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Where to start with Graham Greene’s books

Eight full-cast productions including The End of the Affair, Our Man in Havana &  Monsignor Quixote

The Graham Greene BBC Radio Drama Collection: The Later Years

A definitive collection of eight full-cast BBC Radio productions, featuring stellar talent including Alex Jennings, Michael Kitchen, Ben Miles and Bernard Cribbins 
 
One of the foremost novelists of the last century, Graham Greene left an indelible mark on the world of fiction. In his many masterpieces, he introduced his fans to ‘Greeneland’ – a shadowy world of sin, redemption, treachery and sexual betrayal, occupied by complex, ambivalent characters. 
 
That world is brought vividly to life in these eight stunning BBC Radio productions. They represent the very best examples of his later work, written between 1951 and 1982, and together comprise nearly 17 hours of riveting drama. Included in this substantial box set are adaptations of his masterly novels The End of the Affair, Our Man in Havana, A Burnt-Out Case, The Comedians, The Honorary Consul and Monsignor Quixote, all starring a wealth of distinguished actors, among them Ben Miles, Adjoa Andoh, Michael Kitchen, Paterson Joseph, Bernard Cribbins and Philip Jackson. 
 
Here, too, are the radio versions of two of his superb stage plays. The Potting Shed, a gripping psychological drama centred around faith and family secrets, stars Dame Sybil Thorndike, who took the lead role in the original Broadway production. And in the ingenious two-hander Yes and No, Clive Francis plays the Director, with Alex Jennings as the Actor, whose only lines are ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. 
 
Plus, a bonus programme, Graham Greene at 80, sees the great author in conversation with writer and broadcaster Nigel Lewis, discussing his life and writing. It includes contributions from his biographer. Norman Sherry, and his brother, Sir Hugh Greene, as well as extracts from Greene’s work read by Ian Holm. 
 
Contents: 
The End of the Affair 
The Potting Shed 
Our Man in Havana 
A Burnt-Out Case 
The Comedians 
The Honorary Consul 
Yes and No 
Monsignor Quixote 
Greene at 80 
 
Text copyright © 1951 (The End of the Affair), 1957 (The Potting Shed), 1958 (Our Man in Havana), 1960 (A Burnt-Out Case), 1966 (The Comedians), 1973 (The Honorary Consul), 1980 (Yes and No), 1982 (Monsignor Quixote) 
 
With thanks to Keith Wickham of the Radio Circle for supplying several of the audio recordings. 
 
© 2025 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2025 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Eight full-cast productions including Stamboul Train, Brighton Rock & The Power and the Glory

The Graham Greene BBC Radio Drama Collection: The Early Years

Alan Bennett, Claire Skinner, Charles Dance and Judi Dench are among the star casts of these superlative BBC Radio productions 
 
Graham Greene was the 20th century’s master of plot, an expert chronicler of Catholic guilt, Cold War intrigue, conflict and crime. A prolific polymath, his work incorporated serious novels, thrillers, short stories, screenplays, stage plays and more. 
 
This wide-ranging box set includes the finest examples of his early work, written between 1932 and 1948, and contains over 15 hours of unmissable drama. It includes captivating adaptations of his classic novels Stamboul Train, Brighton Rock, The Confidential Agent, The Power and the Glory, The Ministry of Fear and The Heart of the Matter, performed by an array of A-list actors including Joseph Millson, Claire Skinner, Kenneth Cranham, Stephen Rea, Charles Dance, Harriet Walter and Tom Hollander. 
 
Also featured are Greene’s only original radio play, The Great Jowett, starring Alan Bennett as the titular Oxford don, and an adaptation of his BAFTA-nominated screenplay The Fallen Idol, starring acclaimed classical actor Richard Pasco and a young Judi Dench. 
 
Concluding this definitive collection are two bonus pieces. Great Lives: Graham Greene sees war reporter Tim Butcher and presenter Matthew Parris exploring the strange world of Graham Greene, and in a fascinating 1971 interview from Radio 4’s Now Read On, the author himself discusses his novels with Magnus Magnusson – and reveals which book he considers to be his best... 
 
Contents 
Stamboul Train 
Brighton Rock 
The Great Jowett 
The Confidential Agent 
The Power and the Glory 
The Ministry of Fear 
The Heart of the Matter 
The Fallen Idol 
Great Lives: Graham Greene 
Now Read On 
 
Text copyright © 1932 (Stamboul Train), 1938 (Brighton Rock), 1939 (The Great Jowett, The Confidential Agent), 1940 (The Power and the Glory), 1943 (The Ministry of Fear), 1948 (The Heart of the Matter, The Fallen Idol) 
 
With thanks to Keith Wickham of the Radio Circle for supplying several of the audio recordings. 
 
© 2025 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2025 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Journey Without Maps

Graham Greene's incredible journey to an unchartered land.

One of the best travel books this century

No one who reads this book will question the value of Greene's experiment, or emerge unshaken by the penetration, the richness, the integrity of this moving record

His originality lay in his gifts as a traveller. He had the foreign ear and eye for the strangeness of ordinary life and its ordinary crises

Journey Without Maps and The Lawless Roads reveal Greene's ravening spiritual hunger, a desperate need to touch rock bottom both within the self and in the humanly created world

The iconic writer's travel log from the uncharted shores of West Africa. 
 
Leaving Europe for the first time in his life, Graham Greene set out in 1935 to discover Liberia, then a virtually unmapped republic on the shores of West Africa. This captivating account of his arduous 350-mile journey on foot - a great adventure which took him from the border with Sierra Leone to the Atlantic coast at Grand Bassa - is as much a record of one young man's self-discovery as it is a striking insight into one of the few areas of Africa untouched by Western colonisation. Journey Without Maps is regarded as a masterclass in travel writing. 
 
WITH A FOREWORD BY TIM BUTCHER AND AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL THEROUX 
 
'One of the best travel books this century' Independent

England Made Me

A powerful and unusual love story set in a world that has lost the comfort of national identity and individualism, told by one of the 20th century’s greatest writers.

Greene can never be less than wonderfully readable.

Graham Greene was born in 1904. He worked as a journalist and critic, and in 1940 became literary editor of the Spectator. He was later employed by the Foreign Office. As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography, two of biography and four books for children. He also wrote hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.

Set in a world that has lost the comfort of national identity and individualism, this is a powerful and unusual love story told by one of the 20th century's greatest writers. 
 
Anthony Farrant is back home after lying and cheating his way through one job after another in the Far East. When his adoring sister Kate sets him up with a role in Stockholm as bodyguard to her boss and lover, megalomaniac financier Krogh, Anthony seems set on a path to redemption. But when he receives orders from Krogh that offend his own sense of decency, he begins to leak information to a down-at-heel journalist: a decision that will cost Anthony much more than just his job. 
 
First published in 1935, England Made Me is an early Greene novel and helped to cement his reputation as an important and exciting new writing talent. 
 
'Graham Greene has wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the top ranks of world literature' John le Carré

Twenty-One Stories

A celebrated collection of stories from one of the most important British writers of the twentieth century. Features Greene's most famous short story, 'The Destructors'

One of the most important British writers of the twentieth century

Greene was a force beyond his books... The outsider, the dissenter, the spoiled priest, the failure, the classic underdog - out of characters such as these Greene made novels and stories which have enriched hundreds of thousands of readers

A celebrated collection of stories from one of the most important British writers of the twentieth century. Features Greene's most famous short story, 'The Destructors'. 
 
Written between 1929 and 1954, each of these stories bears the hallmark themes that characterise Greene's great novels: betrayal and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence. 
 
Opening with the iconic story 'The Destructors', in which a gang of schoolboys destroys a house that has survived the Blitz, Greene offers us deliciously satisfying glimpses into twenty-one worlds, with each piece written as masterfully as his novels. From the chilling climax of a children's birthday party, to a man whose youthful indiscretions come back to haunt him, these are the unmistakable work of one of the twentieth century's greatest and most adored storytellers.

The Honorary Consul

A gripping tragicomedy of a bungled kidnapping in a provincial Argentinean town, considered to be one of Greene's finest novels.

Perhaps the most enduring novel that even he has give us

The tension never relaxes and one reads hungrily from page to page, dreading the moment it will end

Greene's work attempts to link the serious moral imagination with the spirit of adventure and romance and to extend the remapping of imaginative geography first undertaken by Conrad

A superb storyteller with a gift for provoking controversy

Greene had the sharpest eyes for trouble, the finest nose for human weaknesses, and was pitilessly honest in his observations... For experience of a whole century he was the man within

A gripping tragicomedy of a bungled kidnapping in a provincial Argentinean town, considered to be one of Greene's finest novels. 
 
In a provincial Argentinian community, Charley Fortnum - a British consul with dubious authority and a notorious fondness for drink - is kidnapped by rebels in a case of mistaken identity. The young but world-weary Doctor Eduardo Plarr, is left to pick up the pieces and secure Fortnum's release, wading through a sea of incompetence and unearthing corruption among authorities and revolutionaries in the process. 
 
First published in 1973, The Honorary Consul was one of Greene's own favourites of his works and is regarded amongst his finest novels, with Plarr perhaps the most moving and convincing figure in his fiction. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE 
 
'Perhaps the most enduring novel that even he has given us' Daily Mail

Graham Greene

Yiyun Li

Graham Greene has wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the top ranks of world literature

Selected Stories

Graham Greene, known for his iconic novels, also wrote extraordinary short stories. Here some of the best have been arranged into pairs - to be read as a duel or duet - by novelist and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li. 
 
Twenty-two of Greene’s very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise his great novels: innocence and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence. 
 
Writer and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li, has arranged the stories into pairs, to be read together in contrast or in harmony – as a duel or a duet. In doing so Li draws out the extraordinary power in Greene’s work, creating an ingenious new perspective on a writer we thought we knew. Unexpected, surprising and wide-ranging, this is the short fiction of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most adored storytellers, revealing his brilliance as never before. 
 
‘No twentieth-century writer had a subtler mind for human comparison’ Zadie Smith 
 
‘Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature’ John le Carré 
 
'One of the most important British writers of the twentieth century' Daily Telegraph 
 
‘A superb storyteller’ New York Times 
 
‘One of the finest writers of any language’ Washington Post 
 
‘One of our greatest authors’ Independent 
 
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY YIYUN LI

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Graham Greene has wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the top ranks of world literature

Greene was a force beyond his books... The outsider, the dissenter, the spoiled priest, the failure, the classic underdog - out of characters such as these Greene made novels and stories which have enriched hundreds ...

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