Once upon a time, a teenaged Kate Winslet (The Reader, Titanic, Revolutionary Road) received a gift that would leave a lasting impression: a copy of Emile Zola’s classic Thérèse Raquin. Six Academy Award nominations and one Best Actress award later, she steps behind the microphone to perform this haunting classic of passion and disaster.

Lewis Romayne returns to the family home, Vange Abbey, after a fatal duel in France–the memory of which still haunts him. In an attempt to put the experience behind him, he visits London where he meets Stella Eynecourt, who will become his wife. However, Romayne also comes across the cunning Father Benwell, who is determined to convert him to Catholicism and to regain Vange Abbey for the Church.

Overcome with grief at her husband’s death, Lady Franklin, an eligible young widow, unburdens herself to Leadbitter–a gallant, hard-bitten ex-soldier who has invested his savings in the car he drives for hire–as he takes her on a series of journeys. He in turn beguiles her with stories of his non-existent wife and children, drawing her out of her self-absorption and weaving a dream-life with Lady Franklin at its heart.

Romance blossoms when Catherine, a 47-year-old widow, and the 25-year-old Christopher meet at repeated performances of a poorly attended play. However, 1920s London society is shocked by such a match, its disapproval shared by Catherine’s daughter and son-in-law, the curate Stephen. As events unfold, can their relationship survive the opprobrium of those around them as well as the disparity in their ages?

In The Thirty-Nine Steps, Hannay struggles to thwart an assassination plot designed to hasten war between Britain and Germany. Later he is plucked from the trenches first, in Greenmantle, to frustrate a plot to ferment an uprising in the Islamic world; and then, in Mr. Standfast, to undertake a vital secret mission against a German spy ring operating among pacifist elements in England. After the war, his adventures continue in The Three Hostages; and then in The Island of Sheep, when an old oath to protect the son of a friend from his days in Africa draws him into new danger.