Showing results by narrator "Louise Brealey" in All Categories

1759, Ipswich. Sisters Peggy and Molly Gainsborough are the best of friends and do everything together. They spy on their father as he paints, they rankle their mother as she manages the books, they tear barefoot through the muddy fields that surround their home. But there is another reason they are inseparable: from a young age, Molly has had a tendency to forget who she is, to fall into mental confusion, and Peggy knows instinctively that no one must find out.

As a 13-year-old World War Two evacuee, Edie’s mother was chosen by the mysterious Juniper Blythe and taken to live at Milderhurst Castle with the Blythe family. In the grand and glorious Milderhurst Castle, a new world opened up for Edie’s mother. She discovered the joys of books and fantasy and writing, but also, ultimately, their dangers. Fifty years later, as Edie chases the answers to her mother’s riddle, she too is drawn to Milderhurst Castle and the eccentric Blythe sisters. Inside the decaying castle, Edie begins to unravel her mother’s past.

Edinburgh, 1850. Despite being at the forefront of modern medicine, hordes of patients are dying all across the city, with doctors finding their remedies powerless. But it is not just the deaths that dismay the esteemed Dr James Simpson - a whispering campaign seeks to blame him for the death of a patient in suspicious circumstances. Simpson's protégé Will Raven and former housemaid Sarah Fisher are determined to clear their patron's name.

For almost a decade, Rachel Caine has turned her back on home, kept distant by family disputes and her work monitoring wolves on an Idaho reservation. But now, summoned by the eccentric earl of Annerdale and his controversial scheme to reintroduce the grey wolf to the English countryside, she is back in the peat and wet light of the Lake District. The earl's project harks back to an ancient idyll of untamed British wilderness.

In an abandoned warehouse, a schoolboy makes a grisly discovery: 96 containers, each filled with exquisitely preserved bodily remains. Detective Eva Harris knows the line between life and death better than most. Having survived a near fatal encounter with the criminal underworld once before, she is still haunted by the repercussions of her actions - and fearful of the whole truth emerging.

In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. Her life will draw to an end in the coming days. Downstairs, the studio is a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit. The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and feverish world.

The powerful new novel from number one Sunday Times best seller Clare Mackintosh. Max and Pip are the strongest couple you know. Only now they're facing the most important decision of their lives - and they don't agree. As the consequences of an impossible choice threaten to devastate them both, nothing will ever be the same again. But anything can happen after the end....

All Lauren wants is a new life in Spain. She’s suffered an unimaginable loss, but at last she has found a home in the pretty seaside town of Mantilla de Mar. Everyone deserves a new start, and Lauren needs to put her past firmly behind her. Hope has everything: an interesting career as a therapist, an attractive husband, a dream home in the countryside - and, finally, the baby she always longed for. Sam. Her beautiful boy. But Sam has gone missing.

Edinburgh, 1847. Will Raven is a medical student, apprenticing for the brilliant and renowned Dr Simpson. Sarah Fisher is Simpson’s housemaid and has all of Raven’s intelligence, but none of his privileges. As bodies begin to appear across the Old Town, Raven and Sarah find themselves propelled headlong into the darkest shadows of Edinburgh’s underworld. And if either of them are to make it out alive, they will have to work together to find out who’s responsible for the gruesome deaths.

Letters of Note, the book based on the beloved website of the same name, became an instant classic on publication in 2013, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. This new edition sees the collection of the world's most entertaining, inspiring and unusual letters updated with 14 riveting new missives and a new introduction from curator Shaun Usher.

The One State is the perfect society, ruled over by the enlightened Benefactor. It is a city made almost entirely of glass, where surveillance is universal and life runs according to algorithmic rules to ensure perfect happiness. And D-503, the Builder, is the ideal citizen, at least until he meets I-330, who opens his eyes to new ideas of love, sex and freedom.

Young women are being discovered dead across the Old Town, all having suffered similarly gruesome ends. In the New Town, medical student Will Raven is about to start his apprenticeship with the brilliant and renowned Dr Simpson. Simpson's patients range from the richest to the poorest of this divided city. His house is like no other, full of visiting luminaries and daring experiments in the new medical frontier of anaesthesia.

Composed in the early 1350s, in the wake of the Black Death, The Decameron comprises 100 short stories from all over the world, reset by Boccaccio among the flourishing merchant classes of Renaissance Italy. Their universal themes—love, sex, religion, fate, morality—resonate with us to this day, and their witty, satirical, bawdy voice sounds utterly modern. Monty Python star and medieval historian Terry Jones presents ten BBC Radio dramatisations of tales from Giovanni Boccaccio's humane and comic masterpiece

In a hyper-competitive world obsessed with rankings, super-wealth and greatness, how can we live up to democratic ideals of equality? Erica Benner has spent a lifetime thinking about these questions from different angles in different countries. Adventures in Democracy draws on her experiences and the deep history of democracies - in ancient Rome and Athens, the American and French revolutions and Renaissance Florence - to offer an unflinching portrait of modern democracy.

Louise wakes up. Her head aches, her mouth is dry, her memory is fuzzy. But she suspects she's done something bad. She rolls over towards her husband, Niall. The man who, until recently, made her feel loved. But it's not Niall who's lying beside her. In fact, she's never seen this man before. And he's dead. As Louise desperately struggles to piece her memories back together, it's clear to Detective Jonah Sheens and his team that she is their prime suspect - though they soon find she's not the only one with something to hide.

It’s 1990. Johanna Morrigan, 14, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides that there’s no point in being Johanna anymore and reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde - fast-talking, hard-drinking Gothic hero and full-time Lady Sex Adventurer! She will save her poverty stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writer - like Jo in Little Women, or the Brontes - but without the dying young bit. By 16, she’s smoking cigarettes, getting drunk, and working for a music paper.

I’m Johanna Morrigan, and I live in London in 1995, at the epicentre of Britpop. I might only be 19, but I’m wise enough to know that everyone around me is handling fame very, very badly. My unrequited love, John Kite, has scored an unexpected Number One album, then exploded into a Booze And Drugs HellTM - as rockstars do. And my new best friend - the maverick feminist Suzanne Banks, of The Branks - has amazing hair, but writer’s block and a rampant pill problem. So I’ve decided I should become a 'Fame Doctor'.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Louise Brealey read a love story in letters, played out against the backdrop of the Second World War. 'Can you feel, as you read these words, that I am thinking of you now; aglow, alive, alert at the thought that you are in the same world, and by some strange chance loving me.' A small blue box opened in 2008 revealed a wartime world of love, longing and frustration. Inside were bundles and bundles of letters written neatly on thin blue airmail paper or headed army notepaper.

Edinburgh, 1849. Hordes of patients are dying all across the city, with doctors finding their remedies powerless. And a whispering campaign seeks to paint Dr. James Simpson, pioneer of medical chloroform, as a murderer. Determined to clear Simpson’s name, his protégé Will Raven and former housemaid Sarah Fisher must plunge into Edinburgh’s deadliest streets and find out who or what is behind the deaths. Soon they discover that the cause of the deaths has evaded detection purely because it is so unthinkable.

In Letters of Note: Dogs, Shaun Usher brings together a delightful collection of correspondence about our canine friends, featuring affectionate accounts of pups’ playful misdemeanours, heartfelt tributes to loyal fidos and shared tales of remarkable hounds.