When Tiro, the confidential secretary of a Roman senator, opens the door to a terrified stranger on a cold November morning, he sets in motion a chain of events which will eventually propel his master into one of the most famous courtroom dramas in history. The stranger is a Sicilian, a victim of the island's corrupt Roman governor, Verres. The sen...

Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets of Paris as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human's. Soon, he is creating the most sublime fragrances in all the city. Yet there is one odour he cannot capture. It...

It is October 1789, in New South Wales. Into Sydney, capital of Britain's infant colony, sails the frigate Tempest. She is one of His Majesty's ships employed in policing the new southern trade routes. Her captain is Richard Bolitho, who hopes to be ordered home to England. Instead, he is despatched on a mission to the islands of the Great South Se...

Uhtred, Northumbrian born, raised a Viking and married to a Saxon, is a formidable warrior, and he, together with the thoughtful and pious Alfred, Alfred's family and a few of Uhtred's companions, are apparently all that remain of the Wessex leadership after a disastrous truce. Defeated comprehensively by the Vikings, Alfred and his Saxon followers...

Uhtred is an English boy, born into the aristocracy of ninth-century Northumbria. Orphaned at 10, he is captured and adopted by a Dane and taught Viking ways. Yet Uhtred's fate is indissolubly bound up with Alfred, King of Wessex, who rules over the only English Kingdom to survive the Danish assault. CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE/ADULT THEMES

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Never Look Back by Lesley Pearse, read by Holli Dempsey. One good deed takes her into another world . . . Sixteen-year-old Matilda is a poor Covent Garden flower girl until the day she saves the life of Tabitha, a minister's daughter. Welcomed into Tabitha's family, Matilda is offered the chance of a lifeti...

The haunting story of the mother of the Tudors, Elizabeth of York, wife to Henry VII. Beautiful eldest daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville - the White Queen - the young princess Elizabeth faces a conflict of loyalties between the red rose and the white. Forced into marriage with Henry VII, she must reconcile her slowly growing love for hi...

1950s Liverpool. In the tight-knit community of the Four Streets, two girls are growing up. One is motherless and hated by the cold woman determined to take her dead mother's place. The other is hiding a dreadful secret which she dare not tell to anyone. The people of Four Streets laugh, grieve and hope together. But what can they do when a betraya...

This audiobook contains three new episodes in the career of Sir Harry Flashman, the eminent if disreputable adventurer. The title piece touches on two of the most spectacular military actions of the century and sees Flashman pitted against one of the greatest villains of the day, and observing, with his usual jaundiced eye, two of its most famous h...

Philippa Gregory-the #1 New York Times best-selling author of Parker Pen Novel of the Year The Other Boleyn Girl-delivers the first in a series of historical novels set during the tumultuous War of the Roses. This compelling tale of romance, rivalry, and revenge unfolds through the eyes of Elizabeth Woodville, the woman whose renowned beauty catapu...

Crowned the "queen of royal fiction" by USA Today, Philippa Gregory is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Romantic Novelists' Association's RoNA Award for The Other Boleyn Girl. The White Princess continues the saga of the War of the Roses as Princess Elizabeth of York weds Henry VII after he kills Richard III in battle. Now q...

In 1666, The Great Plague scorched London whilst the north of England remained untouched until, in a small community of leadminers and hill farmers, a bolt of cloth arrived from the capital. The tailor who cut the cloth had no way of knowing that the damp fabric carried with it bubonic infection. So begins the 'Year of Wonders', based on real-life...

When Sylvester, the Duke of Salford, first meets Phoebe Marlow, he finds her dull and insipid. She finds him insufferably arrogant. But when a series of unforeseen events leads them to be stranded together in a lonely country inn, they are both forced to reassess their hastily formed opinions, and begin a new-found liking and respect for each other...

A thrilling BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation based on the third novel in C. J. Sansom's bestselling Tudor crime series featuring hunchback lawyer-detective Matthew Shardlake. Autumn, 1541. Henry VIII, accompanied by his young bride Catherine Howard, has embarked on a Great Progress from London to York, to establish his power and authority with h...

The year is 1562. Lady Catherine Grey, cousin of Elizabeth I, has just been arrested along with her husband Edward. Their crime is to have secretly married and produced a child who might threaten the Queen's title. Alone in her chamber at the Tower of London, Catherine hears ghostly voices; echoes, she thinks, of a crime committed in the same room...

France, 1152. A beautiful woman is escaping through France, leaving behind two young daughters and a shattered marriage. This woman is Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, and her sole purpose is to marry the man she loves, Henry Plantagenet, a man destined for greatness as King of England. Theirs is a union founded on lust which will create a great empi...

In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family. Sethe knows that the spirit is that of her own baby daughter, 'Beloved', who has retur...

Shrewsbury, 1139. The bloody civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maud has swept through the country towards the rural security of Brother Cadfael's monastery. The citizens of Worcester have fled, among them two orphaned children of noble stock, together with their tutor, a young nun. A Benedictine monk in whose care Lady Ermina and her broth...

As Britain stands alone against a monstrous enemy, the inhabitants of Pearl Street face hardship and heartbreak with courage and humour. The war touches each of them in a different way: for Annie Poulson, a widow, it means never-ending worry when her twin boys are called up and sent to France; Sheila Reilly's husband, Cal, faces the terror of a U-B...

Eighteen-year-old Irene Angel lives with her parents in a tiny room above the shop where her crippled mother ekes out a living selling pickles and sauces, whilst her charming but feckless father Billy gambles away what little money they do manage to earn. And it is all Irene can do to keep the family together. Billy's addiction soon leads him into...

London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. Ambulance drivers Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville ferry injured survivors from bomb sites to hospitals while Elinor's husband Paul works as an air-raid warden. Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art, before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, now all three find themselves caught i...