Showing results by narrator "Patrick Dickson" in All Categories

Victor Hugo wrote this wonderful story while living in exile on the island of Guernsey, which is where the adventure unfolds. Set in the early 1800s, The Toilers of the Sea tells off a young reclusive fisherman who falls dangerously in love with a beautiful island girl. Her uncle, himself an intrepid seafarer, is the owner of a paddle-steamer, which plies its trade to and from St. Malo on the coast of Brittany.

Nine classic works by the Russian literary giant, adapted for BBC Radio Ivan Turgenev stands alongside Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as one of the three great Russian novelists of the 19th century. He was also a consummate short story writer, poet and playwright, and the first Russian author to become...

THE LAUGHING MAN Another epic novel from the pen of Victor Hugo, perhaps the greatest romantic author of the 19th Century. The Laughing Man (L’Homme Qui Rit) is a gothic romance with satirical, political and spiritual overtones. Set in England after Cromwell’s failed republic and during the reign of Queen Anne (early 18thC) the story follows the fortunes of a small boy who has been cruelly and deliberately disfigured when he was just an infant.

It is 1966. Young naive Tom Adams arrives in recently independent Uganda to teach English at a Kampala boys high school where he almost immediately becomes involved in the local expatriate theatre scene with its frequently clashing egos and hot-house sexual shenanigans. Through his friendship with the charismatic African actor Robert Kabarega and his attraction for the beautiful Philomena - daughter of a wealthy Asian business-man - he is further implicated in the dangerous world of Ugandan politics where he finds himself under surveillance by the Government Special Branch.