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15 Minute Drama

The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

Episode 1: The Letter

Duration: 15 minutes

First broadcast: on BBC Radio 4 FMLatest broadcast: on BBC Radio 4 Extra

In Rachel Joyce's best selling novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Queenie Hennessy is told she has days to live. She sends a letter of rose pink paper in which she bids goodbye to Harold Fry. It is a letter that inspires a walk, a cast of well-wishers, a journey of its own. Harold will save her.

Harold's story began its life as an award winning Radio 4 play so it only seems apt that this companion novel should grace the airwaves too.

In this novel there is a second letter - a quieter, longer, more complicated letter. It is in this one that Queenie reveals the shocking and beautiful truth of her life. It is Queenie's story and it is a love song to the man she loves.

'It's all very well for a man to step out of his front door and tell his friend to wait while he walks the length of England. It's an entirely different kettle of fish when you are the woman at the other end.'

Directed by Tracey Neale. Show less

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