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Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Book of the Week: Charles Timoney - An Englishman Aboard

Mark Heap

Joanna Green

Libby Spurrier

Charles Timoney

Book of the Week: Charles Timoney - An Englishman Aboard: Episode 2

Factual: Travel

An Englishman Aboard

Episode 2

Charles Timoney - An Englishman Aboard

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Charles Timoney - An Englishman Aboard, Episode 2

Charles takes his first purposeful strokes towards the Channel, travelling the Seine.

Having located the source of the Seine, Charles Timoney takes his first purposeful strokes towards the English Channel. Read by Mark Heap.

Charles Timoney is an English writer, with a French wife, living in France.

After showing a group of friends the rowing boat he has spent the last six months building, Charles - possibly unwisely - accepts a challenge to travel the entire length of the River Seine from source to the sea, using the boat where he can, to discover the true France.

But it proves rather more difficult than he imagined. Not all of the Seine is navigable by rowing boat, so he sets sail into an unvarnished France on a variety of craft, hitching lifts in everything from a converted Parisian tourist boat to a sailing boat with no mast. He even tries out an amphibious vehicle.

Along the way he encounters Stèphane (a carp fisherman with a very strange habit), grapples with rapids and stubborn cattle, rescues a couple when their sailing dinghy capsizes, and discovers that rowing in the dark is more frightening than he first thought.

Written by Charles Timoney
Abridged by Libby Spurrier

Reader: Mark Heap
Producer: Joanna Green

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

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Writer Charles Timoney accepts a challenge to travel the entire length of the River Seine

Charles Timoney accepts a challenge to travel the entire length of the River Seine, from source to sea, to discover the true France. Abridged by Libby Spurrier. Read by Mark Heap

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