20th Century Classics

The classic thriller featuring Richard Hannay who goes on the run after a murder is committed in his flat. Once in his native Scotland he manages to keep one step ahead of his pursuers.

The forerunner to James Bond, secret agent Richard Hannay is a thoroughly British action hero, pursuing ruthless villains, foiling deadly plans and risking life and limb for his country. This gripping collection encompasses all five of Hannay's adventures, adapted for radio with superb casts including Tom Baker, Clive Merrison, Stuart Milligan, Jasmine Hyde and Patrick Malahide.

Richard Cantrell, an American colonel, falls passionately in love with an Italian countess in Venice just after World War Two. The fighting may have ended but for some the longed-for peace has come too late.

Steinbeck's first posthumously published work, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights is a reinterpretation of tales from Malory's Morte d'Arthur. In this highly successful attempt to render Malory into Modern English, Steinbeck recreated the rhythm and tone of the original Middle English.

When Lord Lucan walks into psychiatrist Hildegard Wolf's Paris office, there is one problem: she already has a patient who says he's Lucan, the fugitive murderer who bludgeoned his children's nanny in a botched attempt to kill his wife. As Dr Wolf sets about deciding which of her patients, if either, is the real Lucan, she finds herself in a fierce battle of wills and an exciting chase across Europe. For someone is deceiving someone, and it may be the good doctor, who, despite her unorthodox therapeutic method (she talks mainly about her own life), has a sinister past, too.

When the great statesman Lord Slane dies, everyone assumes his dutiful wife will slowly fade away, the paying guest of each of her six children. But Lady Slane surprises everyone by escaping to a rented house in Hampstead where she revels in her new freedom, revives youthful ambitions and gathers some very unsuitable companions.

Irreverent, entertaining and insightful, this is a tale of the unexpected joys of growing older.

Berlin, 1940, is a city filled with fear. At 55 Jablonski Strasse, the various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: nervous Frau Rosenthal; bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes; retired Judge Fromm, and the unassuming working-class couple Otto and Anna Quangel.

Hubert Anvil is a 10 year old boy blessed with the voice of an angel. The Church hierarchy decrees that Hubert should be turned into a castrato - an alteration that could bring Hubert fame and fortune, but would also cut him off from an adult world he is curious to discover. In a dystopian world where Martin Luther never reformed and where the Holy Office's power is absolute, where will Hubert turn if he decides to defy their wishes.

Farm animals drive out their masters and set out to govern on the principle that 'all animals are equal'. Fairly rapidly some animals become 'more equal than others'. A modern fable on the history of a revolution, with excellent excuses at every step of the descent into dictatorship for each perversion of the original ideas.

Twenty-one-year-old Ann Veronica Stanley is determined to live her own life. When her father forbids her from attending a fashionable ball, she leaves her family home and makes a fresh start in London. There she meets the brilliant Capes, a married academic, and quickly falls in love, but she soon finds that freedom comes at a price…

Against a background of life in the Staffordshire Potteries - a gossipy, myopic, savage community - Anna receives an inheritance but has to contend with her miserly father.

In this surreal comedy of soldiers and spies, Lieutenant James Churchill and his colleagues find themselves questioning their purpose. Are they for death or against it? These men of action will travel between the barracks, the lunatic asylum and the house of an aristocratic nymphomaniac in search of answers.

For while few know the awful truth about Operation Apollo, the mission they are being trained for, fewer still understand the motives of the powerful psychiatrist Dr Best, who thinks he is surrounded by repressed homosexuals, and none know the identity of the secret agent among them. When the Anti-Death League is founded they are at last offered the chance to rebel and perhaps escape...

Now a screenwriter at Warner Brothers' in Teddington, Nick is drawn into the world of Lady Molly and her numerous Tolland nieces and nephews, where he meets Isobel Tolland, his future wife.  Book 4 of series.

Advised to live the quiet life Bertie and Jeeves head for the peace of Maiden Eggesford but they haven't reckoned on scheming Aunt Dahlia.

Barbara Pym is one of the 20th Century's wittiest, and most underrated, novelists. Her perceptive comedies of manners, centred around the domestic lives and loves of unassuming middle-class Englishwomen, won her many devoted readers and saw her hailed as a modern-day Jane Austen. Yet she spent 15 years out of print in the 1960s and '70s, until Philip Larkin championed her work in the Times Literary Supplement. Her seventh novel was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and writers from Jilly Cooper to Alexander McCall Smith continue to laud her talent today.

Included in this collection are the BBC Radio dramatisations of some of her most beloved books, including her debut Some Tame Gazelle; her second novel Crampton Hodnet, published posthumously in 1985; and its sequel Jane and Prudence. Alongside them are her fifth and sixth novels, A Glass of Blessings and No Fond Return of Love; and a comic spy thriller, So Very Secret. Adapted by actress and writer Elizabeth Proud, they feature stellar casts including Miriam Margolyes, Hannah Gordon, Samantha Bond, Rebecca Front, Joanna David, Penny Downie and Amanda Root.

Her best-known novel, Excellent Women, about a clergyman's daughter whose life is disturbed by anthropologists and a handsome naval officer, is read by One Foot in the Grave star Annette Crosbie. It is followed by a bonus biographical drama, The Resurrection of Miss Pym, starring Penelope Wilton and Bill Wallis and telling the story of Barbara Pym's warm friendship with Philip Larkin, her years in the publishing wilderness, and her eventual triumphant rediscovery. And in the fascinating radio talk Finding a Voice, we hear from the author in her own words as she analyses her inspiration, influences, literary style and why she kept on writing 'even in the face of discouragement'.

It is 1929 and young George Ginder is desperate to exchange the toils of teaching in Bradford for a job in the land of his heroes: the Wild West of America. So he buys a third - class ticket and sets off on a journey from Liverpool that will eventually bring him to Palisades, South Dakota.

A lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an enclosed order of nuns. A new bell, legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. Dora Greenfield, erring wife, returns to her husband. Michael Mead, leader of the community, is confronted by Nick Fawley, with whom he had disastrous homosexual relations, while the wise old Abbess watches and prays and exercises discreet authority. And everyone, or almost everyone, hopes to be saved whatever that may mean... Iris Murdoch's funny and sad novel is about religion, the fight between good and evil and the terrible accidents of human frailty.

When Esther Greenwood wins an internship at a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she believes she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women's aspirations seriously.

Seemingly a novel about English country-house life, the action takes place in the grounds where there is to be a pageant in the month leading up to World War 2. Using dialogue and humour Woolf explores how a community is formed, and scattered.

Sequel to: 'The Sugar House' (1351); When Clara Batchelor’s brief marriage to Archie ends she returns to her parents’ home, hoping for comfort and support. She finds the Catholic household oppressive, however, and longs to escape to the outside world, but when she begins a passionate affair her fragile identity cracks.

The big blonde in question is Hazel Morse, who, when we meet her, is "a model in a wholesale dress establishment", whose thoughts are largely devoted to men. Then she meets Herbie Morse, an attractive man and a heavy drinker. Where will events now take her?

A classic of alienation and horror, 'The Birds' was immortalised by Hitchcock in his celebrated film. The five other chilling stories in this collection echo a sense of dislocation and mock man's sense of dominance over the natural world.

Ex-tax collector and author of two unpopular novels, Bradley Pearson wishes to devote his retirement to writing a masterpiece. But the doorbell and the phone keep ringing, and every ring brings with it an ex-wife, a friend in need, a sister in trouble or a young woman seeking a teacher, and so dusty, selfish Bradley is plunged into the muddles and mysteries which will end in his doom.

Judith Lane is the young widow of the war hero Anthony Lane, and an editor at the successful if rather rakish publisher. But one evening the harmonious routine of Judith's life is interrupted when she receives her first visit from Baldwin Reeves, who reveals that Anthony's wartime adventures were not quite as glorious as the newspaper reports would have her believe. To protect Anthony's family from the scandal, Judith reluctantly acquiesces to the repellent but attractive Reeves's demands - but both blackmailer and blackmailee soon find themselves out of their depth in ways they could not have anticipated.

It isn't just Nanny who finds it difficult in France when Grace and her young son Sigi are finally able to join her dashing aristocratic husband Charles-Edouard after the war. For Grace is out of her depth among the fashionably dressed and immaculately coiffured French women, and shocked by their relentless gossiping and bedhopping. When she discovers her husband's tendency to lust after every pretty girl he sees, it looks like trouble. And things get even more complicated when little Sigi steps in . . .

FBI agents pay a visit to a communist man and his wife in their New York apartment, and, after a trial that divides the country, the couple are sent to the electric chair for treason. Later, in 1967, their son Daniel struggles to understand the tragedy of their lives. But while he is tormented by his past, Daniel is also haunted, like millions of others, by the need to come to terms with a country destroying itself in the Vietnam War.

Nicholas Jenkins returns to his old university library during the winter of 1945 to undertake research for a book about Robert Burton. Quiggin is starting a literary magazine called Fission, which is to be funded by Erridge ... except that Erridge dies suddenly.  Book 10 of series.

Prophesies on the future of mankind, which may perhaps come to pass. The world of Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne is one where human beings are brewed from test tubes and then conditioned to accept the duties of their predestined castes in society.

Four stories by Truman Capote – ‘Breakfast at Tiffany's’ ; ‘House of Flowers’; ‘A Diamond Guitar’ and ‘A Christmas Memory’.

For Emily Pool, India is a magical place where she has the freedom to escape her mother's suffocating influence. But as the cracks in Emily's family home are papered over, and the Pools strive to maintain an outward impression of respectability, it is through the Nikolides that Emily discovers that nothing in the town is quite as it seems . . .

An excellent 1932 novel by a very popular pre-war and post-warwriter, chronicling the life of a hard-working and kindly London architectover thirty-five years.

An evocative novel of life in the golden age before the second world war. When Charles Ryder meets Sebastian Flyte at Oxford it is the start of his painful infatuation with the Marchmain family.

In 1714 a footbridge in Peru gave way and catapulted five people to their deaths. Brother Juniper witnessed the incident and determined to find out why these particular people died.

Half of London pours into Brighton on a Bank holiday, and one man dies on the beach. On the surface there is no mystery, but one woman senses a murder, and through her we meet Pinkie and are introduced to the labyrinth of sordid vice lying behind the esplanade at Brighton.

In February 1944, a rag-tag collection of clerks, drivers, doctors, muleteers, and other base troops, stiffened by a few dogged Yorkshiremen and a handful of tank crews managed to hold out against some of the finest infantry in the Japanese Army, and then defeat them in what was one of the most astonishing battles of the Second World War. What became know as The Defence of the Admin Box, fought amongst the paddy fields and jungle of Northern Arakan over a fifteen-day period, turned the battle for Burma.

Burma '44 is a tale of incredible drama. As gripping as the story of Rorke's drift, as momentous as the battle for the Ardennes, the Admin Box was a triumph of human grit and heroism and remains one of the most significant yet undervalued conflicts of World War Two.

Burmese Days describes corruption and imperial bigotry in a society where, 'after all, natives were natives'.

When Flory, a white timber merchant, befriends Indian Dr Veraswami, he defies this orthodoxy. The doctor is in danger: U Po Kyin, a corrupt magistrate, is plotting his downfall. The only thing that can save him is membership of the all-white Club, and Flory can help. Flory's life is changed further by the arrival of beautiful Elizabeth Lackersteen from Paris, who offers an escape from loneliness and the 'lie' of colonial life.