In the week before Christmas Mrs Carol Aird, a married housewife, has met Therese Belivet, a would-be theatre designer, across the counter of the toy department in a big New York store. It's now two days later, and Therese has accepted an invitation out to Carol's home in New Jersey. She hasn't told her boyfriend.

Patricia Highsmith's tender and unsettling love story about two women – one of them married, and the other 19 - who risk everything to be together.

Highsmith is best known as one of the 20th-century's most accomplished thriller writers - a role she assumed overnight when Alfred Hitchcock turned her sublimely disturbing first novel, Strangers on a Train, into a hit movie in 1951.

Written a year later, Carol broke all the rules for the portrayal of lesbians in American fiction. Despite warnings from her publisher and her agent that a lesbian novel would ruin her new-found reputation, the book became a major best-seller, with over a million sales when it was released in paperback – and Highsmith went on to write thirty more books before her death in 1995.

Carol is a genuinely groundbreaking classic – and a truly modern love story.

Carol..............Miranda Richardson
Therese...........Andrea Deck
Hargess...........Colin Stinton
Richard...........Gunnar Cauthery
Abby..............Lorelei King
with David Jarvis, Beverley Klein and Liza Ross

Written by Patricia Highsmith
Adapted and directed by Neil Bartlett

Producer: David Blount
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4 first broadcast in December 2014. Show less