Showing results by narrator "Juliet Stevenson" in All Categories

A weekly dinner party. Ten amateur sleuths. The Tuesday Night Club murders. On a quiet Tuesday in St Mary Mead, a group of friends gather for dinner. A policeman, a clergyman, a solicitor, an author, an artist, and an unassuming lady with a shrewd gaze – Miss Jane Marple. Conversation naturally turns to crime. Each recounts a seemingly unsolvable mystery. Each thinks they know the answer. But it’s the one they least expect who understands the true nature of each wicked act.

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.

Jennifer Worth came from a sheltered background when she became a midwife in the Docklands in the 1950s. The conditions in which many women gave birth just half a century ago were horrifying, not only because of their grimly impoverished surroundings, but also because of what they were expected to endure. But while Jennifer witnessed brutality and tragedy, she also met with amazing kindness and understanding, tempered by a great deal of Cockney humour.

The Portrait of a Lady tells the compelling and ultimately tragic tale of a beautiful young American woman's encounter with European sophistication. Set principally in England and Italy, the story follows Isabel Archer's fortunes as a variety of admirers vie for her hand. Her choice will be crucial, and she is not wanting for advice, whether from the generous-spirited Ralph Touchett or the charming Madame Merle.

An unknown wounded man in a church. A fatal riding accident. A corpse and a tape measure. Whether in St Mary Mead or further afield, there is always much wickedness lurking below the surface, should, like Jane Marple, you have the eyes to see it. Published posthumously, this collection of tales, seven of them featuring Agatha Christie’s much loved Miss Marple, plus two stand-alone stories, is a treasure trove.

As the Second World War raged across Europe, and the Nazi regime tightened its reign of horror and oppression, nine women, some still in their teens, joined the French and Dutch Resistance. Caught out in heroic acts against the brutal occupiers, they were each tortured and sent east into Greater Germany to a concentration camp, where they formed a powerful friendship. In 1945, as the war turned against Hitler, they were forced on a Death March, facing starvation and almost certain death.

Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's Living Autobiography is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it.

Four books...one groundbreaking author. This collection includes Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), A Room of One’s Own (1929), and The Waves (1931).

The collected BBC dramatisations of the fiction of Virginia Woolf, with star casts including Kristin Scott-Thomas, Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson, Laura Fraser, Robert Glenister and Fenella Woolgar....

Growing up in Torquay, Agatha Christie’s love of the West Country never left her and many of her finest stories are set on the moors and shores of Devon and Cornwall. This collection celebrates some of her finest countryside stories featuring a cast of Christie’s most iconic characters: Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford and Parker Pyne.

Agatha Christie is recognized throughout the world as the writer of remarkable country house mysteries and ingenious murders set in faraway countries. Yet many of her books and stories were set in the city she new best and for many years called home: London. From Poirot's flat in Whitehaven Mansions to Scotland Yard, the Old Bailey to Harley Street, Lyons Tea Rooms to the Savoy, Paddington Station to the London Underground, Agatha Christie knew and loved London, and mined it for its rich seam of storytelling opportunities.

It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment? Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.

Seeking refuge and anonymity in the cobbled streets of Montmartre, Yanne and her daughters, Rosette and Annie, live peacefully, if not happily, above their little chocolate shop. Nothing unusual marks them out; no red sachets hang by the door. The wind has stopped - at least for a while. Then into their lives blows Zozie de l’Alba, the lady with the lollipop shoes, and everything begins to change….

Author Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing a comprehensive "golden notebook" that draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook. Anna’s struggle to unify the various strands of her life – emotional, political, and professional – amasses into a fascinating encyclopaedia of female experience in the ‘50s.

Picking up where Things I Don't Want to Know left off, this short, exhilarating memoir shows a writer in radical flux, facing separation and bereavement and emerging renewed from the ashes of a former life. Faced with the restrictions of conventional living, she dismantles her life, expands it and puts it back together in a new shape. Writing as brilliantly as ever about mothers and daughters, about social pressures and the female experience, Deborah Levy confronts a world not designed to accommodate difficult women and ultimately remakes herself in her own image.

Everything about life intrigues Alma Whittaker. Her passion for botany leads her far from home, from London to Peru to Tahiti, in pursuit of that rare specimen: knowledge. But as her careful studies draw her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she meets the man who she will come to love - whose perspective, radically different from her own, will transform the way she understands the world.

It is 1950. In a devastating moment of clarity, Margery Benson abandons her dead-end job and advertises for an assistant to accompany her on an expedition. She is going to travel to the other side of the world to search for a beetle that may or may not exist. Enid Pretty, in her unlikely pink travel suit, is not the companion Margery had in mind. And yet together they will be drawn into an adventure that will exceed every expectation. They will risk everything, break all the rules and, at the top of a red mountain, discover their best selves.

Anchor House is the coastal home where Naomi and her husband raised their two girls. Now widowed, Naomi is building a new life alone, but the arrival of Ellis next door is bringing some long-awaited fun back too. Naomi’s daughters are very different: Martha is determined and driven like her father, while Willow is a free spirit. The three women have always been close, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have secrets of their own. There are things Naomi has kept from her girls, like the fact that her marriage to their father wasn’t quite what it seemed…

Julian Fellowes's Belgravia is the story of a secret. A secret that unravels behind the porticoed doors of London's grandest postcode. Set in the 1840s, when the upper echelons of society began to rub shoulders with the emerging industrial nouveau riche, Belgravia is peopled by a rich cast of characters. But the story begins on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. At the Duchess of Richmond's now legendary ball, one family's life will change forever.

When her father assassinates Henry Carson, his employer's son and Mary's admirer, suspicion falls on Mary's second admirer, Jem, a fellow worker. Mary has to prove her lover's innocence without incriminating her own father.