Showing results by narrator "Esther Wane" in All Categories

Becky Brown has selected extracts from the Mass Observation Archives to anthologise the voices of everyday people as they deal individually and collectively with the crisis of the Second World War. The diarists themselves have been selected from every level of society - from warehousemen to widows, soldiers to farmhands, WRENs to architects. The extracts have been chosen to both uplift and to ground, to remind listeners that nothing is new, that everything can be weathered and perhaps even made better. After all, World War II saw the birth of the NHS.

It is the week before Christmas, and the cathedral city of St Albans is blanketed by snow. But beneath the festive lights, darkness is stirring. The frozen body of a young girl is discovered by the ice-covered lake. The police scramble for clues. A local woman, Jenny, has had visions of what happened the night of the murder. But Jenny is an exhausted new mother whose midnight wanderings pull her ever closer to the lake. Then another girl goes missing, and the community unravels. Neighbour turns against neighbour, and Jenny has no idea who to believe.

Despite the many films and television programmes over the decades since the end of the Second World War that portrays our allied heroes as grown-up men and women, the Battle of Britain was in the main actually fought and won by teenagers. The average age of an RAF fighter pilot was just 20 years old. Many of the men and women who designed and built their planes were even younger.

Unable to prove that she’s the missing princess, and unable to bear life under Lady Tremaine any longer, Cinderella attempts a fresh start, looking for work at the palace as a seamstress. But when the grand duke appoints her to serve under the king’s visiting sister, Cinderella becomes witness to a grand conspiracy to take the king - and the prince - out of power, as well as a longstanding prejudice against fairies, including Cinderella’s own fairy godmother.

1939: war has broken out, and in Albania Bekim's family take in a Jewish family fleeing from Nazi Austria. The years of war will shape his life in unimaginable ways as Bekim grows to love Hannelore, doing everything in his power to protect her. But will he be enough to keep her safe? 2019: following a shock redundancy, Ruth is taking an extended holiday in Southern Italy, where she befriends local Zak. When Zak's dying father asks them to solve a mystery from his past, Ruth leaps at the chance.

The biggest event in the Catholic calendar is a disaster in Zofia Turbotyńska’s household. Her maid, Karolina, has handed in her notice and worse, gone missing. When Karolina’s body is discovered, violated and stabbed, Zofia knows she has to investigate.

After Ludwig van Beethoven’s death, a love letter in his writing was discovered, addressed only to his ‘Immortal Beloved’. Decades later, Countess Therese Brunsvik claims to have been the composer’s lost love. Yet is she concealing a tragic secret? Who is the one person who deserves to know the truth? Becoming Beethoven’s pupils in 1799, Therese and her sister, Josephine, followed his struggles against the onset of deafness, Viennese society’s flamboyance, privilege and hypocrisy and the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars.

A young writer is brutally attacked in her home and left for dead. For her sister, Nina Bergmann, it's the beginning of a nightmare that will threaten to destroy her marriage, her job and ultimately her life. As she sets out to unravel the truth about what really happened to her sister, Nina comes face-to-face with inner demons she believed long since banished and discovers that her sister's past and that of the once-divided city are intertwined in unimaginable ways. The Wall may be gone, but its legacy still haunts Berlin.

Strange things have been happening to Layah and her younger sister, Izzie, ever since their mother dragged them to a rain-soaked cottage miles from anywhere in the Lake District: there is a peculiar whistling at night, a handful of unusual feathers appear and a sudden, frightening banging at the door. And their mother is behaving very oddly. Layah is mourning the loss of her dear grandmother in Poland - and can almost hear her voice telling her the old myths, legends and fairy tales from that place.

Jess Bright, single mum and journalist, feels her life has stalled. So when she's offered a writing job in Paris for the summer, she leaps at the chance to go back to a city full of old memories and the promise of new opportunities. Her subject is the iconic artist Adelaide Fox, whose personal life has always been steeped in scandal and intrigue. Now approaching eighty, she's ready to tell her side of the story - and serve up some scalding-hot revenge in the process. Amidst a stormy working relationship, Jess and Adelaide must face up to their pasts.

Only fourteen, Stella Infuriati is the youngest member of her town's resistance network during World War II. Risking imprisonment and death, she relays messages, supplies, and weapons to partisan groups in the Tuscan Hills. Her parents have no idea, consumed instead by love and fear for their beloved son, Achille, a courier and unofficial mechanic for a communist brigade fighting the fascists.

Joan, once a singing star of the 1940s and 1950s, now ekes out a lonely, impoverished existence—until a chance encounter promises a comeback concert and an album. Her sister Kathleen is a successful medical researcher who has been offered the directorship of a prestige institute in Los Angeles in her retirement but is facing divorce after her husband's affair. In their old age, Joan and Kathleen draw closer together. Until a figure from Joan's past threatens everything they've built.

When Anya is arrested at a Moscow anti-corruption rally under false pretenses, she is given a 10-day sentence at a detention center. Her cellmates are five other ordinary women arrested on petty charges. Ten listless days stretch before Anya and, as she appeals her sentence and recalls her progress from apolitical youth to informed citizen, she is troubled by strange, dreamlike visions, and wonders if her cellmates might somehow not be as ordinary as they seem.