John Fowles won international acclaim for his innovative, allusive novels The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. All were critical and commercial successes, translated into several languages and adapted as feature films. This collection brings together the BBC Radio adaptations of these three modern classics, with stellar casts including Judi Dench, Charles Dance and John Hurt.

One of the 20th century's most challenging novels of ideas, The Fountainhead champions the cause of individualism through the story of a gifted young architect who defies the tyranny of conventional public opinion. The struggle for personal integrity in a world that values conformity above creativity is powerfully illustrated through three characters: Howard Roarke, a genius; Gail Wynand, a newspaper mogul and self-made millionaire; and Dominique Francon, a devastating beauty.

A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."

Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he's assigned, he'll be in violation of Catch-22.

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sarah Collier has taken a step back from work to spend more time with her family. Movie nights with her husband Daniel and their daughter Maddie are a welcome respite from the scrutiny of the world’s press. As much as it hurts, it’s good to be able to see her father more too. He’s suffering from Alzheimer’s and needs special care. Sarah has started to show tell-tale signs of the disease too. She’s been experiencing blackouts and memory loss. It’s early days but she must face the possibility that she won’t be there to see her daughter grow up.

A breakneck race against time…and an implacable enemy. An anonymous young woman murdered in a run-down hotel, all identifying characteristics dissolved by acid. A father publicly beheaded in the blistering heat of a Saudi Arabian public square. A notorious Syrian biotech expert found eyeless in a Damascus junkyard. Smoldering human remains on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan. A flawless plot to commit an appalling crime against humanity. One path links them all, and only one man can make the journey. Pilgrim.

The Devil comes to Moscow, but he isn't all bad; Pontius Pilate sentences a charismatic leader to his death, but yearns for redemption; and a writer tries to destroy his greatest tale, but discovers that manuscripts don't burn. Multi-layered and entrancing, blending sharp satire with glorious fantasy, The Master and Margarita is ceaselessly inventive and profoundly moving. In its imaginative freedom and raising of eternal human concerns, it is one of the world's great novels.

A psychopath is terrorizing Copenhagen. His calling card is a “chestnut man” - a handmade doll made of matchsticks and two chestnuts - which he leaves at each bloody crime scene. Examining the dolls, forensics makes a shocking discovery - a fingerprint belonging to a young girl, a government minister’s daughter who had been kidnapped and murdered a year ago. A tragic coincidence - or something more twisted? To save innocent lives, a pair of detectives must put aside their differences to piece together the Chestnut Man’s gruesome clues.

After Englishman John Blackthorne is lost at sea, he awakens in a place few Europeans know of and even fewer have seen—Nippon. Thrust into the closed society that is seventeenth-century Japan, a land where the line between life and death is razor-thin, Blackthorne must negotiate not only a foreign people, with unknown customs and language, but also his own definitions of morality, truth, and freedom. As internal political strife and a clash of cultures lead to seemingly inevitable conflict, Blackthorne’s loyalty and strength of character are tested by both passion and loss.

For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.

An escaped convict with a false passport, Lin flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter the city’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.

When does enlightenment come? At the end of the spiritual journey? Or the beginning? In After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, Jack Kornfield brings into focus the truth about satori, the awakened state of consciousness, and enlightenment practices today. The result is this extraordinary look at the hard work we all must do - the laundry - no matter how often we experience ecstatic states of consciousness through meditation and other disciplines.

A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place.

Somewhere on the frontier between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a parallel time and place that might sound and smell very much like our own, but which looks completely different. Particularly as it’s carried though space on the back of a giant turtle (sex unknown). It plays by different rules. But then, some things are the same everywhere. The Disc’s very existence is about to be threatened by a strange new blight: the world’s first tourist, upon whose survival rests the peace and prosperity of the land.

Amanda Hale and Tom Burke star in a brand new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Charlotte Brontë's most beloved novel, adapted by Rachel Joyce. Orphan Jane learns at an early age that self-control is the surest means of retaining self-respect in adversity. It is a lesson that serves her well in the years ahead as she endures the misery of life with her cruel, uncaring aunt, followed by the harsh regime at Lowood Institution, a charity school for poor children.

John Fowles’s The Magus was a literary landmark of the 1960s. Nicholas Urfe goes to a Greek island to teach at a private school and becomes enmeshed in curious happenings at the home of a mysterious Greek recluse, Maurice Conchis. Are these events, involving attractive young English sisters, just psychological games, or an elaborate joke, or more? Reality shifts as the story unfolds. The Magus reflected the issues of the 1960s perfectly, and it continues to create tension and concern today.

John Fowles won international acclaim for his innovative, allusive novels The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. All were critical and commercial successes, translated into several languages and adapted as feature films. This collection brings together the BBC Radio adaptations of these three modern classics, with stellar casts including Judi Dench, Charles Dance and John Hurt.

The Ebony Tower, comprising a novella, three stories, and a translation of a medieval French tale, echoes themes from John Fowles' internationally celebrated novels as it probes the fitful relations between love and hate, pleasure and pain, and fantasy and reality.

Det. Inspector Kate Carter and her team are assigned to investigate the murder of man found inside the wreckage of a car. A vintage vinyl record from 1964, found next to the body, soon turns out to be an important clue as a second body is discovered. And meanwhile, Det. Inspector Kate, shrewd and smart, and a happy-go-lucky mum to three children, has something very dark to contend with her in her personal life.

At the end of a long and useful life, Penelope Keeling's prized possession is The Shell Seekers, painted by her father, and symbolizing her unconventional life, from bohemian childhood to wartime romance. When her grown children learn their grandfather's work is now worth a fortune, each has an idea as to what Penelope should do. But as she recalls the passions, tragedies, and secrets of her life, she knows there is only one answer...and it lies in her heart.