Patricia Highsmith was one of the great 20th-century novelists, celebrated for classics The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol and Strangers on a Train, but she was also a masterful and prolific short-story writer. This definitive new collection, featuring two stories that have never been published before, confirms Highsmith as a genius of the genre. Peerlessly disturbing, exhilarating and savagely funny, Highsmith's stories still have the power to startle, presenting a world that is frighteningly familiar and as relevant today as when they were written.

George Bernard Shaw - or Bernard Shaw, as he preferred to be known - was one of Ireland's foremost dramatists and thinkers. His plays range from contemporary satires to historical allegories, and are infused with ideas, insight, wit and wisdom. Included here are some of his best works, adapted for radio and brought together in reverse chronological order in one statement collection.

Writer and director David Hare is one of England's leading political dramatists, celebrated for his many award-winning plays analysing the morality of contemporary Britain. This collection comprises some of his most acclaimed pieces, as well as a fascinating radio interview with Hare himself.

Suave, unflappable and ambitious, veteran politician Charles Bannister knows his way around the corridors of power. As chief whip, he's adept at keeping MPs in line and squashing potential scandals—aided by his brother-in-law, MI6 Agent Henry Colvil, who whispers useful titbits of information in his ear. His position seems invincible—but nothing is forever, and when the tides of politics turn, Charles finds himself under threat. In these six series, we follow his fortunes and those of his close friend Home Secretary Dougal Baxter. Together, the duo rise, fall and rise again.

Patricia Highsmith's first novel was picked up by Hitchcock and was a world-wide success. Her second novel was meant to tell everything about her true inside and dare what no-one had dared to write before: a lesbian love-story with a happy ending. But when she eventually relented to publish it under a pseudonym, it was a decision that would shape her life more than she could have guessed at the time. Henceforth she would vent her inner life either encoded in her future novels or—unbeknownst to most—in the 18 diaries and 38 notebooks she kept throughout her life.

David Kelsey has an invincible conviction that life is going to work out just as he has planned it - if he can just fix 'the situation'. His one true love, the brilliant, beautiful Annabelle, has married another man. But that doesn't mean they can't still be friends. And even though she is pregnant with her husband Gerald's baby, that surely doesn't mean she won't one day get back together with David. She still loves him, of that he is certain. David is sure she'll take him back and, under an alias, is setting up a wonderful home for the two of them in a town close by.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tennessee Williams is one of the three most important American dramatists of the 20th century, alongside Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill. Acclaimed for their lyrical language, dark themes and vivid portrayal of the American South, his works have spawned several Oscar-winning films and been translated and performed worldwide. Collected here are some of the best, beginning with the play that launched Williams' career: The Glass Menagerie. 

Acclaimed as 'the most thoroughly European of British crime writers' (Guardian), Nicolas Freeling was well known for his novels featuring Dutch sleuth Van der Valk and French policeman Henri Castang. Included in this collection are six stories showcasing both detectives, as well as a bonus programme exploring Van der Valk and his creator.

An 18-part serialisation of John Masters' chronicles of the Savage family, spanning the years 1825-1946 and set against the backdrop of British rule in India. Based on the hugely popular novels of John Masters, this landmark BBC Radio adaptation charts the history of the British in India through the perspective of one family over several generations. Ranging over more than 120 years, these thrilling tales of love, murder and espionage take us from the expansion of the East India Company to the last days of the Raj and the approach of Independence.

West Midlands copper Jackie Hartwell has one of the toughest jobs in CID: comforting and supporting grieving relatives in the aftermath of a serious crime. But there's much more to what she does than providing tea and sympathy. Part social worker, part savvy investigator, she needs to be able to win the trust of families, while simultaneously keeping a watchful eye on their behaviour and reactions. Because often, the suspect she's searching for isn't far from home....

Alison Steadman and Sue Johnston star as world-weary hack Dee T. Mitchell in these two mystery thrillers set in South Wales. These two gripping crime dramas follow the dogged, imaginative and impressive investigations of Dee T. Mitchell, a reporter on a local Swansea newspaper, as she attempts to uncover the murders of two individuals and in the process exposes deep secrets and cover-ups across the Gower peninsula and beyond.

One of the greatest novelists of all time, Leo Tolstoy is famed worldwide for his masterpieces of realist fiction, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. This comprehensive collection contains both those iconic works, as well as his final novel, Resurrection, his autobiographical essay 'A Confession', Stephen Wakelam's dramatic account of his tempestuous marriage, Mrs Tolstoy, and In Our Time: Tolstoy. 

Budapest, 1963. Special Investigator Bertalan Lázár and his wife, spymaster Franciska Lázár, face formidable challenges as they try to navigate a path through the dangerous underworld of Cold War-era Hungary. Catching the criminals is difficult enough, but there are other more threatening battles raging in higher places.

This collection brings all five series of this tense, fast-paced drama set in an ambulance control for the first time.

Barbara Pym is one of the 20th-century's wittiest, and most underrated, novelists. Her perceptive comedies of manners, centred around the domestic lives and loves of unassuming middle-class Englishwomen, won her many devoted readers and saw her hailed as a modern-day Jane Austen. Yet she spent 15 years out of print in the 1960s and '70s, until Philip Larkin championed her work in the Times Literary Supplement. Her seventh novel was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and writers from Jilly Cooper to Alexander McCall Smith continue to laud her talent today.