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  • Published: 19 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9781787537354
  • Imprint: BBC DL
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 10 hr 21 min
  • Narrators: Kate O'Flynn, Neil Dudgeon, Tim McInnerny, Don Gilet, Rebekah Staton
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China Towns: Based on the Five Towns Novels

BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisations




Neil Dudgeon and Tim McInnerny star in this epic tale of money, passion and defiance, inspired by the ‘Five Towns’ novels of Arnold Bennett

Neil Dudgeon and Tim McInnerny star in this epic tale of money, passion and defiance, inspired by the 'Five Towns' novels of Arnold Bennett

In this radical reinterpretation of Arnold Bennett's classic novels set in the Staffordshire potteries, it's the 19th Century and the Industrial Revolution is at full throttle. Only the ruthless thrive in this uncompromising world - and Ephraim Tellwright and Darius Clayhanger are both determined to succeed.

From humble beginnings, these two self-made men have risen to become wealthy and powerful. Now, they hold the fate of the Five Towns in their hands, passing judgement on those who put the prosperity and reputation of their community at risk...

Over 10 hours and almost 40 years, we follow them, their descendants, and the inhabitants of Bursley and the Five Towns, as individuals rise, fall, flourish, age, and see the world around them become unrecognisable, transformed by new technology. Fortunes are lost, hearts broken, empires built and compromises made.

These tales of aspiration and passion, damage and danger are told with Bennett's forensic eye for human psychology and a surprising degree of witty comedy, and feature a star cast including Emma Cunniffe, Kate O'Flynn, Don Gilet and Rebekah Staton.

  • Published: 19 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9781787537354
  • Imprint: BBC DL
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 10 hr 21 min
  • Narrators: Kate O'Flynn, Neil Dudgeon, Tim McInnerny, Don Gilet, Rebekah Staton
Categories:

About the author

Arnold Bennett

Arnold Bennett was born in Hanley, Staffordshire, in 1867. After a secondary school education, he worked first for his father, a self-taught solicitor, and then moved to London as a shorthand clerk with a firm of solicitors. He began to write to make extra money and in 1893 became assistant editor and subsequently editor of the weekly magazine, Woman, reviewing books and writing articles on general subjects, something he continued to do all his life. His first novel, A Man From the North, appeared in 1898 and in 1900 he finished The Grand Babylon Hotel, published in 1902, and began Anna of the Five Towns (1902), in which he first started to use the Potteries of his boyhood as a setting for his novels. In these contrasting works, he also reveals his lifelong fascination for, on the one hand, the world's luxury and opulence, and on the other, puritanism and people who can endure hard work.

In 1903 Bennett moved to Paris and in 1907 he married a Frenchwoman (from whom he separated in 1921). The Old Wives' Tale (1908) was written in France and shows Bennet's main influences, the first being that of his own background and the second that of the French realists such as Flaubert, Maupassant and Balzac. In it, Bennett also reveals his own preoccupations with the effects of time and history on the lives of ordinary people.

This was followed by the Clayhanger trilogy: Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911) and These Twain (1916). His works also include several plays, two volumes of short stories and several other novels. He died in 1931.

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