Showing results by narrator "Anna Healy" in All Categories

Irish writer Maeve Binchy was one the best-loved and most successful authors of her time. Her bestselling books sold over 40 million copies worldwide, and were translated into 37 languages. This comprehensive anthology of her finest fiction, as heard on BBC Radio, demonstrates all the warmth, wit and compassion that made her so popular.

Fifty-three, long married, and in the throes of menopause, Laura is dismayed. She’s always tolerated her journalist husband’s belittling insults and manipulation—but at least she got some peace when he was busy at his job. Now he’s working from home, and her life is becoming a nightmare. Laura’s blessed escape comes in the form of book-club meetings where her female friends commiserate and joke about raging hormones and rogue chin hairs. She also runs into an ex-boyfriend, and their renewed friendship awakens the spirit and self-confidence she thought was long gone.

Elizabeth Bowen was one of the 20th century's most distinctive writers. An associate of the Bloomsbury Set, she was a keen observer of upper-middle-class life and relationships. Best known for her novels of the Anglo-Irish gentry and wartime London, her fiction displays recurring themes of loss, rootlessness and displacement. This collection contains five of Bowen's best-loved works, and hears from the author herself in three radio talks on the art of novel-writing.