Showing results by narrator "Juliette Stevenson" in All Categories

The remarkable double life of an American-turned-British spy, Virginia Hall, a 'bolshie' woman from Maryland who, determined to overcome a physical disability that threatened to define her life, successfully infiltrated Vichy France for England's SOE before America's entry into WWII and then, three years later, for the SOS, providing crucial intelligence and logistics for the mounting French Resistance and, later, Allied troops.

A place of myths, rumours and secrets, The Hotel looms over the dark Fens, tall and grey in its Gothic splendour. Built on cursed land, a history of violent death suffuses its very foundations - yet it has a magnetism that is impossible to ignore. Here are the stories of The Hotel: stories of children, mothers, monsters, cult film-makers, thrill-seekers and workers on the night shift, all with their own tales of its strange power, of the horrors of Room 63, and of desperate but failed attempts to escape its seductive pull.

Jane Start is thirty-three, broke, and recently single. Ten years prior, she had a hit song-written by world-famous superstar Jonesy-but Jane hasn't had a breakout since. Now she's living out of four garbage bags at her parents' house, reduced to performing to Karaoke tracks in Las Vegas. Rock bottom. But when her longtime manager Pippa sends Jane to London to regroup, she's seated next to an intriguing stranger on the flight-the other Tom Hardy, an elegantly handsome Oxford professor of literature. Jane is instantly smitten by Tom, and soon, truly inspired.

Columnist, critic and award-winning author Craig Brown is well known for his Private Eye parodies lampooning politicians and celebrities. He has written for numerous newspapers, both under his own name and as his alter egos Wallace Arnold and Bel Littlejohn. Collected here are Brown's four fantastic radio series, plus two bonus programmes in which he discusses his life and work.

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 heroic and absurd results. One of Mitford's earliest novels and written before Christmas 1939, Pigeon Pie is delivered with a touch lighter than that of her later masterpieces but no less entertaining. This comedy combines glamour, wit and a fiendishly absurd plot into an irresistible literary confection.

Jacob’s Room is Virginia Woolf’s own modernist manifesto. Jacob Flanders is a mere point of contact between a crowd of people, appearing and disappearing in a tableau in which all is flux, without certainty and without a controlling viewpoint. But it seems that the author could not maintain this rigorous impersonality, and the radical technique breaks down, so that we finally see Jacob as a person, just as his world is blown apart.

Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008, The Road Home is the best-selling story of Lev, a middle-aged migrant from Eastern Europe, who moves to London in search of work after losing his wife and job. Lev's London is awash with money, celebrity and complacency. The world Tremain creates is both convincing and poignant.

The collected BBC dramatisations of the fiction of Virginia Woolf, with star casts including Kristin Scott-Thomas, Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson, Laura Fraser, Robert Glenister and Fenella Woolgar....

In this follow up to Call the Midwife, Jennifer Worth, a midwife working in the docklands area of East London in the 1950s, tells more stories about the people she encountered. There's Jane, who cleaned and generally helped out at Nonnatus House - she was taken to the workhouse as a baby and was allegedly the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat. Peggy and Frank's parents both died within six months of each other, and the children were left destitute. At the time, there was no other option for them but the workhouse.

This diverse, wide-ranging anthology features readings of 10 of the greatest books in the English language, taken from the BBC's Book at Bedtime and performed by a stellar cast of narrators. Here are nearly 27 hours of sensational stories, from iconic romances and humorous travelogues to pioneering Modernist masterpieces and compelling explorations of the human heart. Comprising much-loved favourites as well as neglected classics, this genre-spanning selection has something for everyone.

Caro, gallant and adventurous, has been courted long and hopelessly by young scientist, Ted Tice. The milder Grace seeks fulfilment in an apparently happy marriage. But as the decades pass and the characters weave in and out of each other's lives, love, death, and two secrets wait in ambush for them.

The story is told by Coriander, daughter of a silk merchant in 1650s London. Her idyllic childhood ends when her mother dies and her father goes away, leaving Coriander with her stepmother, a widow who is in cahoots with a fundamentalist Puritan preacher. She is shut away in a chest and left to die, but emerges into the fairy world from which her mother came, and where time has no meaning. When she returns, charged with a task that will transform her life, she is seventeen.

Of all Jane Austen's books, Pride and Prejudice has earned a special place in the hearts of the reading public as her best-loved and most intimately known novel. From its famous opening sentence, the story of Elizabeth and Darcy, told with a wit that its author feared might prove "rather too light and bright, and sparkling," delights its most familiar readers as thoroughly as it does those who encounter it for the first time.

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.

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. She found herself once again immersed in the world of the 1950s East End of London. The voices of much loved, familiar characters spoke loud and clear, particularly that of Fred the boiler man, who features extensively in this joyful collection.

Audiobook queen Juliet Stevenson joins Robin Morgan in the Audible Studios to discuss her latest audio project, her career as an audiobook narrator, and the books that have inspired her.

Unlike the other residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is elegant, smart and in control. Only Jenny, her care assistant, knows that she harbours a painful secret, and only she can prevent Stella from carrying it to the grave. As the women talk, Jenny pieces together the answers to many questions that arise: Why has she kept possession of a house that her family don’t know about? What happened there that holds the key to a distant tragedy?

Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's Living Autobiography is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it.

Picking up where Things I Don't Want to Know left off, this short, exhilarating memoir shows a writer in radical flux, facing separation and bereavement and emerging renewed from the ashes of a former life. Faced with the restrictions of conventional living, she dismantles her life, expands it and puts it back together in a new shape. Writing as brilliantly as ever about mothers and daughters, about social pressures and the female experience, Deborah Levy confronts a world not designed to accommodate difficult women and ultimately remakes herself in her own image.

These four works show Samuel Beckett at his most penetrating. Both Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Not I (1972) are among the most striking pieces written for the theatre in the 20th century. An old man sits at a table, playing back old tapes made when he was younger, mixed glimpses of past feelings. In Not I, we have just a mouth expressing memories and torment in a torrent of words.