Showing results by narrator "Mark Meadows" in All Categories

Alec Reid’s ghosts of the 21st century seldom lurk in old houses or waft across chilly moors. His dark tales may breathe alongside the supernatural, but they take place in broad daylight, in our daily lives. Their themes include dead warriors resurrected via Bluetooth, Rumpelstiltskin in the suburbs, an algorithmic fear of ghosts, and the shattered dreams of immortality. The world they describe is the one you inhabit, but you would live in terror were you to recognize it for what it is.

Shaun is finally free of responsibilities to anyone but himself; single, with two grown up daughters, he is just embarking on a new life in a new country when he gets a call to say his father is dying. His mother has Parkinson's Dementia and is in a care home. Shaun faces a stark choice: should he give up his new-found freedom, or turn his back on the woman he'd fought so hard to protect, not least from his own father? Shaun's mother had loved and cared for her son all her life. Could he now do the same for her?

Denis is searching for his mother’s past, knowing she had secrets. In Nice, he finds her friends, Monique and Clemence. In the 1950s, they were Matisse’s assistants when he was old and ill, pinning up his coloured paper shapes, putting the great cut-out works together. Monique inspired his great designs in the chapel at Vence, Clemence, in pursuit of love, was caught in an affair that led to violence and disaster. So they have their own intense and colourful past - but they hold the key to Denis’s past, too. He’s about to face the greatest challenge of his life.

A story of romance, humor, and true detective fiction, this novel begins with Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief known for his strict moral code, forcing the French authorities to find an investigator who can put a stop to his dealings. In order to find a competitor keen enough, they must traverse the English Channel, where they find Herlock Sholmes and his assistant, Wilson - two of the most inquisitive and successful detectives in the world. Does Lupin stand a chance?

These classic mystery short stories feature Maurice Lebanc’s famous rogue, Arsène Lupin. A master of disguise, Lupin moves between high society and a burglar’s life, stealing from the rich and powerful and creating mischief for Detective Ganimard.

Brimming with wisdom and humour, David Kynaston’s diaries written over one football season offer up his most personal take on social history to date. David Kynaston was seven and a half years old when he attended his first Aldershot match in the early months of 1959. So began a deep attachment to the game and a lifelong loyalty to an obscure, small-town football club. Though as he sits down to write his diaries almost 60 years on, he reflects that life might have been simpler if his father had never taken him to that first match at the Rec....

It is September 1939. Shortly after war is declared, Anthony Rhodes is sent to France, serving with the British Army. His days are filled with the minutiae and mundanities of army life - friendships, billeting, administration - as the months of the 'Phoney War' quickly pass and the conflict seems a distant prospect. It is only in the spring of 1940 that the true situation becomes clear; the men are ordered to retreat to the coast and the beaches of Dunkirk, where they face a desperate and terrifying wait for evacuation.

IWM was founded on 5th March 1917 when the War Cabinet approved a proposal by Sir Alfred Mond MP for the creation of a national war museum to record the events still taking place during the First World War. The intention was to collect and display material as a record of everyone's experiences during the war - civilian and military - and to commemorate the sacrifices of all sections of society.The First World War Retold tells the story of that war from a fresh perspective from IWM's unparalleled collections.

November 1853. Inspector Field has summoned his friends Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to examine a body found in an attic studio, its throat cut. Around the body lie the lacerated fragments of canvas of a painting titled A Winter of Despair. Wilkie realises he recognises the victim, for he had been due to dine with him that very evening. The dead man is Edwin Milton-Hayes, one of Wilkie's brother Charley's artist friends. With his own brother under suspicion of murder, what secrets lie among the close-knit group of Pre-Raphaelite painters who is the killer in their midst?

When Inspector Field shows his friend Charles Dickens the body of a young woman dragged from the River Thames, he cannot have foreseen that the famous author would immediately recognise the victim as Isabella Gordon, a housemaid he had tried to help through his charity.

Every captain would love Brearley's degree in people, as well as a hardhitting all-rounder like Botham. But theirs was a barely recognisable game from the one we play on often dishevelled grounds up and down the country with ragtag teams of ageing, deluded or hungover friends and acquaintances. Now, Charlie Campbell offers us a New Testament to Brearley’s Old Testament, as he guides us through the realities of captaining an amateur team.

It starts when Desiré Rosenkvist of Stockholm Police receives a letter. Two things are immediately clear: the letter she holds in her hands was written in a state of utter desperation and paranoia. And it contains details of one of her old murder cases which only the murderer could know. Desiré contacts private investigator Sam Berger, who sets off to the remote north of Sweden with his colleague Molly Blom to find the author of the letter and to stop them in their tracks. But someone wants to keep them from getting to the bottom of the mystery at any cost and is watching their every move.

The Only Girl in the World follows the gripping romance between English WWI soldier Dennis and Helene. Dennis cannot escape the shadows of the trenches, and with only two weeks leave, his future with Helene is not secure. When this war is over, he says he will come back for her. Dare Helene fall in love with this foreigner? Will he survive? In war, love is the only thing you can trust....

Hamburg, 1947. A ruined city occupied by the British who bombed it, experiencing the coldest winter in living memory. Food is scarce; refugees and the homeless crowd into shantytowns and sheds. There is a killer on the loose, and all attempts to find him or her have failed. Plagued with worry about his missing son, Frank Stave is a career policeman with a tragedy in his past that is driving his determination to find the killer.

Gerad Kite - founder of the renowned Kite Clinic in London - believes that the way we are living today is making us ill. For all the choices we have, for all the improvements in our material lifestyle, people are more unhappy than ever - because we have lost the ability to tap in to our inner selves. In this inspiring, revelatory audiobook, Kite shows us how to look at things from a different perspective and to uncover the truth: that everything we need to be happy and well, we already have inside.

Galileo, Einstein, Curie, Darwin, Hawking - we know the names, but how much do we really know about these people? Galileo gained notoriety over his battle with the Vatican, but did you know that this father of modern science was also an accomplished lute player? And Darwin of course discovered the principle by which new species are formed, but his bold curiosity extended to the dinner table as well. Eureka! explains how these scientific geniuses have shaped our understanding - and how they spent their free time as well.

Arriving at their idyllic and newly renovated Highland home, worthy of TV's Grand Designs, wealthy 30-somethings John and Laura Payne hope they are leaving their problems behind in the city. But the couple's presence disturbs neighbour and local eccentric Luther Grove, forcing him to confront long-buried secrets - secrets that draw him inextricably to Laura and trigger an instant conflict with John.

You take one risk. Now those you love must pay.... Dom Turner is a dependable husband, a loving father. A man you can rely on. But it takes only one day to destroy a seemingly perfect life. Emma thought she could trust her husband, Dom. She thought he would always look after her and their daughter, Daisy.... Then one reckless act ends in two innocent deaths - and Dom's family becomes the target of a terrifying enemy. There's nowhere to hide. They're on the run for their lives.

'A man's eye is accommodative, like his heart.' Samuel Browne's wife has left him suddenly after just three years of marriage. She invites him to 'go live a better life without me'. He must start again, and alone. And so it is that Sam finds himself deep in the English countryside in a cold but characterful old house, remote and encircled by hills, in the employment and company of an older, wiser man, a man as fond of mystery as he is of enlightenment.

After an unspecified near-future disaster, one English town survives under the protection of the surviving computer algorithms of the Process, which governs every aspect of their lives. But now the Process is making soldiers. It is readying for war.