Showing results by narrator "Peter Noble" in All Categories

Inspector Keon has finally got over the death of his wife, Alysha, in a terrorist attack five years ago. The illegal AI copy of her - Liss - that he created to help him mourn has vanished, presumed destroyed. His life is back on track. But a deadly shooting in a police-guarded room in a high-security hospital threatens to ruin everything. Who got past the defences? Why did they kill the seemingly unimportant military officer who had been in a coma for weeks? And why did the scanners pick up the deceased man the next day on the other side of the planet, seemingly alive and well?

1659. Lord General George Monck has set up camp on the Scottish border with his loyal army. He has plans to retire, to spend the rest of his years on his estates with his wife, Anne, and son, Kit. But the changing political climate forces him to march his army south to the capital. In the Rump of the Long Parliament, the case is being made for an end to the Commonwealth and for the Restoration of the Monarchy. When the Monarchy is restored, there is never a quiet moment for Monck.

A global thriller presenting an apocalyptic vision of a world on the brink of despair and destruction. What would you do if the world was brought to a standstill? If you heard deafening static followed by the words 'my children. Do not be afraid'? Would you turn to God? Subscribe to the conspiracy theories? Or put your faith in science and a rational explanation? The lives of all 26 people in this account are affected by the message. Most because they heard it. Some because they didn't.

The Tsar's Dragons series follows the epic tale of 19th-century industrialist John Hughes, who founded a city on the Russian steppe. For people like Hughes' right-hand man, Glyn Edwards, who has found love in a new country, and Anna Parry, a Welsh orphan who has found fulfilment working in Hughesovka's hospital, the city is a chance to build a new life, but fresh arrivals from their hometown threaten the peace and stability of that new existence. Meanwhile, for ambitious Russians like Alexei Beletsky, the city offers a chance to change their homeland for the better.

In the 17th century, a wall is built around the deer park of a great house. Wychwood is a world in itself, its ornamental lakes and majestic avenues planned by Mr Norris, a master of the new art of landscaping. A world where, after decades of civil war, everyone has something to hide or something to fear, where dissidents hide in the forest and Londoners fleeing the plague are at the gate.

After a five-year sabbatical following the tragic death of his wife and fellow agent, Alysha, Keona Rause returns to the distant colony world of Magenta to resume service with the Magentan Intelligence Service. With him he brings an artificial re-creation of his wife's personality, a simulacrum built from every digital trace she left behind. She has been constructed with one purpose - to discover the truth behind her own death - but Keona's relationship with her has grown into something more....

Why do bookshops matter? How do they filter our ideas and literature? In this inventive and highly entertaining extended essay, Jorge Carrion takes his listeners on a journey around the world via its bookshops. His travels take him to Shakespeare & Co in Paris, Wells in Winchester, Green Apple Books in San Francisco, Librairie des Colonnes in Tangier, the Strand Book Store in New York and provoke encounters with thinkers, poets, dreamers, revolutionaries and readers.

During the oppressive heat wave of 1976, a young journalist, Ed Peters, finds an Edwardian photograph in a junk shop in the Brighton Lanes. It shows an alluring dark-haired girl, an actress whose name was Leda Grey. Leda Grey is living still, in a decaying clifftop house once shared with a man called Charles Beauvois, a director of early silent film. As Beauvois' lover and his muse, Leda often starred in scenes where stage magic and trick photography were used to astonishing effect.

Gabriel is a stranger in a small Breton town. Nobody knows where he came from or why he's here. Yet his small acts of kindness, and exceptional cooking, quickly earn him acceptance from the locals. His new friends grow fond of Gabriel, who seems as reserved and benign as the toy panda he wins at the funfair. But unlike Gabriel, the fluffy toy is not haunted by his past….

When a Catholic priest hangs himself during the pope's inauguration, his friend and ex-priest Alex Harker is dragged into a secret war that has been playing out on the fringes of society since the birth of Christ. The suicide sets into motion a planned timetable of terrifying events that will irrevocably change the world as we know it.

Refugee camps in Africa are swelling. And Europe has closed its borders. The refugees have no future, no hope, and no money to pay the vast sums now demanded by people smugglers. But what they do have is time. And then an angel arrives from reality TV. When German model and star presenter Nadeche Hackenbusch comes to film at the largest of the camps, one young refugee sees a unique opportunity: to organise a march to Europe, in full view of the media.

Since the late-1990s, the fate of Nazi stolen art has become a cause célèbre. In Belonging and Betrayal, Charles Dellheim turns this story on its head by revealing how certain Jewish outsiders came to acquire so many old and modern masterpieces in the first place—and what this reveals about Jews, art, and modernity. This audiobook tells the epic story of the fortunes and misfortunes of a small number of eminent art dealers and collectors who, against the odds, played a pivotal role in the migration of works of art from Europe to the United States and in the triumph of modern art.

In A Man Apart Richard Steyn once again brings to life a South African icon. Louis Botha was the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, a union he did much to create in the decade after the devastation of the Anglo-Boer War. During the war Botha was a brilliant young Boer general who through his battlefield strategy won significant victories over the British in the early stages of the war.

Funny, moving and sharply observed, these stories are confirmation of Boyd's status as one of English fiction's finest writers. Here are 24 gripping tales told in bold, distinct voices from Brazil to Africa and from Nice to Hollywood. This eclectic collection by the acclaimed author of Restless and Brazzaville Beach is a must for any lover of the short story.

Winter 1644, the Tower of London. Colonel George Monck has been charged with high treason. A brilliant soldier, admiral and military governor, Monck joined the King's men in besieging Nantwich. But the Parliamentary side's more disciplined army successfully routed them, and Monck was thrown in jail. Brooding and despondent, Monck's troubles look to intensify when he starts an affair with Anne Ratsford, a married woman who is caring for him in The Tower.

Psychologist Mailin Bjerke is due to appear on the notorious TV show Taboo, tackling its most sensational subject yet. But she never arrives at the studio. As the police struggle to find any sign of Mailin, her sister Liss, living on the edge in Amsterdam, takes matters into her own hands. Flying home to Olso, she discovers a complex backdrop of friends and enemies where no one can be relied upon to tell the truth. Her battle is made harder by the fractured memories of a childhood where Mailin was always her protector and by the secrets she must keep hidden.

Ted Bailey thought his days as an Intelligence Operative were long gone. He certainly wasn't expecting to be blackmailed back into action, especially not by his own side. But then Bailey is the only person left who ever encountered Berger, the KGB master-spy. Berger is running a major operation on US soil and both the CIA and SIS are desperate to track him down. So Bailey returns to the arena of international espionage and finds that little has changed.

It should be a routine job. Joe Hunter and his associates are hired to provide security for an elite event in Miami. Wear a tux, stay professional, job done. But things go wrong. Hunter is drawn into what appears to be a domestic altercation. When he crosses the mysterious Mikhail, however, he soon finds something altogether more sinister.... Before long this chance encounter has serious repercussions for Hunter and his friends. Good people are being killed. On the run, in the line of fire, the clock is ticking.

From ambitious scientists rising above the clouds to analyse the air to war generals floating across enemy lines, Richard Holmes takes to the air in this heart-lifting history of pioneer balloonists. Falling Upwards asks why they risked their lives, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet. The stories range from early ballooning rivals to the long-distance voyages of American entrepreneurs; from the legendary balloon escape from the Prussian siege of Paris to dauntless James Glaisher, who in the 1860s flew seven miles above the earth - without oxygen.

The Heliothane Dominion is triumphant in the solar system after a bitter war with their Umbrathane progenitors. But some of the enemy have escaped into the past, intent on wreaking havoc across time. The worst of these is Cowl, an artificially forced advance in human evolution but one who is no longer human. Polly, desperate to obtain funds to support her habits, is unprepared for her involvement with Nandru Jurgens, a Taskforce soldier, and the killers pursuing him.