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  • Published: 1 January 2012
  • ISBN: 9781408497135
  • Imprint: BBC DL
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 7 hr 25 min
  • Narrators: Stephen Rea, Sinead Cusack

Ulysses




A BBC Radio 4 dramatised reading of James Joyce's classic modernist novel, starring Stephen Rea and Sinead Cusack.

The young poet Stephen has been recalled from Paris to Dublin to be at his mother’s deathbed. But he refuses her dying wishes: to kneel and pray for her. Now, holed up in his Martello tower outside the city walls, he has to suffer the taunts of Buck Mulligan by day and, by night, the vision of ‘her eyes, shaking out of death to shake and bend my soul.’ Timelessly evocative, Ulysses is far more than the story of Stephen Dedalus’ journey through Dublin. It is a huge, rich portrayal of human life. In this magnificent, highly accessible, part reading part dramatisation - which includes the famous Molly Bloom soliloquy - the power and truth of Joyce’s vision is as potent as ever. Ulysses stars Stephen Rea and Sinead Cusack, with an introduction by Seamus Heaney. ‘The best book at bedtime’ - Sunday Telegraph.

  • Published: 1 January 2012
  • ISBN: 9781408497135
  • Imprint: BBC DL
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 7 hr 25 min
  • Narrators: Stephen Rea, Sinead Cusack

About the author

James Joyce

James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882, the eldest of ten children in a family which, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. He was nonetheless educated at the best Jesuit schools and then at University College, Dublin, and displayed considerable academic and literary ability. Although he spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Joyce's psychological and fictional universe is firmly rooted in his native Dublin, the city which provides the settings and much of the subject matter for all of his fiction. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922) and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). James Joyce died in Zürich, on 13 January 1941.

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