During the month of October 2009, the UK satellite channel Sky Arts will be screening Charles Dickens's England, presented and narrated by Silksoundbooks star audio book reader Sir Derek Jacobi.

Charles Dickens is without doubt the UK’s most prominent writer since Shakespeare and the literary voice of Victorian England. His characters are universally well known, and his style of writing came to define the episodic cliff-hanger. The documentary, which is also available on DVD, is a journey through the places, buildings, towns, cities and villages where Dickens lived or was inspired in his writing.

From Portsmouth to the Isle of Wight, numerous London locations, and including Bury St Edmonds, Rochester, and Broadstairs, well over 100 locations are featured. Many of them, such as the interior of 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields where Dickens first read in public, the offices in Covent Garden where he lived and worked, his childhood home in Chatham and Gad’s Hill in Kent, the last in a very long list of his homes, are simply not open to the public and have rarely been filmed.

Charles Dickens is well represented in the Silksoundbooks catalogue with four wonderful unabridged audio books available for download. The legendary George Cole reads The Cricket on the Hearth , The Chimes and A Christmas Carol while Andrew Sachs brings his astonishing talent for voices to A Tale of Two Cities .

Sir Derek reads the tale of Dr Frankenstein and the horrendous monster he unleashes on the world when he tinkers with the laws of Nature in the Silksoundbooks unabridged version of Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein.

A feast of audio delights indeed!

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