Showing results by narrator "Joe Jameson" in All Categories

One glance is all it takes to bring his defences crashing down...Seventeen-year-old Davey has never made friends easily. Shy, geeky, crippled with social anxiety, he feels isolated from his peers, and only his position as defender for the school football team fills the void of loneliness. On the pitch, his deft footwork has earned him the respect and acceptance of his squad, though at a price. Desperate to hold onto this camaraderie, Davey conceals the truth from everyone, even his own family.

1943. Sleeper spy Will Starling has been drafted in to the SOE, joining forces with the French Resistance in the fight against the Nazis; but Will's memory is fractured, and only occasional flashbacks reveal fragments of his past. Despite this, he has not forgotten his pledge to find and rescue his sister, Rose - if she is still alive. When his mission in France is compromised, Will suspects he's been betrayed.

Tom, single father to Hannah, is the manager of a tiny local theatre. On the same day each year, he and its colourful cast of part-time actors have staged a fantastical production just for his little girl, a moment of magic to make her childhood unforgettable. But there is another reason behind these annual shows: the very first production followed Hannah's diagnosis with a heart condition that both of them know will end her life early. And now, with Hannah a funny, tough girl of 15 on the brink of adulthood, that time is coming.

Awakening the sleeping dragon... Smooth expat Michael Nicholson is a fixer, getting on by doing favours for the rich and powerful in booming China. When he makes the mistake of getting too close to one of his clients, the wife of a leading Communist Party official, the ageing Lothario fears for his life as a vengeful husband decides to put his house in order.

Things like this don't happen often in a lifetime... John Hilliard, a young subaltern returning to the Western Front after a brief period of sick leave back in England blind to the horrors of the trenches, finds his battalion tragically altered. His commanding officer finds escape in alcohol, there is a new adjutant and even Hilliard's batman has been killed. But there is David Barton. As yet untouched and unsullied by war, radiating charm and common sense, forever writing long letters to his family.

Only a few months have passed since the day Kester Lanner forced an angry ghost through the spirit door, but business prospects for Dr. Ribero's supernatural agency haven’t improved. Things are looking grim when the agency lands a contract that they must share with a rival agency headed by Dr. Ribero’s sworn enemy, Larry Higgins. Desperate for the job, the team accepts and begins to investigate the seaside town of Lyme Regis, where elderly victims are dying. The same mysterious clue links the horrendous deaths: The victims all see a double of themselves before dying.

When Kester fulfills his mother's dying wish and meets his father, he is thrown headlong into the family business: catching supernatural spirits.

The village of Slyford St. James is no stranger to supernatural happenings, as long-time residents Jed and Emma know all too well. Although Jed’s spiritual connection with the dead was once a source of pride, it now fills him with dread. When he receives an invitation to the family estate of his old army friend Simon, who wants Jed to use his gift to solve the brutal murder of his elder brother, Jed is initially reluctant, but Emma encourages him to agree, hoping that this new sense of purpose might lift him out of his melancholy, despite the circumstances.

From the economy and politics to ideology, these short texts work through the different faces of liberal fascism, structured around a trio of the universal, the particular, and the single: our global predicament; Europe and the Middle East; Trump's America. Peeling back the inadequate labels we hasten to pin on the phenomena that terrify us – like 'post-truth'– to peer at the seeping wounds beneath them, these writings reveal the uneasy mixture of lies and truths that have always been stacked, matryoshka like, inside of one another.

The essays in Zero Point ask how we distinguish defeat from disaster, and how we confront despair without collapsing into it - questions never more pertinent than the current moment in the wake of electoral victories for authoritarian populists and unceasing news of violent atrocities. The 'zero-point' of the title is ground level, rock bottom, the place to which one retreats and where one regroups.

Slavoj Žižek has long been a commentator on, and critic of, Christian theology. His preoccupation with Badiou's concept of 'the event' alongside the Pauline thought of the New Testament has led to a decidedly theological turn in his thinking. Drawing on traditions and subjects as broad as Buddhist thought, dialectical materialism, political subjectivity, quantum physics, AI and chatbots, this book articulates Žižek's idea of a religious life for the first time.

The concept of freedom is deceptively simple. We think we understand it, but the moment we try and define it we encounter contradictions. In this new philosophical exploration, Slavoj Žižek argues that the experience of true, radical freedom is transient and fragile. Countering the idea of libertarian individualism, Žižek draws on philosophers Hegel, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, as well as the work of Kandinsky and Agatha Christie to examine the many facets of freedom and what we can learn from each of them.

The concept of disparity has long been a topic of obsession and argument for philosophers but Slavoj Žižek would argue that what disparity and negativity could mean, might mean and should mean for us and our lives has never been more hotly debated. Disparities explores contemporary 'negative' philosophies from Catherine Malabou's plasticity, Julia Kristeva's abjection and Robert Pippin's self-consciousness to the God of negative theology, new realisms and post-humanism and draws a radical line under them.

Locked in ice for more than twenty thousand years, the lands that now make up Britain and Ireland were some of the last settled by humans. The earliest people, Mesolithic hunter-gatherers like Cheddar Man, arrived around eleven thousand years ago to find dense forests. While they lived lightly, they did introduce fire, which they used to create clearings, and this was the beginning of the reshaping of Britain’s forests.

Our hero Luca is back for the second leg of the Race to Imagination Island! This time, our plucky Racers create team mascots to help them with the three challenges they must overcome: crossing a canyon full of tricks and traps, passing through a kingdom of evil icy-blue fairies, and quite literally pulling the plug out of the ocean.

Is true love just a few dates away... or even closer than you think? Tom has always been a hopeless romantic: but now he's just hopeless. After lockdown in particular made the millennial a reclusive introvert, it was finally time to get back 'out there' – at least according to his best friends Adam, Allison and sister Sarah. As the group sets up 10 dates to rejuvenate Tom's love life, he soon realises how difficult the dating scene has become, along with juggling his Shakespearean-themed cafe and a hobby of romantic mixtape making.

Even when the climate crisis escalates beyond our worst nightmares and people become refugees, the world keeps turning and life carries on as usual: teenaged love stories, marital collapses, identity crises and revolts against hopeless parents continue to play out. Through four inter-connected perspectives, Jens Liljestrand chronicles how the struggles of ordinary people go on even as the world as we know it is coming to an end.

Three strangers all caught in the deep end... but can they help each other float through? After tragically losing her husband and being left a single mother to two children, Gabriella has only one escape for herself - swimming at a local London lido to clear her mind. A constant stream of both new and familiar faces visit the lido like Gabriella, but she doesn't suspect any are suffering quite like her until she meets Helen - who swims to escape her emotionless husband, and Ian - who feels lost in the deep end after becoming unemployed and unable to tell his husband.

Letters from the Labyrinth is a fantasy story based on the worlds from The Stranger’s Guide to Talliston. Written by author John Tarrow, this is a sequel, prequel, and stand-alone story to the novel, exploring the 13 locations of the house and novel. Each of the 13 letters is set in a vast collection of extraordinary times and places.

Abandoned and alone, 13-year-old Joe's world is shattered when he enters a deserted council house and becomes trapped within a labyrinth protecting the last magical places on earth. There, Joe discovers a book charting this immense no-man's land, without time or place, its 13 doors each leading to a different realm.