The first of five novels by Buchan featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of sticky situations, the 39 Steps pit's the adventurer against German agents in a tense backdrop of a Europe weeks away from the first world war.

The story places him in a desperate game of cat and mouth that will lead Hannay from his Portland Place home to the highlands of Scotland, back to London, and to a sleepy holiday village on the coast, where all is not as it seems...

Narrated by Michael Ward.