84 Charing Cross Road

Written by Helene Hanff

Narrated by John Nettles and Juliet Stevenson

INCLUDES AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THE READERS

Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase 'antiquarian book-sellers' scares me somewhat, as I equate 'antique' with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions, or in Barnes & Noble's grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.

So begins the delightfully reticent love affair between Miss Helene Hanff of New York and Messrs Marks and Co, sellers of rare and secondhand books, at 84 Charing Cross Road, London. For 20 years, this outspoken New York writer and Frank Doel, a rather more restrained London bookseller carry on an increasingly touching correspondence. No doubt their letters would have continued, but in 1969, a letter informed Helene that Frank Doel had died. In the collection's penultimate entry, Helene Hanff urges a tourist friend, ''If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me. I owe it so much."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Little, Brown (Hachette UK) Audio
• Release date: Feb 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781405503129

Helene Hanff

Helene Hanff (Filadelfia, 1918-Nueva York, 1997), de formación autodidacta, inició su carrera literaria escribiendo obras de teatro y, más adelante, guiones para la televisión, libros infantiles, ensayos históricos y políticos y colaboraciones en el New Yorker y Harper's. La fama le llegó después de publicar 84, Charing Cross Road, que inspiró una película protagonizada por Anne Bancroft y Anthony Hopkins