Episode 4

Driving West across America from New York, Carol and Therese have become lovers in a motel room in the town of Waterloo. By the time they reach Utah, Carol's battle with her husband for custody of their daughter seems very far away. However, everything they've left behind is just about to catch up with them.

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
Lobby Clerk......Colin Stinton
Landlady.........Liza Ross
with Barbara Barnes and David Jarvis

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.