Jay Gatsby causes quite a stir when he buys a mansion on the east coast of America and sets about hosting the most lavish parties. Anyone who is anyone wants to be seen at his glittering parties, but Gatsby himself always seems to be watching and waiting. Who or what is he waiting for?

Pat Hobby is an ageing film writer who used to do well, but these days is low on ideas that pay, until he stumbles across someone else's flash of inspiration.

Augustus Melmotte is a fraudulent foreign financier who preys on dissolute nobility - using charm to tempt the weak into making foolish investments in his dubious schemes. Persuaded to put money into a notional plot to run a railroad from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, the capricious gambler Felix Carbury soon becomes one of his victims. But as Melmo...

Set in the nineteenth century against a backdrop of island life and the vast surrounding seas, A High Wind in Jamaica is the gripping story of the Bas-Thornton children, whose parents send them back to England following a hurricane in the postcolonial Caribbean they call home. Having set sail, the children quickly fall into the hands of pirates.

Sheila Hancock stars in a BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of E. M. Forster's glorious tale of love in Italy and England. Lucy Honeychurch is an innocent abroad. Under the care of her well-meaning but infuriating chaperon, cousin Charlotte, she is completing the final part of a conventional well-bred English upbringing - the Grand Tour. But the...

D.H. Lawrence's controversial classic, The Rainbow, follows the lives and loves of three generations of the Brangwen family, between 1840 and 1905. Their tempestuous relationships are played out against a backdrop of change as they witness the arrival of industrialization-the only constant being their unending attempts to grasp a higher form of exi...

Voltaire and Pangloss travel the world looking for the good in life, but can they find it? Candide and his tutor Pangloss travel the globe trying to follow the philosophy 'All is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds'. However, they are stung and let down at every turn, being robbed, tortured and ridiculed, amongst other trials. On...

The inspiration for a major film releasing 2008 starring Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon. A study of faith and disillusionment in a glamorous upper-class world, Waugh's most famous novel is partly autobiographical and is a gripping multi-character-study of aristocratic life behind closed doors. Charles Ryder meets Sebastian, a member of the aristo...

After the death of her parents, Mary Lennox is brought back from India as a forlorn and unwanted child to live in her uncle's great lonely house on the moors. Then one day, she discovers the key to a secret garden and, as if by magic, her life begins to change.

An early morning awakening leads to a discovery much more shocking than a few rifled drawers at a grand house. A suspected bungled robbery that it seems has gone horribly wrong calls our heroes Holmes and Watson to The Abbey Grange, where their super-sleuthing may be able to shed some light on the mystery.

From its opening sentences Agnes Grey introduces a heroine who is honest, perceptive and charming. Unfortunately, the Bloomfields, who engage her as a governess, are rather less appealing, and the incarnation of the suppressed cruelties and hypocrisies of the Victorian age. When Agnes moves to a marginally less alarming family, one of her charges s...

The body of polynices, Antigone's brother, has been ordered to remain unburied by Creon, the new king Thebes. Antigone's faithfulness to her dead brother and his proper burial, and her defiance of the dictator Creon, seals her fate. Originally produced in Paris during the Nazi occupation, Anouilh's "Antigone" was seen by the French as theater of th...

Read by members of the cast of the exciting new film based on 'The Decameron', 'Virgin Territory', Boccacio's raunchy 14th-Century work is given a new lease of life in this inventive and witty production by CSA WORD. A group of Florentine youth escape to the mountain countryside during the time of the plague, only to regale each other with vignette...

Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once a historical war epic, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Noted for its mastery of realistic detail and psychological analysis, it follows the metamorphosis of five aristocratic families against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Individual stories...

Written during his time in Reading Gaol, De Profundis is Oscar Wilde's moving letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, whose relationship with Wilde led to the poet's imprisonment. Here Wilde repudiates Lord Alfred and reflects on his ordeal, acknowledging how the depths of his sorrow have helped liberate him towards a fuller, freer wisdom. Brimming with bea...

A stark tale of adultery, guilt, and social repression in Puritan New England, The Scarlet Letter is a foundational work of American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's exploration of the dichotomy between the public and private self, internal passion and external convention, gives us the unforgettable Hester Prynne, who discovers strength in the fac...

A BBC Radio 3 full-cast dramatisation of H. G. Wells' pioneering science fiction adventure. Wells' story of an inventor who travels in time and discovers a nightmarish dystopian future has been adapted several times for TV and film. This first ever UK radio adaptation, starring Robert Glenister as the Time Traveller and William Gaunt as H. G. Wells...

When father mysteriously has to go away for a time, three children and their mother leave their comfortable home in London for the country. The children seek solace in the nearby railway station, making friends with Perks the porter and with the station master himself. But will their father ever return?

Set in New York in the 1920s, The Glimpses of the Moon details the romantic misadventures of Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, two high-society hangers-on with the right connections but a lack of funds. To maintain their status, they decide to marry and spend a year or so sponging off their wealthy friends, honeymooning in their mansions and villas. Bo...