Episode 1

John Galsworthy's epic novels of love, money and betrayal in an upper class family.
Dramatised for radio by Lin Coghlan

1920 and Soames Forsyte would do anything for his sparkling daughter, Fleur. But when she begins to fall in love with the wrong man, how can he stop history repeating itself?

Original music composed by Neil Brand

Produced and directed by Marion Nancarrow

Dramatisations of all 9 books in John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga. An epic tale of sex, money and power in the lives of an upper middle-class family in London, it spans 50 years from 1886 to 1936.

The Forsytes Continues is the 2nd of 4 series of The Forsyte Saga, which follows the life of young Fleur Forsyte, the baby born at the end of series one. Now 19 and thoroughly spoiled by her doting father, Fleur is relishing everything the 1920s has to offer.

It's 20 years since Soames Forsyte divorced the love of his life, Irene, who went on to marry his cousin Jo. Now their respective children have grown up, neither knowing their parents' troubled history.

When adult life inflicts its first wounds, Fleur throws herself into smart society determined to embrace all that is considered modern. She's an archetypal bright young thing, a restless soul, on a mission to burn her wings. This young generation which has survived the horrors of war is hell bent on consuming all that is shiny and new - it's fast cars and fast living, where scruples are old hat and collecting "sensations" is the thing. To Soames, every inch the Victorian man, this modern age feels increasingly strange and he wonders about his place in it and how to protect his daughter from it.

Still insulated from reality by their wealth and class, the Forsytes and their kind can no longer ignore the threat of social change.

Award-winning writers Shaun McKenna and Lin Coghlan are dramatising the complete novels and Interludes and have taken a new approach to the books - delving deeper to bring more of Galsworthy's wonderful insight, wit and observation from the page. Although focussed on the period in which they were written - in the first 20 years of the 20th century - the novels feel remarkably contemporary and have much to reveal of our own world and inner lives.