breakthroughsAntarctica, the ice kingdom hosting the South Pole, looms large in the human imagination. The secrets of this vast frozen desert have long tempted explorers, but its brutal climate and glacial shores notoriously resist human intrusion. Land of Wondrous Cold tells a gripping story of the...

Set in the fictional South American country of Costaguana, Nostromo explores the volatile politics and crippling greed surrounding the San Tomé silver mine. The story of power, love, revolutions, loyalty and reward is told with richly evocative description and brilliantly realised characters. But Nostromo is more than an adventure story; it is also a profoundly dark moral fable. Its language is as compellingly resonant as the sea itself; the characters absorbing and complex. It was Conrad’...

Lady Susan was the first of Jane Austen’s novels to be completed. An epistolary novel in eighteenth-century style, it tells the story of the recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon, intelligent but highly manipulative, who is intent on gaining financially secure relationships for both herself and her wayward but shy teenage daughter Frederica. Less known than Austen’s six great later novels, it demonstrates the wit and sharp observations of Jane Austen and is shown at its best in audiobook form...

The tragic but doomed love of Marguerite and Armand, recounted so passionately in La Dame aux Camélias, became one of the great love stories from its first publication in 1848. The title role of the consumptive heroine and her ultimate sacrifice inspired actresses from Sarah Bernhardt to Greta Garbo and Giuseppe Verdi to write La Traviata. In this sound dramatisation, the story of passion and conflict is as fresh and compelling as when it was first written.

Three semi-autobiographical plays by Victor Pemberton telling the story of one family across the 20th centuryNovelist and playwright Victor Pemberton was best known for scripting Doctor Who and working on Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock. His many plays for BBC Radio included The Slide, Kill the Pharaoh. and this three-part family saga, a love story inspired by the lives of his own parents and starring Nerys Hughes, Nigel Anthony, Sheila...

Crime and Punishment is set in the claustrophobic slums of St Petersburg in the heat of the summer. The novel's setting mirrors the inner life of the main characters as they struggle with their problems of grinding poverty. Central to the plot are the thoughts and actions of Rodion Raskolnikoff, an embittered yet idealistic student who is disastrously influenced by new ideas on morality. He is finally redeemed through the love of Sonia, a prostitute who is also a devout Christian, and the ...

‘I knew that Clea would share everything with me, withholding nothing not even the look of complicity which women reserve only for their mirrors.’ In Clea, the concluding part of The Alexandria Quartet, Darley returns to Alexandria now caught by war-fever. The conflagration has its effect on his circle on Nessim and Justine, Balthazar and Clea, Mountolive and Pombal a clarity of purpose emerges as the story moves towards its cadence.

The politics of love, the intrigues of desire … love and murder, moved obscurely in the dark corners of Alexandria’s streets and squares, brothels and drawing-rooms moved like a great congress of eels in the slime of plot and counter-plot…’ In Balthazar, the second volume in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, the story and the characters come more clearly into focus. Darley, the reflective Englishman, receives from Balthazar, the pathologist, a mass of notes which attempt to explain what really...

This widely-studied play is one of the best sellers of the Shakespeare canon. This production is the seventh Shakespeare play in the series undertaken by Naxos AudioBooks in conjunction with Cambridge University Press.

BBC Radio productions of the first seven books in Patrick O'Brian's hugely popular Napoleonic naval series - plus bonus materialWidely regarded as the most engaging historical novels ever written, the 21 books in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series have garnered millions of fans since the publication of the first volume over 50 years ago. Included here are BBC radio adaptations of the first seven thrilling stories.Master and Commander

**INCLUDES AN EXCERPT OF RENDELL’S FINAL NOVEL, DARK CORNERSFrom “one of the most remarkable novelists of her generation” (People) a “refined, probing, and intelligent” (USA TODAY) mystery in the masterful Inspector Wexford series…more enthralling than ever after fifty years.**A female vicar named Sarah Hussein is discovered strangled in her Kingsmarkham vicarage. A single mother to a teenage girl, Hussein was working in a male-dominated professio...