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The Time Machine
The Time Machine
Aug 13, 2025 6:16 AM

Author:H.G. Wells,Robert Glenister,William Gaunt,Full Cast

The Time Machine

Wells' thrilling story of an inventor who travels in time and discovers a nightmarish dystopian future has been adapted several times for TV and film. This first ever UK radio adaptation, starring Robert Glenister as the Time Traveller and William Gaunt as H. G. Wells, brings Wells' fascinating ideas and extraordinary visions to vivid life. It opens in 1943, when Wells is recording a talk for the Home Service in which he questions mankind's future. After the broadcast, he spends the evening with American journalist Martha, and tells her the astonishing news that his bestselling book The Time Machine was not fantasy but fact. Wells explains that he was actually present at the dinner party in Richmond fifty years earlier, when the Time Traveller returned from his first fateful journey into the future. He reveals to Martha the full story of the Time Traveller's encounter with the Eloi and the Morlocks - and what really happened to him afterwards...

Reviews

The novel's pleasures... mostly reside in its formal arrangement and Bail's brilliantly distilled, and witty prose

—— Times Literary Supplement

A curious and intriguing novel... the brilliant skill of the writing makes the world come alive on the page

—— Hermione Lee , Guardian

A nicely written, wonderfully entertaining novel... Philosophy is a big, difficult subject - there is none bigger - that Bail depicts thoughtfully and with sympathetic humour

—— The Daily Telegraph

Quietly fascinating... Bail's prose is as full of space and glaring, almost painful light as the landscape... This book is as hard and sparse as that landscape, but no less beautiful for that

—— Jonathan Gibbs , Independent

Bail's highly idiosyncratic style resembles a choppy sea in which phrases and images constantly jostle each other to send up a dazzlingly brilliant spray. In addition, his ability to conjure up a character in a paragraph or even a mere sentence is remarkable

—— Francis King , Literary Review

The novel makes no pretence of providing unambiguous answers, but takes us on a beguiling, questing journey

—— Nick Rennison , Sunday Times

Murray Bail marshals the tensions between his characters and their ideas to great effect

—— Peter Scott , The Telegraph

A gratifyingly dry wit pervades this novel of ideas

—— Chris Ross , The Guardian

Truly gripping

—— Big Issue

Opening with a mysterious yet distressing anecdote about a girl driving dangerously, Peter Ferry's first novel immediately captures the reader's imagination, drawing you into a story filled with humour, tenderness and suspense... The novel is as entertaining as it is intriguing and is not to be missed

—— Aesthetica

A very neat piece of storytelling

—— William Leith , Evening Standard

A neat piece of storytelling

—— Johanna Thomas-Corr , Scotsman

A lovely and heartbreaking book . . . Julia Glass writes the sort of novels you wish would go on forever; such is your immediate attachment to her impeccably drawn characters . . . [she] offers up intimate examinations of the lives on complex people, recognizable for their insecurities and strengths, failings and successes, humor and sadness, loves and loves lost.

—— Miami Herald

An arresting story that is both thorny and complex ... A wonderful novelist will expose truths that elude us in the everyday. [Glass's] eye in I See You Everywhere takes in blind spots and makes them mesmerizing

—— New York Daily News

Julia Glass is a writer firmly in control

—— Dallas Morning News

Glass elegantly captures what it means to be an independent and spirited contemporary woman

—— Chicago Tribune

Beautifully written

—— Image Magazine

It is expertly written in its way, and oddly compelling - like a slushy movie you can't help but respond to

—— Guardian

Moving and thoughtful ... Poignant and compelling, this lyrical novel lifts the veil on an internal world of love, rivalry and misunderstanding; an intricate depiction of sibling relationships

—— Good Book Guide

A beautifully evocative and intelligent novel

—— Woman & Home

This impassioned tale is a gripping read

—— James Smart , The Guardian

Jones is fabulous...offering titbits of danger and discord, yet keeping a cool matter-of-fact tone for the big horrors

—— Sunday Times

Her second novel is a must-read; a devastating, brilliant account of what happens when everything a man believes in...begins to crumble

—— Cath Kidson Magazine

Full of danger and discord

—— Sunday Times Summer Reading
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