Showing results by narrator "Juliet Stevenson" in All Categories

A fascinating new volume of messages about fatherhood, from the author of the best-selling Letters of Note collections. In Letters of Note: Fathers, Shaun Usher collects together remarkable correspondence by and about fathers, including proud parental words of love, advice from experienced dads to new ones, as well as letters from both frustrated and adoring offspring.

Flappy Scott-Booth is the self-appointed queen bee of Badley Compton, a picturesque Devon village. While her husband Kenneth spends his days on the golf course, she is busy overseeing her beautiful house and gardens and organising unforgettable events, surrounded by friends who hang on to her every word. Her life is a reflection of herself—impossibly perfect. Until the day that Hedda Harvey-Smith and her husband Charles move into the village. Into an even grander home than hers. Taking the front seat on the social scene, quite literally.

Mary Lennox is a sick and spoiled child living in India. After her parents die of cholera, she returns to England. There her health improves while meeting all sorts of strange and wonderful people and friends. Mary has all kinds of adventures with weird sounds in the night, amusing accents, and a locked garden. The Secret Garden is a magical book about friendship, tenacity, and willpower.

'There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party....' As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they first appear....

Set in medieval Britain, Learwife gives voice to one of the most famous female characters ever written out of literary history. Lear's queen has been exiled in an abbey for 15 years, since the birth of her youngest daughter, for an unknown offence. After hearing the devastating news of the deaths of her husband and daughters, the queen enters into a spiral of grief. To occupy her troubled mind, she encourages the women of the abbey into a competition for her approval, a contest that quickly devolves into savagery.

Responsible for cleaning the homes of the rich, Mrs. Harris is a humble charlady with a knack for putting things in order wherever she goes. When, much to her surprise, she wins a trip for two beyond the Iron Curtain, she has no idea of the adventure that lies ahead of her. Ever the loyal servant, Mrs. Harris (accompanied by her friend Mrs. Butterfield) believes it only right that others benefit from her fortune as well. With a mink coat in mind for Mrs. Butterfield, she also hopes to use their 'oliday to reignite a lost romance between her employer and a Russian woman he had loved years ago.

In Letters of Note: Cats, Shaun Usher collects together the most engaging missives that celebrate, eulogise, rail against and analyse the idiosyncratic ways of our feline companions. A star-studded cast of readers brings the letters to life, with contributions from Sanjeev Bhaskar, Louise Brealey, Simon Callow, Benedict Cumberbatch, Adrian Edmondson, Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, Danny Huston, Toby Jones, Ferdinand Kingsley, Helen McCrory, Natascha McElhone, Stephen Mangan, Miriam Margolyes, Clarke Peters, Juliet Stevenson, Mark Strong and Meera Syal.

What if you couldn't remember a single minute of the ten years you'd spent with the love of your life? Joe can remember everything about Ally; Ally remembers nothing about Joe.

From the thrilling imagination of best-selling, award-winning Colm Tóibín comes this ambitious, violent and modern retelling of one of our oldest and most enduring stories. On the day of his daughter's wedding, Agamemnon orders her sacrifice. His daughter is led to her death, and Agamemnon leads his army into battle, where he is rewarded with glorious victory. Three years later he returns home, and his murderous action has set the entire family - mother, brother, sister - on a path of intimate violence.

Kat Wolfe loves her new home in idyllic Bluebell Bay, especially as it comes with a resident wildcat. But when she starts pet-sitting for pocket money, she finds that beneath the town's perfect surface lie some dark and dangerous secrets...After a pet owner vanishes from his clifftop mansion, Kat turns to her new friend, Harper Lamb, for help. What began as mystery-solving holiday fun quickly turns deadly for Wolfe and Lamb....

Set in 17th-century London, Sexing the Cherry is about the journeys taken by the boisterous Dog-Woman and her son, Jordan: journeys across seas to find bananas and pineapples; journeys through time that weave snatches of the present with tales of Charles the First and Oliver Cromwell; journeys in search of the self. As mothers go, the Dog-Woman takes some beating. She's a giant wrapped in a skirt that could 'serve as a sail for some war torn ship' and strong enough to fling an elephant into the air.

Ruth has the life she always wanted—stellar career, loving family, beautiful home—but now, with an empty nest, and heading towards 55, she feels restless. Then her daughter is told that she will never be able to conceive, and Ruth discovers that, with the right dose of hormones, she could carry a child for her daughter. At first Ruth is buoyed with a new sense of purpose, but her daughter can't contain her corrosive envy, and then long-buried secrets from the past resurface. What begins a simple gift becomes something darker and more complicated.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Noonday by Pat Barker, read by Juliet Stevenson, Stephen Boxer, John Sackville, Anne Reid & Finlay Robertson. London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. Ambulance drivers Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville ferry injured survivors from bomb sites to hospitals while Elinor's husband, Paul, works as an air-raid warden.

One September evening in 1785, Jonah Hancock hears an urgent knocking on his front door near the docks of London. The captain of one of Jonah’s trading vessels is waiting eagerly on the front step, bearing shocking news. On a voyage to the Far East, he sold Jonah’s ship for something rare and far more precious: a mermaid. As gossip spreads through the docks, coffee shops, parlors and brothels, all of London is curious to see this marvel in Jonah Hancock’s possession. Thrust from his ordinary existence, somber Jonah finds himself moving from the city’s seedy underbelly to the finest drawing rooms of high society.

A teenage girl finds unexpected sexual freedom on a trip to Amsterdam. A woman trapped at a dinner party comes up against an ugly obsession. The stories in Free Love are about desire, memory, sexual ambiguity and the imagination. In the harsh light of dislocation, the people in them still find connections, words blowing in the street, love in unexpected places. Ali Smith shows how things come together and how they break apart. She disconcerts and affirms with the lightest touch, to make us love and live differently.

Ailsa Tilson moves with her husband and children to Trinity Fields in search of the new. New project - a house to renovate. New people - no links to the past. New friends - especially her next-door neighbour, the lonely Verity, who needs her help. Verity has lived in Trinity Fields all her life. She's always resisted change. Her home and belongings are a shield, a defence to keep the outside world at bay. But something about the Tilsons piques her interest. Just as her ivy creeps through the shared garden fence, so Verity will work her way into the Tilson family....

The Reacher Guy is a compelling and authoritative portrait of the artist as a young man, refracted through the life of his fictional avatar, Jack Reacher. Through parallels drawn between Child and his literary creation, it tells the story of how a boy from Birmingham with a ferocious appetite for reading grew up to become a high-flying TV executive, before coming full circle and establishing himself as the strongest brand in publishing.

Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's "living autobiography" is an exhilarating, thought-provoking, and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it.

aking George Orwell's famous essay, "Why I Write", as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indispensable reflections of the writing life. With wit, clarity, and calm brilliance, she considers how the writer must stake claim to that contested territory as a young woman and shape it to her need. Things I Don't Want to Know is a work of dazzling insight and deep psychological succor, from one of our most vital contemporary writers.

The story is told by Coriander, daughter of a silk merchant in 1650s London. Her idyllic childhood ends when her mother dies and her father goes away, leaving Coriander with her stepmother, a widow who is in cahoots with a fundamentalist Puritan preacher. She is shut away in a chest and left to die, but emerges into the fairy world from which her mother came, and where time has no meaning. When she returns, charged with a task that will transform her life, she is seventeen.