Showing results by narrator "Laurel Lefkow" in All Categories

A brand new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of a classic Raymond Chandler mystery featuring private eye, Philip Marlowe. Marlowe is now married, living in the resort town of Poodle Springs. Once again, he sets himself up as an investigator and soon finds himself in the middle of blackmail and murder....

Migration, terrorism, the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism, the promise and peril of a technological and communications revolution: these forces shaped the life and work of Joseph Conrad at the dawn of the 20th century. In this brilliant new interpretation of one of the great voices in modern literature, Maya Jasanoff reveals Conrad as a prophet of globalization as we recognize it today.

Elizabeth's eyes have failed. She can no longer read the books she loves or see the paintings that move her, but her mind remains sharp, and music fills the vacancy left by her blindness. When her father's journals are discovered on a shipwrecked boat, she enlists the help of a delinquent teen, Morgan, to read to her. As an unlikely friendship grows between them, Elizabeth is carried back to her childhood home - the lighthouse on Porphyry Island, Lake Superior - and to the memory of her enigmatic twin sister, Emily.

When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don’t necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked, for the historical processes that created life also created cancer. The Cheating Cell delves into this extraordinary relationship, and shows that by understanding cancer’s evolutionary origins, researchers can come up with more effective, revolutionary treatments.

After a lifetime spent living firmly in English, Lauren Collins finds herself adrift in French-speaking Geneva. Having fallen in love with Olivier, a Frenchman, Lauren wakes up one day to the realisation that she is living in a community where she cannot speak the language and that she is married to a man whose name she doesn't dare speak in public, for fear of mispronunciation. A New Yorker journalist skilled at making a living through her writing, Lauren is suddenly no longer able to communicate with the local shop owners, let alone her in-laws.

Have you ever loved someone so much that you'd do anything for them? When Dr Luke Findley turns up to his hospital shift in the small town of St Andrews, Maine, he's expecting just another evening of minor injuries and domestic disputes. But instead, Lanore McIlvrae walks into his life - and changes it forever. For Lanny is a woman with a past...Lanny McIlvrae is unlike anyone Luke has ever met.

The small Connecticut town of Sanctuary is rocked by the death of its star quarterback. Daniel's death looked like an accident, but everyone knows his ex-girlfriend Harper is the daughter of a witch - and she was there when he died. Then the rumours start. When Harper insists Dan was guilty of a terrible act, the town turns on her. So was his death an accident, revenge - or something even darker? As accusations fly and secrets are revealed, paranoia grips the town, culminating in a trial that the whole world is watching....

Sent abroad to Egypt in 1922, 11-year-old Lucy is caught up in the excitement that surrounds the hunt for Tutankhamun's tomb. When she meets Frances, the daughter of an American archaeologist, the two girls spy on the grown-ups and a lifelong bond is formed. Haunted by the ghosts of her past, the mistakes she made, Lucy disinters her past. And she finally comes to terms with what happened after Egypt, when Frances needed Lucy most.

"My darling girls. You were once so happy in this house. Now I’m gone, all I ask is that you spend one last summer here together on Dune Island. And please forgive me, your Nana, for the secret I’m about to tell you..." Arriving at the honeysuckle-covered beach house inherited from her beloved grandmother, recently heartbroken Jill hopes to convince her two feuding sisters not to sell a place so full of happy childhood memories. But the envelope waiting on the driftwood table changes everything.

Award-winning novelist Vikram Seth is renowned worldwide for his magnum opus A Suitable Boy. But his dazzling debut, though less well-known, is equally innovative, masterly and ambitious. First published in 1986 and inspired by Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, it is written entirely in verse, comprising almost 600 stanzas of rhyming sonnets. This epic poem focusses on the interconnected stories of five young professionals, as they make their way in the 'unfettered city' of San Francisco in the '80s.

When a young woman makes a distressing middle-of-the-night call to 911, apparently running for her life in a quiet, exclusive beachside neighbourhood, miles from her home, everything suggests a domestic incident. Except no one has seen her since, and something doesn't sit right with the officers at Hampstead County PD. With multiple suspects and witnesses throwing up startling inconsistencies, and interference from the top threatening the integrity of the investigation, lead detective Casey Wray is thrust into an increasingly puzzling case that looks like it's going to have only one ending…

Poland, 1944. The train slowed and halted with a squeal of the brakes. It felt like we waited in the carriage for an eternity, but eventually, the heavy doors opened, directly into the chaos outside. Sara Leibovits, a 16-year-old Jewish girl, was a passenger on the train, together with her family. Within minutes, their horrific fate was sealed. The little family spent their final minutes together on the platform at Auschwitz before they were ordered in all directions and each left to their own fate.

Susannah has two beautiful daughters, a high-flying medical career, a successful husband and an enviable life. Her hair is glossy, her clothes are expensive: she truly has it all. But when—on the hottest day of the year—her strict morning routine is disrupted, Susannah finds herself running on autopilot. It is hours before she realises she has made a devastating mistake. Her baby, Louise, is still in the backseat of the car, and it is too late to save her.

The island has a way of calling you home.... Ten years ago, Emily Watson was on top of the world: a best-selling novel, a husband plucked from the pages of a magazine, and a one-way ticket to happily ever after. Now her perfect life has crumbled, and Emily is left to pick up the pieces. So when her great-Aunt Bee invites her to spend the month of March on her beloved Bainbridge Island, Emily accepts, longing to be healed by the sea.

A droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists and brief essays about babies. One August day a baby was born, or, as it seemed to Rivka Galchen, a puma moved into her apartment. Her arrival felt supernatural; she seemed to come from another world. And suddenly the world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. But Galchen didn't want to write about the puma. She had never been interested in babies or in mothers before. Now everything seemed directly related to them.

The last time criminal psychology expert Dr Charlotte 'Charlie' Stone helped capture a serial killer, it was nearly the last thing she ever did. Now she's determined to stick to research - and leave risk-taking to the law. But when dangerous duty calls, she can't refuse. And there's no greater danger than the Cinderella Killer, a charming predator who lures beautiful single women to their deaths.

In the snowy Highlands of Scotland, Suzanne McBride is dreaming of the perfect cozy Christmas. Her three adopted daughters are coming home for the holidays and she can't wait to see them. But tensions are running high... Workaholic Hannah knows she can't avoid spending the holidays with her family two years in a row. But it's not the weight of their expectations that's panicking her-it's the life-changing secret she's hiding. Stay-at-home mom Beth is having a personal crisis.

Ten years ago, Abigail Lovett fell into a job she loves, managing The Passage Inn, a cozy, upscale resort nestled in the North Carolina mountain town of Cutter's Pass. Cutter's Pass is best known for its outdoor offerings--rafting and hiking, with access to the Appalachian trail by way of a gorgeous waterfall--and its mysterious history. As the audiobook begins, the string of unsolved disappearances that has haunted the town is once again thrust into the spotlight when journalist Landon West, who was staying at the inn to investigate the story of the vanishing trail, then disappears himself.

We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, yet everywhere we see signs that our pursuit of happiness has proven fruitless. Dissatisfied, we seek change for the sake of change - even if it means undermining the foundations of our common life. In Why We Are Restless, Benjamin and Jenna Storey offer a profound and beautiful reflection on the roots of this malaise and examine how we might begin to cure ourselves.

Joanna Smith Rakoff's richly drawn and immensely satisfying first novel details the lives of a group of Oberlin graduates whose ambitions and friendships threaten to unravel as they chase their dreams, shed their youth, and build their lives in Brooklyn during the late 1990s and the turn of the 21st century.