Showing results by narrator "Laurel Lefkow" in All Categories

A collection of radio readings of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction - plus two bonus programmes. Over the years the BBC has broadcast readings of many of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, novellas and short stories. This collection includes some of his most famous works alongside various lesser-known tales, including three 'lost stories' (first published in 2017 and with an introduction written by editor Anne Margaret Daniel). 

When Evie and Duke meet on set, it’s a frosty encounter. In fact, the only thing icier than their interactions is the snow that coats the Bavarian streets they are filming on. But after images of them arguing leak to the press and put the movie in jeopardy, they are left with no choice but to fake date until the cameras stop rolling. As the pair start to put their differences aside, gradually, somewhere along the Romantic Road, their feelings begin to thaw. But can sparks ever really fly in a snowstorm?

Three years after a virus wiped out 99 percent of the men on earth, a mother and son are on the run. All Cole has left in the world is her boy, Miles. With men now a prised commodity, keeping him safe means breaking hastily written new rules - and leaving her own sister for dead. All Miles has left in the world is his mother.

Fifteen years ago Nora Watts gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. Now Bonnie has vanished, and when the police don't seem to care, her desperate parents turn to Nora as a last resort. Nora knows only too well what happens to missing girls, especially when they aren't blonde or white enough. Despite herself, she sets out to find the daughter she's never known protected only by her instincts and a freakish ability to detect truth from lies.

Juliana Chastain doesn't know anything about her family history. While her mother was alive she remained very secretive about her past. So when Juliana discovers a photograph of a glamorous French actress from World War Two amongst her mother's possessions, she is in shock to find herself looking at her grandmother - especially as she is arm in arm with a Nazi officer.... Desperate for answers, Juliana is determined to trace the journey of her grandmother. Surely there is more to the photograph than meets the eye?

When Caroline Williams wakes up in a hospital bed in Paris with no memory of her past, she finds that returning to the life she has forgotten is harder than she thought. Especially as her feet seem to know where to go and her cavernous apartment seems devoid of any memories...Taking her mind off her foggy past is the discovery of a stack of World War Two love letters written by a young mother named Celine to her beloved, Luc, found in a box in the spare room.

Single woman of 29, Lily Bart is Edith Wharton's quintessential trapped heroine. Orphaned following the death of her parents, Lily understands that she must use her beauty, grace, and charm to attain the social position she longs for, but she is caught between her desire for wealth and a strong moral conscience, which sabotages every opportunity she encounters.

Berlin, 1936. The Landau family are at the heart of their community, running a music shop in Berlin and just trying to survive. But their lives are unravelling as Hitler's power increases and the treatment of Jewish families deteriorates. Eldest daughter, Rachel, fears for her sisters' future and will do anything she can to keep them safe. Will she find hope in the darkness? Paris, 1936. As whispers of war travel over from Europe, American debutante Kay escapes her mother's grasp and travels as a reluctant spy from Paris to Berlin.

I haven’t spoken to my mother or sisters in years, but everything changes when I lose my husband. And I know it’s finally time to tell them why I’ve pushed them away. But as I approach my childhood home, my heart drops at the sight of police tape across the porch, and it shatters when I’m told my mother’s body has been recovered from the lake behind the house. I’m too late. Pushing all our differences aside, my sisters and I desperately search her house for answers. But something isn’t right. Her clothes are missing, and everything is covered in a thick layer of dust. 

Jamie MacAfee's life is almost perfect. She's sure she loves her fiancée, even if she hasn't quite worked out why she won't set a wedding date, and she certainly adores her job, working as an architect on her family's home renovation show. Meanwhile, her beloved mother, Caroline, has built up her confidence after a painful divorce, working closely alongside her daughter as the very successful host of Gut It! Everything is going to plan until the lives of both women are changed overnight.

Sarah McAdams needs a fresh start. So she's come home to the shores of Oregon's wild Columbia river, to renovate the old Victorian mansion where she grew up. Her daughters, Jade and Gracie, aren't impressed by the run-down property, and as soon as they pull up the isolated drive, Sarah too is beset by uneasy memories - of her cold, distant mother, of the half-sister who vanished without a trace, and of a long-ago night when Sarah was found outside, feverish and delirious.

Germany, 1945, and the bombs are falling. In Heidenfeld, Etta and her husband, Josef, roam an empty nest: their eldest son, Max, is fighting on the front lines, while 15-year-old Georg has swapped books for guns at a Nürnberg school for the Hitler Youth. At home, news of the war provokes daily doses of fear as the planes grow closer, taking one city after the next. When Max is unexpectedly discharged, Etta is relieved to have her eldest home and safe. But soon after he arrives, it’s clear that the boy who left is not the same returned. 

In best seller Elin Hilderbrand's first Christmas novel, a family gathers on Nantucket for a holiday filled with surprises. Kelley Quinn is the owner of Nantucket's Winter Street Inn and the proud father of four - Patrick, Kevin, Ava and Bart, all of them grown and living in varying states of disarray. As Christmas approaches, Kelley is looking forward to getting the family together for some quality time at the inn.

Twenty years ago, teenager Brandon Taylor walked into the Big Woods north of Tibbehah County, Mississippi, and never returned. For former Army Ranger-turned-sheriff Quinn Colson, the Taylor case has particular meaning. As a 10-year-old, Colson had been lost in those same woods, and came back from them alive and a local legend. Years later, bones of a child are found in the woods, confirming for many the end to the Taylor story. 

Six-year-old Sheila was abandoned by her mother on a highway when she was four. A survivor of horrific abuse, she never spoke, never cried, and was placed in a class for severely retarded children after committing an atrocious act of violence against another child. Everyone thought Sheila was beyond salvation - except her teacher, Torey Hayden. With patience, skill, and abiding love, she fought long and hard to release a haunted little girl from her secret nightmare.

Rescued from a poverty-stricken mountain life, Charity Royall lives as ward to Lawyer Royall in the small New England town of North Dormer. However, Charity is bored by her job at the local library and feels thwarted by the order that governs her society–until a young man named Lucius Harney plucks her from the drabness of North Dormer life.

In this trio of warm, witty, insightful stories, three very different women face questions of the heart that could change all their Christmases to come.

Witness early, bloody, anaesthetic-free operations and first crude surgical instruments, trace the mapping of the circulatory system, follow the painstaking detective work that led to the decoding of the human genome and understand the role that potions, cures, therapies, herbal medicines and drugs have played in the human quest to tame and conquer disease, injury and death. An engrossing history and tale of drama and discovery that celebrates the milestones of medical history across generations and cultures.

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.

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.