Telling Tales

Alan Bennett is one of Britain's best-loved and most highly acclaimed writers. He has written widely for radio, television and theatre. His latest play, The History Boys, won several awards, including Evening Standard and Critics' Circle Awards for Best Play and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. It also won six Tony Awards, including Best Play, following an extremely successful transfer to Broadway. In 2006 Bennett was named Author of the Year at the British Book Awards for Untold Stories, his collection of memoirs and diaries.

Following on from the phenomenal success of Writing Home, Alan Bennett reminisces about his early years from his schooldays to undergraduate life at Oxford University. It was an ordinary childhood - growing up in Leeds taught Alan early on that 'life is generally something that happens elsewhere'. Yet the children who long for German bombs to lend their city some wartime glamour; the working class mother who reads Ideal Home and dreams of coffee mornings and cocktail parties; and 18-year-old Alan - a practising Anglican who is deeply distrustful of God - strike a chord within all of us. In fact, it is their very ordinariness that makes these tales so special - combined, of course, with the wry observation and tender understatement that have earned Alan Bennett his place at the forefront of contemporary writing. The stories on this volume are: 'A Strip of Blue', 'Proper Names', 'Our War', 'Eating Out', 'An Ideal Home', 'Aunt Eveline', 'A Shy Butcher', 'Unsaid Prayers', 'Days Out', 'No Mean City'.2 CDs. 2 hrs 10 mins.