Shakespeare's thought-provoking tale of a merchant in debt to a heartless Jewish moneylender who demands his pound of flesh is movingly retold by award-winning author Leon Garfield. Read by Simon...

In the second volume ,'Within a Budding Grove', of Proust’s great novel 'The Remembrance of Things Past', the narrator emerges as an actor in the drama of his own life.

Swann has now...

It is over 500 years since Duke Claudio the Falcon lived his brutal, twisted life in Ruffano, Italy. Now, the modern–day town has forgotten its violent history. Its university has a shiny new...

An anthology of 39 British and American poets, from Shakespeare and Dunne to Whitman and Yeats.

'Wuthering Heights', first published in 1847, is set amongst the wind-blasted moors known to Emily Brontë from her life at Haworth in Yorkshire, where her father was a clergyman. The dramatic...

An unabridged reading of the classic novel by Thomas Hardy.

Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate...

George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose...

Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is shell-shocked and on the brink of...

When Helen Schlegel falls suddenly in love with Paul Wilcox she breaks off the engagement almost at once, perceiving the spiritual gulf between their two families. But when her sister, Margaret,...

Shakespeare's notorious 'Scottish play' describes how ambition, lust for power, and the prophecy of three evil witches transform a brave nobleman into a traitor and murderous tyrant. Retold by...

A beautiful novel in itself, ‘Swann’s Way' is also the introduction to the great seven-part work ‘Remembrance of Things Past' ('A la Recherche du Temps Perdu') – one of the greatest works...

Born and raised in the workhouse, orphan Oliver Twist’s life is miserable. When he is taken on as an apprentice by Mr Sowerby the undertaker, he hopes things will get better, but Sowerby’s...

Five brilliant stories from one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Includes the following stories: Head and Shoulders, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Dalyrimple Goes Wrong, The Curious...

An unabridged reading of the classic novel by Jane Austen.

When the personable Captain Wentworth reappears in Anne Elliot’s life several years after she had been persuaded to break...

This is a story of contrasts, between North and South, between rural and industrialised England, and above all between the central characters of Margaret Hale and John Thornton, the millowner…...