Showing results by narrator "Neil Pearson" in Literature & Fiction

In Nocturnes, a sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the "hush-hush floor" of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning. Gentle, intimate, and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme: the struggle to keep alive a sense of life's romance, even as one gets older.

One of the main movers and shakers at TS Sports Stars agency, Trevor Heslop is honest, decent and sensitive. Unfortunately, he works in a world of cutthroats and corruption, with nightmare clients and a rapacious partner with the morals of a barracuda. Add to that his dysfunctional family - estranged wife Meryl and teenage son Toby - and it’s a miracle he manages to stay afloat in the shark tank that is his life.

The complete BBC Radio 4 satirical comedy series about a seasoned presenter of travel documentaries, Brian Gulliver, who finds himself in a hospital's secure unit after claiming to have experienced a succession of bizarre adventures. In series one we hear about Brian's travels in Gelbetia, a country run by doctors; Juradia, where every other person is a lawyer; Osminia, a land where marriage is outlawed; Sham, a country where alternative therapies abound; Erosia, which has a very different view of sexual politics; and Jampoa, where fame definitely equals fortune.

In series 1 and 2, as his mum and wife, Mary, sit round his bedside and wonder how to wake him up, Ben’s mind is busy elsewhere. In his imagination, he lives with his two-year-old daughter, Blitz (now miraculously grown up), encounters celebrities such as Sue Lawley, Elvis Presley and Tom Paulin, relives memories from his past and gets into a compromising situation with a fellow inmate at a strangely familiar Torquay hotel. Meanwhile, an imaginary sitcom written by him, about coma patients in a hospital, plays in the background.

The body of a well-liked local historian is found half-buried under a wall near the village of Helmthorpe, Swainsdale. Who on earth would want to kill such a thoughtful, dedicated man? Penny Cartwright, a beautiful folk singer with a mysterious past, a shady land-developer, Harry's editor, and a local thriller writer are all suspects, and all are figures from Harry's previous, idyllic summers in the dale. A young girl, Sally Lumb, knows more than she lets on, and her knowledge could lead to danger.

It should have been a cosy scene: log fire, sheepskin rug, Vivaldi on the stereo, Christmas lights and tree. But appearances can be deceptive. For Caroline Hartley has been brutally murdered.

Composed in the early 1350s, in the wake of the Black Death, The Decameron comprises 100 short stories from all over the world, reset by Boccaccio among the flourishing merchant classes of Renaissance Italy. Their universal themes—love, sex, religion, fate, morality—resonate with us to this day, and their witty, satirical, bawdy voice sounds utterly modern. Monty Python star and medieval historian Terry Jones presents ten BBC Radio dramatisations of tales from Giovanni Boccaccio's humane and comic masterpiece

Chief Inspector Banks is back - in an original tale that makes up part of a new crime collection of seven short stories by Peter Robinson, never published in the UK before. With settings ranging from the Pacific Northwest in the Sixties to the Yorkshire of the Second World War and present-day Toronto to Eastvale at Christmas, these stories feature hippies, policemen and models, little girls dancing ballet, PIs and soldiers.