Showing results by narrator "Noble Noble" in All Categories

Dead Souls, Gogol's epic poem in prose, is widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. We follow Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant turned conman, through the countryside in pursuit of his shady enterprise as he arrives in the provincial town of 'N' and begins visiting various landowners to make each a strange and ghostly offer.

A wide-ranging selection of George Orwell's essays, written in the clear-eyed, passionate and uncompromising style that has earned him a reputation as one of Britain's greatest writers.

In the North Sea, far from what remains of the coastline, a wind farm stretches for thousands of acres. The Boy, who is no longer really a boy, and the Old Man, whose age is unguessable, are charged with its maintenance. They carry out their never-ending work, scoured by wind and salt, as the waves roll, dragging strange shoals of flotsam through the turbine fields. Land is only a memory. So too is the Boy’s father, who worked on the turbines before him, and disappeared.

A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his 30s, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father - a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him.

Marcus Sempronius Gracchus, a soldier of Rome, has spent 2,000 years walking the earth, seeking redemption he may never find. After losing his latest confrontation with Thomas, a man he once considered his brother, Marcus is on the run and must find new allies to continue the struggle.

In this essay, Orwell discusses the notion of nationalism and argues that it causes people to disregard common sense and become more ignorant towards factuality. Orwell shows his concern for the social state of Europe, and in a broader sense, the entire world, due to an increasing amount of influence of nationalistic sentiment occurring throughout a large number of countries.

For Commandant Verhoeven life is beautiful: he is happily married, expecting his first child with the lovely Irène. But his blissful existence is punctured by a murder of unprecedented savagery. Worse still, the press seem to have it in for him - his every move is headline news. When he discovers that the killer has killed before - that each murder is a homage to a classic crime novel - the fourth estate are quick to coin a nickname: The Novelist.

'I'll stay with them no matter what happens. Someone who has mercy in his heart for humans has mercy for every living thing.' When war came to Alaa Aljaleel's hometown, he made a remarkable decision to stay behind, caring for the people and animals caught in the crossfire. While thousands were forced to flee, Alaa spent his days carrying out perilous rescue missions in his makeshift ambulance and building a sanctuary for the city's abandoned cats.

This novel has all the makings of a classic murder mystery, but with a twist: as Attorney-General Anstruther Blayton leads the court through prosecution and defence, Inspector Fenby carries out his investigation. All this occurs while the identity of figure in the dock is kept tantalisingly out of reach. Excellent Intentions is a classic crime novel laced with irreverent wit, first published in 1939.

The Gate of Ice is the only way in or out of the mountain—at least that's supposed to be true. There's a second gate, a smuggler's gate dug in secret over decades by a Southcaver named Yale. The Southcaver dwarves might not be the most reputable in the mountain, but they have a certain tenacity and rebellious streak that Yale depends on. Topaz, a Southcaver smelter's daughter, decides to accept proposals of marriage. She doesn't anticipate getting mixed up with the existence of the Second Gate, much less the fate of the whole mountain.

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality.

They say I'm a murderer. Six years ago, Kate Reynolds was found holding the body of her best friend, covered in blood, and clutching the knife that killed her. I plead guilty. Kate has been in prison ever since, but now her sentence is up. She is being released. But the truth is, I didn't do it. There's only one person who can help: Private Investigator Madison Attallee, the first officer on the scene all those years ago. But there's someone out there who doesn't want Kate digging up the past.

What was life really like for women in the medieval period? How did they think about sex, death and God? Could they live independent lives? And how can we hear the stories of women from this period?

When a shadow from the past reawakens, successful surgeon Axel Glenne's life turns upside down. Soon after, a woman's body is found in Nordmarka, a forest north of Oslo. Items found near the body suggest that the killer is leaving a message, and while this death is being investigated, another woman is murdered. The similarities are too close to be coincidental - and it appears that Axel Glenne has a connection to both victims.

Spring 1941: Britain is losing the war, but the fighters of the French Resistance are determined not to give up. These courageous men and women - young and old, aristocrats and nightclub owners, teachers and military heroes - run an escape line for British airmen down to Spain. In Rouen and Orleans, in secret hotels and on the streets, they prise open Europe's sealed doors to lead British fighters to freedom....

When wounded, grieving war-hero Jack Fiskardo arrives in the London of 1639 from the battlefields of Europe, a veteran not just of conflict but of tragedy, his only wish is to make a life for himself and his two sons different to any he has known. But in an England on the verge of civil war, and a city full of bitter rivalries and deadly secrets, a soldier's past cannot be so easily forgotten.

When an empty passenger plane mysteriously crashes in the Lake District, journalist Carly Atherton is determined to get to the truth of what happened—the love of her life was one of the two pilots on board. But when she contacts the family of the other pilot, the conflicting memories of his wife and his sister draw her into a story far darker than she could possibly have imagined. As Carly delves into the dynamics of a seemingly ordinary family, she realises that the bonds that shape us can also tear us apart—and that sometimes there are monsters living among us, hiding in plain sight...

Deeply in love and about to marry, students Misha and Sophia flee a Warsaw under Nazi occupation for a chance at freedom. Forced to return to the Warsaw ghetto, they help Misha's mentor, Dr Korczak, care for the 200 children in his orphanage. As the noose tightens around the ghetto, Misha and Sophia are torn from one another, forcing them to face their worst fears alone. Meanwhile, refusing to leave the children unprotected, Korczak must confront a terrible darkness.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Six Minutes in May by Nicholas Shakespeare, read by Peter Noble. London, May 1940. Britain is under threat of invasion and Neville Chamberlain’s government is about to fall. It is hard for us to imagine the Second World War without Winston Churchill taking the helm, but in Six Minutes in May Nicholas Shakespeare shows how easily events could have gone in a different direction.

In AD 843, the three surviving grandsons of the great Emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited what became France, another Germany and the third Lotharingia: the chunk that initially divided the other two. The dynamic between these three great zones has dictated much of our subsequent fate.