Showing results by narrator "Clare Clare" in All Categories

Russia, 1854: the Crimean War grinds on, and as the bitter winter draws near, the battlefield hospitals fill with dying men. In defiance of Florence Nightingale, Rosa Barr - young, headstrong and beautiful - travels to Balaklava, determined to save as many of the wounded as she can.

These five 19th-century ghost stories from both sides of the Atlantic provide some of the best chills in the genre. Ambrose Bierce is well-known, but "To Let" by B. M. Croker and "The Upper Berth" provide moments to tingle the spine, as does "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances" by Le Fanu.

Shamela is a bawdy, spirited, and hilarious response to Samuel Richardson's hugely popular 1740 novel, Pamela. In this pointed satire, Shamela (which transpires to be the real name of Richardson's Pamela) reveals the ulterior motives behind the events that took place in Pamela. Shamela is unlike the virtuous young lady portrayed in Richardson's novel and she takes command of her master, Squire Booby. Our heroine has planned it all out from the start and she is determined to entrap her master into marriage.

It's 1960 in Birmingham and Lella Florence is looking for women to help with trials of the contraceptive pill. Married women in a certain age and weight bracket are required.Three very different women decide to take part. Ditsy June's fed up with being under the influence of her overbearing in-laws and would rather save up for a new bathroom than for another baby. Glamorous Jeanette wants to avoid another agonising labour and to keep her wealthy husband happy. And Isobel has her own secret reasons for signing up. All three women couldn't guess the ways their lives will be changed....

Clare Corbett reads this enchanting tale of a peculiar painting, a talking cat and a very odd Curator, inspired by the Doctor Who episode 'The Bells of Saint John'... In the seaside village of Watchcombe, young Kate is determined to make the most of her last week of summer holiday. But when she discovers a mysterious painting entitled 'The Lord of Winter' in a charity shop, it leads her on an adventure she never could have planned.

What does the name "Agatha Christie" mean? To many people, it means a book about a murder mystery - a "whodunnit". "I'm reading an Agatha Christie," people say. "I'm not sure who the murderer is. I think it's…." But they are usually wrong, because it is not easy to guess the murderer's name before the end of the book. But who was Agatha Christie? What was she like? Was her life quiet and unexciting, or was it full of interest and adventure?Was there a mystery in her life, too?

Elise loves the farm that is her home; she loves playing with beetles and chameleons in the garden, buying sweets from the village shop and listening to the stories of spirits and charms told by her nanny, Beauty. As a young white girl in 1990s Zimbabwe, her life is idyllic. Her clothes are always clean and ironed, there is always tea in the silver teapot, gin and tonics are served on the veranda, and, in theory at least, black and white live in harmony.

"What is my dad thinking? He's planning to sing AT MY SCHOOL in a fund-raising concert! It's even worse for Eddie. His dad is an Elvis impersonator. Eddie's life might just as well be over. And when Eddie's dad gets together with my dad, my life will be over too!"

‘The Dead are not alone. There is something in the mist and it talks to them.' In a remote clinic in 18th-century Italy, a lonely girl writes to her mother. She tells of pale English aristocrats and mysterious Russian nobles. She tells of intrigues and secrets, and strange faceless figures that rise from the sea. And she tells about the enigmatic Mrs Pond, who arrives with her husband and her physician. What she doesn’t tell her mother is the truth that everyone knows and no one says: that the only people who come here do so to die.

When Charlie falls off a stepping stone in the woods, her whole world suddenly changes. She stumbles in the 21st century, and picks herself up in the middle of the 20th. She's a pupil at a weird outdoor school. Can she get back to her own time?

A family cleaner sees and hears everything, from the pill packet that signals that her employers are no longer trying for another child, to that unfamiliar earring in the marital bed that signals something altogether more worrying. In this five-part drama, two successful people, prosperous and happily married, pay little attention to their Polish domestic. Perhaps they should....

Veronica Britton is a Victorian private detective, a specialist in untangling tricky situations that occur in time as well as space. Working alongside her young apprentice Gabrielle Pendleton, she's very much in demand: if a necklace goes missing and you suspect that someone is selling it off in the future as a valuable antique, or you find yourself being blackmailed by someone who knows a little too much about your past, she's your woman.

Clare Balding looks back at the time the Olympic Games came to London in 1948. Three years after the end of the Second World War, Britain was still gripped by austerity. Rationing was still in force, severe bomb damage was still much in evidence, and no new sports facilities could be built. Visiting athletes were put up in schools and RAF camps. Yet the Games were a resounding success and actually made a profit.

John Durbeyfield (Keith Barron) learns that he is descended from the aristocratic Norman family of d'Urbervilles. He encourages his daughter, Tess (Claire Rushbrook), to befriend the family of Stoke d'Urbervilles where she meets Alec d'Urberville (Adam Godley). Tess is ultimately seduced by Alec and the effects of their affair creates dramatic ripples in Tess's life. In an attempt to make a fresh start, Tess begins work in Wessex at the Talbothay's farm where she encounters Angel Clare (James D'Arcy), the younger son of a parson, who asks her to marry him.

Cumbria, 1967. Grieving the loss of her son, Cordelia Hemlock is in a village graveyard when lightning strikes a tumbledown tomb - and gives her a glimpse of a new corpse that doesn't belong among the crumbling bones. But when the body vanishes, the authorities refuse to believe some hysterical outsider. Cordelia persuades Felicity Goose, the only other person to have seen the corpse, to join her investigation. But the villagers don't take kindly to their interference. There are those who believe the village's secrets should remain buried...whatever the cost.

A bold new dramatisation of Thomas Hardy’s classic, giving his story a 21st-century resonance. Tess Durbeyfield is driven by poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urberville family. But meeting her cousin Alec proves to be her downfall. This classic criticism of social convention is given a new treatment in this full-cast adaptation which blows away the shepherd's pipe and heritage stereotype, foregrounding Hardy's social and sexual radicalism.

In 1967, when Jo Ivester was 10 years old, her father transplanted his young family from a suburb of Boston to a small town in the heart of the Mississippi cotton fields, where he became the medical director of a clinic that served the poor population for miles around. But ultimately it was not Ivester’s father but her mother - a stay-at-home mother of four who became a high school English teacher when the family moved to the South - who made the most enduring mark on the town.

Golden girl Zoe’s been dead for 10 years, her body dragged from the River Black after a night out to celebrate the end of school. But now a woman who says she’s Zoe has turned up in her hometown of Blackwater, on the Irish border, with no memory of the last decade. She claims she woke up in a forest nearby, bruised and bleeding, and doesn’t know where she’s been all this time. What happened to her? Is she really Zoe? And if so, who is in her grave?

There's a city far away.... My parents often spoke of it as if it had always been there and always would be. I had seen it in paintings, I had read of it in stories, the richest, most powerful place on earth...the centre of everything. It drew people from every corner of the empire and beyond, hungry for wealth and power, or in some case, more wealth and more power. They were dazzled by its brightness. And like moths drawn to a candle...many were burnt alive by its fire.... Tumanbay.

Gordon Downie, lead singer and lyricist for the popular Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip, released his first solo record, Coke Machine Glow, in spring 2001. Alongside the album, his first book of poetry and prose under the same title was published, including the lyrics to the 16 songs on the record. Now, on the 20th-anniversary year of Coke Machine Glow, fans have more to delight in: the audiobook of Coke Machine Glow and a brand-new album by Downie, released posthumously.