At the dawn of the nineteenth century, two very different magicians emerge to change England's history. In the year 1806, with the Napoleonic Wars raging on land and sea, most people believe magic to be long dead in England-until the reclusive Mr Norrell reveals his powers, and becomes a celebrity overnight. Soon, another practicing magician comes...

Three BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramas starring John Shrapnel as Morse and Robert Glenister as Lewis, plus a bonus reading by Colin Dexter of one of his short stories. In Last Seen Wearing, Inspector Morse is reluctant to take over an old missing person case from a dead colleague. But two years, three months and two days after teenager Valerie Ta...

16 modern fiction superstars shine a startling light on the romance and pain of the infamous literary pair Heathcliff and Cathy. In 'Terminus' a young woman hides in an empty Brighton hotel; in 'Thicker Than Blood' a man sits in a hot tub stalking his newly-married love on social media; and in 'A Bird, Half-Eaten' an amateur boxer prepares for a ma...

When Christabel runs across her cousin Charles while vacationing in Damascus, he mentions their ancient Great Aunt Harriet, who lives cloistered in Dar Ibrahim, a palace atop a hill in Lebanon's Adonis Valley. On a whim, she decides to meet this legendary relative of hers, a Grand Dame replete with young male retinue and secret seraglio. Though her...

Ten people gather together for an elegant London dinner party. By the end of the party, only nine are alive. Sometime after dinner, General Thaddeus Carlyon is brutally murdered in the hallway. Who had the strength—and motive—to murder the distinguished military hero? Nurse Latterly and Inspector Monk find the answers in a nightmarish l...

When the beautiful daughter of Sir Basil Moidore is stabbed to death in her bed, Inspector Monk and Nurse Latterly uncover a tale of shame and scandal that threatens to destroy a powerful London dynasty.

A tragic accident leaves Inspector Monk with amnesia just moments after he solves the murder of a popular Crimean war hero. Forced to redo his entire investigation, a frustrated Monk faces a desperate murderer who will do anything to keep the inspector from discovering the truth twice.

The fairy lights are up and shoppers are flooding the snowy seaside promenade. It's going to be a busy month at Forget-Me-Not Vintage, a magical shop with a warm heart where every item has a story to be told. With bright red hair and an infectious smile, Dodie is a hopeless romantic and absolutely one of a kind, just like the pieces in her shop. Wh...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist comes one of the funniest, warmest, most delightful Christmas stories ever.

Christmas in Cornwall is just around the corner... But after last Christmas revealed a shocking family secret, Scarlett's hardly feeling merry and bright. All she wants this Christmas is to know who her real father is. So Scarlett heads to the little Cornish town of Porthmellow, where she believes the truth of her birth is hidden. She just didn't b...

Barbara Pym's early novel takes us into 1950s England, as seen through the funny, engaging, yearning eyes of a restless housewife Wilmet Forsyth is bored. Bored with the everyday routine of her life. Bored with teatimes filled with local gossip. Bored with her husband, Rodney, a civil servant who dotes on her. But on her thirty-third birthday, Wilm...

Full-cast BBC Radio 4 dramatisations of the first five Falco novels by Lindsey Davis, starring Anton Lesser as Marcus Didius Falco. The Silver Pigs:One fine day, A.D. 70, Sosia Camillina quite literally runs into Marcus Didius Falco on the steps of the Forum. It seems Sosia is on the run from a couple of street toughs, and after a quick and dirty...

The first book in the dramatic new saga from the Sunday Times bestselling author. The village of Little Creek, the long winter of 1867. The first flakes of snow are falling when Daisy Marshall, secretly engaged to her master's son, finds herself jilted at the altar. Heartbroken, Daisy flees to the small village of Little Creek, nestled on the coast...

Charles Dickens is one of the most famous and influential writers in English literature and Heather Redmond's delightful series asks what if Dickens had also solved crimes...? Now, the third book in the acclaimed A Dickens of a Crime series reimagines Dickens' most famous story, A Christmas Carol, as a murder mystery with Dickens himself as the sle...

As snowflakes fall, romance blossoms across open fires, ice skating rinks and a tiki bar... Harriet Cookson knows exactly what she wants from life. She has a plan, she has ambition and she knows she has to keep busy. But when her beloved Nana Lorna passes away, Harriet has to put everything on hold as she flies out to the Hamptons to say goodbye an...

A Christmas short story from bestselling author Lucy Diamond, revisiting her Beach Cafe characters. After a hectic summer running her beach cafe in Cornwall, Evie Flynn is looking forward to her first Christmas with new boyfriend Ed - she's determined that it's going to be the most perfectly romantic one ever. Cosy nights in front of the fire, spic...

Christmas may be the season of goodwill and festive cheer, but not for the poor of 1950s Liverpool. And for St Angelus Hospital in Lovely Lane, it is frantically busy. There are the old, the dying, the children and the emergencies. The nurses, known locally as the Angels of Lovely Lane, are run off their feet. Dana, Beth, Pammy and Victoria hardly...

The Trial is one of the great works of the twentieth century: an extraordinary vision of one man put on trial by an anonymous authority on an unspecified charge. Josef K, 30, lives in a large town in an unspecified country. He is summonsed to answer a charge and appears in the court room for his trial. Franz Kafka evokes all the reality of tri...

This hugely engaging story of murder, superstition, religious politics and drama in a medieval monastery was one of the most striking novels to appear in the 1980s. The Name of the Rose is a thrilling story enriched with period detail and laced with tongue-in-cheek allusions to fictional characters, the most striking of which is the Franciscan fria...

An old man, enchanted by tales of knightly courage, puts on his rusty armour and sets out on a quest of his own. For him, the world is filled with giants, knights and a peerless mistress. Others, such as his earthy squire Sancho Panza, see windmills, sheep and vulgar serving girls. But such prosaic interpretations do not satisfy the greatest figure...

  Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize. The richly exotic story of the childhood the twins Esthappen and Rahel craft for themselves amongst India's vats of banana jam and mountains of peppercorns. Here, perhaps, is the greatest Indian novel by a woman. Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things' is an astonishingly rich, fertile novel,...