Episode 5

In an attempt to retain custody of her daughter, Carol has abandoned her 19 year-old lover, Therese, after her husband obtained evidence of their affair.

Therese has returned to New York to try and pick up her career as a theatre designer – and to forget the woman who has torn her life apart.

Conclusion of 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
Abby...................Lorelei King
Genevieve Cranell...Felicity Dean
Mr Bernstein..........Colin Stinton
With David Jarvis, Barbara Barnes and Gunnar Cauthery

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.