Showing titles in Political

It’s Belfast in 2019 and despite more than 20 years of peace, scores of so-called peace walls continue to separate Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods. Jean Beattie’s grief turns to anger when police refuse to open the peace gate at the end of her street to allow her best friend’s funeral procession through to her church on the other side of the peace wall. The gate remains closed because local youths are recreational rioting. Comforted by her friends from the cross-community pensioners’ club, Jean vows the gate will be opened.

Hamilton was a bastard son, raised on the Caribbean island of St. Croix. He went to America to pursue his education. Along the way he became one of the American Revolution's most dashing - and unlikely - heroes. Adored by Washington, hated by Jefferson, Hamilton was a lightning rod: the most controversial leader of the American Revolution.

A Lithuanian family comes to America to seek a living. This book's ghastly and often brutal descriptions of work in the Chicago meat stockyards and the grim consequences of extreme poverty forced Congress to pass laws reforming work conditions and food safety standards in the United States. It also helped to stir up the Socialist movement in this country.

It’s 1994, and the former Yugoslavia is being torn apart. In England a gang of good-hearted young people are about to set off in a Ford Transit van armed with several sacks of rice and a half-written play. A play which will light a beacon of peace across the Balkans and, very probably, stop the war.

Acclaimed author JG Farrell came to fame with his Empire Trilogy, exploring the collapse of British colonialism and its repercussions in three different countries. The first book in the series, Troubles, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Lost Man Booker Prize, while the second, The Siege of Krishnapur, was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction. Included here are three BBC Radio adaptations of the trilogy, plus an edition of Witness History exploring Farrell's tragic accidental death.

Suave, unflappable and ambitious, veteran politician Charles Bannister knows his way around the corridors of power. As chief whip, he's adept at keeping MPs in line and squashing potential scandals—aided by his brother-in-law, MI6 Agent Henry Colvil, who whispers useful titbits of information in his ear. His position seems invincible—but nothing is forever, and when the tides of politics turn, Charles finds himself under threat. In these six series, we follow his fortunes and those of his close friend Home Secretary Dougal Baxter. Together, the duo rise, fall and rise again.

Pussy is the story of Prince Fracassus, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its golden-gated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality shows on TV, imagining himself to be the Roman Emperor Nero, and fantasizing about hookers.

He is idle, boastful, thin skinned and egotistic. He has no manners, no curiosity, no knowledge, no idea and no words with which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again?

Wie werden wir leben, falls die weltweit auf Hochtouren laufende Forschung zur biologischen Verjüngung des Menschen Erfolg hat? SPIEGEL-Bestsellerautor Maxim Leo legt einen raffinierten und hochgradig unterhaltsamen Roman über vier Menschen vor, deren Leben so unmerklich wie unaufhaltsam aus den Fugen gerät. Sie sind Probanden einer medizinischen Studie der Berliner Charité, deren »Nebenwirkungen« ungeahnte Folgen hat: eine biologische Verjüngung um gleich mehrere Jahre. Jakob ist gerade seiner ersten Liebe begegnet und verliert auf einmal jegliche Lust.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) is capitalizing on the neglect of war-weary world leaders. No one in Iraq is safe. Christians are herded like cattle. Whole communities are torn apart. Marine Cal Stokes has had enough. With the quiet support of US President Brandon Zimmer, Stokes and his closest friends return to the Middle East to take the battle to the enemy, even if it means being cut off from ever coming home. This is a about what's right, not what's popular, a moral imperative....

A compelling dramatisation of Rohinton Mistry's Booker Prize-nominated novel about India's underclass. India, 1975. Desperate to preserve her independence from her abusive brother, Parsi widow Dina Dilal turns her cramped city apartment into a sweatshop. But when her eyesight begins to fail, she hires two tailors - uncle and nephew Ishvar and Om, who have fled from caste violence in their native village. She also takes in a lodger - Maneck, a reluctant student from the mountains.

Jumping to alternate realities sounds great, if you're in control. But what if you're not? What if you're propelled away from the people and places you love the most in the blink of an eye? And what if these involuntary journeys happen because your neurochemistry is different, and your brain works differently? Beautiful, compassionate, and resourceful as she is, this is Rea's problem. A latina trans woman and an academic, she is beloved by a tight circle of friends, who fully accept her without knowing the cause of her disappearances.

Britannia, 45 AD: Vespasian's brother, Sabinus, is captured by druids. The druids want to offer a potent sacrifice to their gods – not just one Roman Legate, but two. They know that Vespasian will come after his brother and they plan to sacrifice the siblings on midsummer's day. Vespasian must strive to save his brother whilst completing the conquest of the south-west of the haunted isle, before he is drawn inexorably back to Rome and the heart of Imperial politics.

It’s a hot summer night, and Hugh Dalgarno, a 31-year-old clerical worker, thinks his brain is broken. Over the course of a day and night in an uncannily depopulated public park, he will sift through the pieces and traverse the baroque landscape of his own thoughts: the theology of nosiness, the beauty of the arbutus tree, the pathos of Gene Hackman, the theory of quantum immortality, Louis Riel’s letter to an Irish newspaper, the baleful influence of Calvinism on the Scottish working class, the sea, the CIA, and, ultimately, thinking itself and how it may be represented in writing.

Essentially the start of Dazai's career, Schoolgirl gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language. Now it illuminates the prevalent social structures of a lost time, as well as the struggle of the individual against them—a theme that occupied Dazai's life both personally and professionally. This new translation preserves the playful language of the original and offers the listener a new window into the mind of one of the greatest Japanese authors of the 20th century.

Wife. Mother. Spy. A double life is no life at all. Since the disappearance of her husband in 1951, Laura Leverett has been living in limbo with her daughter in Geneva. All others see is her conventional, charming exterior; nobody guesses the secret she is carrying. Her double life began years ago, when she stepped onto the boat which carried her across the Atlantic in 1939. Eager to learn and eager to love, she found herself suddenly inspired by a young Communist woman she met on the boat.

When a car bomb explodes outside a Parisian café, Navy Seal turned covert Homeland Security Operative Scot Harvath is thrust back into the life he has tried so desperately to leave behind. Saving the intended victim of the attack, Harvath becomes party to an amazing and perilous race to uncover a secret so powerful that militant Islam could be defeated once and for all without firing another shot, dropping another bomb, or launching another covert action.

Edward Everett Hale’s The Man Without a Country is a poignant and patriotic short story that explores the devastating consequences of exile and the importance of national identity. The story follows Philip Nolan, a young army officer who, in a moment of reckless defiance, renounces his country during a treason trial. As punishment, he is sentenced to spend the rest of his life at sea, never again hearing mention of the United States.

It's the year 2027. Extraterrestrials have finally responded to broadcast signals transmitted from Earth. President Elizabeth Schaefer creates a secret alliance with Bretta, a humanistic young female, who is seeking legal asylum for herself and over 200 refugees from another world. Together they must face an ominous galactic danger testing their strategies, strengths, and desires.

Top-secret data has been stolen from the CIA, and the only man who knows its hiding place is dead. CIA operative Mitch Rapp must race to find the classified information in this blistering novel that picks up where The Last Man left off in Vince Flynn's New York Times best-selling series.

Britain is awash, the sea creeps into the land, brambles and forest swamp derelict towns. Food production has moved overseas and people are forced to move to the cities for work. The countryside is empty. A chorus, the herd voice of feral cows, wander this newly wild land watching over changing times, speaking with love and exasperation. Jesse and his puppy Mister Maliks roam the woods until his family are forced to leave for London.