BBC Audiobooks Ltd

In Gibbons's classic tale, a resourceful young heroine finds herself in the gloomy, overwrought world of a Hardy or Bronte novel and proceeds to organize everyone out of their romantic tragedies into the pleasures of normal life. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19, chooses to live with relatives at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex, where cows are named Feckless, Aimless, Pointless, and Graceless, and the proprietors, the dour Starkadder family, are tyrannized...

When the host is found dead at a card game, four investigators - including Poirot himself - look for clues as they set out to discover which guest is the killer. Mr. Shaitana is famous as a flamboyant party host. When he boasts to Hercule Poirot that he considers murder an art form, the detective has some reservations about accepting a party invitation to view Shaitana’s 'private collection.' Three of the other players turn out to be Superintendent...

Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century, this "absolutely delightful" novel (New York Times) movingly and comically chronicles the breakdown of a marriage and the disintegration of English society in the years after World War I.

After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last has grown bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband,...

CLASSIC FICTION (CHILDREN'S / TEENAGE). Phizz-whizzing new branding for the world's No.1 storyteller, Roald Dahl! Exciting, bold and instantly recognisable with Quentin Blake's inimitable artwork. Danny lives in a gipsy caravan with his father, the most marvellous and exciting father any boy ever had. All the land around them belongs to Mr Victor Hazell, a rich snob with a great glistening beery face and tiny piggy eyes. Nobody likes him, not one-little...

A novel of love and betrayal set during a cholera epidemic from the acclaimed British author of Of Human Bondage, “a great artist, a genius” (Theodore Dreiser).
 
“[Theodore Dreiser] is the modern writer who has influenced me the most.” —George Orwell
 
Arriving in Hong Kong in the 1920s, newlywed Kitty Fane soon learns that being the wife of a British government bacteriologist...

In 1930, on the coast of Scotland, eight-year-old Kirstie finds a large egg which hatches into an unusual sea creature, and as he grows her family must decide what to do with him.

The Circus has already suffered a bad defeat, and the result was two bullets in a man's back. But a bigger threat still exists. And the legendary George Smiley is recruited to root out a high-level mole of thirty years' standing - though to find him means spying on the spies.

Stephen Fry hosts four programmes on the joys of the English language - as heard on BBC Radio 4. Current Puns Why does our language groan with the weight of puns? What exactly is a pun? And who, or what, is the Thief of Bad Gags? Metaphor The English language is chock-full of maritime metaphors: cock up, taken aback, chip on your shoulder and show a leg. And, with the help of a Greek removals firm, we also find the origin of the word 'metaphor'.

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P. D. James is “the greatest living mystery writer.” –People
Headstrong and beautiful, the young housemaid Sally Jupp is put rudely in her place, strangled in her bed behind a bolted door. Coolly brilliant policeman Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard must find her killer among a houseful of suspects, most of whom had very good reason to wish her ill.
Cover Her Face is P. D. James’s electric debut novel, an ingeniously...

"When the fabled Blue Train, the luxury overnight passenger express to the Riviera, arrives at Nice, a guard attempts to awaken Ruth Kettering from her slumbers. But the wealthy American socialite will never wake again, for a brutal blow has killed her, disfiguring her almost beyond recognition. What is more, her famously valuable rubies are missing. The prime suspect is Ruth's estranged husband, Derek. Yet Hercule Poirot is not convinced, and so...