Performed by Richard Armitage, Anthony Boyle, Emila Fox and Hugh Quarshie
HOUSEHOLD GIZMOS WITH A MIND OF THEIR OWN.
THE WRONG KIND OF COLD CALLS.
AND THE CREEPING SUSPICION THAT NONE OF THIS IS REAL.
Reality, and Other Stories is a gathering of deliciously chilling entertainments - stories to be listened to as the evenings draw in, and the days are haunted by uncanny technologies and the absurd horrors of modern life.
"Masterly...remarkable." GUARDIAN on The Wall
Narrated by BAFTA-winning actor Will Poulter
Kavanagh begins his life patrolling the Wall. If he's lucky, if nothing goes wrong, he only has two years of this, 729 more nights.The best thing that can happen is that he survives and gets off the Wall and never has to spend another day of his life anywhere near it. He longs for this to be over; longs to be somewhere else. He will soon find out what Defenders do and who the Others are. Along with the rest of his squad, he will endure cold and fear day after day, night after night. But somewhere, in the dark cave of his mind, he thinks: wouldn't it be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if you had to fight for your life?
John Lanchester's thrilling, hypnotic new novel is about why the young are right to hate the old. It's about a broken world you will recognise as your own-and about what might be found when all is lost.
To those who don't speak it, the language of money can seem impenetrable and its ideas too complex to grasp. How to Speak Money is acclaimed writer John Lanchester's entertaining and informative attempt to bridge the gap between the money people and the rest of us.
With characteristic wit and candor ("wickedly funny" --Dwight Garner, New York Times), Lanchester shows how the world of finance and economics really works--from the terms and conditions of your personal checking account to the evasions of bankers appearing in front of Congress. How to Speak Money reveals how the language of money is often a tool to conceal and mislead; he explains hundreds of common economic terms, from GDP to the IMF, amortization and securitization to collateralized debt obligation; and he argues that we all need to speak money lest those who do write the financial rules for themselves.
It's 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London-a banker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and her graffiti-artist grandson, Pakistani shop owners and a shadowy refugee who works as the meter maid, the young soccer star from Senegal and his minder-are receiving anonymous postcards reading "We Want What You Have." Who is behind it? What do they want? Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.
Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have. Following the residents of Pepys Road, Capital features a cast of characters that you will be sad to leave behind.
Family Romance is a beautifully written memoir in which John Lanchester joins the dots of his parents' history, their extraordinary secrets and the shape of their shared life. From his grandparents' beginnings in rural Ireland and colonial Rhodesia, Lanchester navigates through his parents' lives: his father Bill's devastating war-time separation from his parents; his mother Julia's tragic first love, her decision to become a nun and her adoption of a new identity. Lanchester illuminates their characters and Julia's motives with moving insight.
Mr Phillips wakes on the morning of July 31 in his modest, nearly mortgage-free home, in the bed he has contentedly shared with his wife of thirty years (though to be honest, at night he lies beside her and dreams of other women), ready to face another ordinary day. Except that for Mr Phillips, it is not an ordinary day, for on Friday, July 28, he was summarily sacked. Nonetheless, he rises at his usual hour and prepares himself as he has done his entire working life for the office he no longer has. This is the story of one day in the life of a decent man who only forty-eight hours before knew exactly who and what he was - husband and father, accountant, home-owner, son - and who on this day wonders who and what he can become.
