Showing results by narrator "Peter Noble" in All Categories

The gripping story of a young boy and his family, driven from their home by war and indiscriminate violence. Like millions of others, they attempt the treacherous journey across their war-torn continent, trying to reach the safety of Europe. The truth is, Europe doesn't want them, and thousands die every month at the hands of thieves and profiteering men to whom life is cheap. Kalu believes that he can lead his family to safety. They have money and a plan, and Kalu is, after all, the smartest man in Monguno.

In a remote city, a renowned performance artist commits suicide on video; from a long-abandoned space station comes impossible footage of a dead body; and in an isolated outpost, a secretive cult believes they are communing with the ancient alien Masters. How are they connected? Inspector Keon is trying to investigate, but once again his life has been flipped upside down. His wife, Alysha, is alive. His long search is over. Or so he thinks.

The idea that people are basically driven by individualism and economic incentives and that prosperity and good societies come from top-down leadership has dominated politics for the last 30 years (from some perspectives, much longer). This book shows that the age of homo economicus and centralisation is coming to an end. Instead, Collier and Kay argue that community and mutuality will be the drivers of successful societies in the future - as they are already in some parts of the world.

Roald Dahl was one of the world's greatest storytellers. He conceived his vocation as one as intrepid as that of any explorer and, in his writing for children, he was able to tap into a child's viewpoint throughout his life. He crafted tales that were exotic in scenario, frequently invested with a moral, and filled with vibrant characters that endure in public imagination to the present day.

It’s 1933, and Ivor Castle, Oxford-educated and Jewish, arrives in Palestine to take up a position as assistant to the defense counsel in the trial of the two men accused of murdering Haim Arlosoroff, a leader of the Jewish community in Palestine whose efforts to get Jews out of Hitler’s Germany and into Palestine may have been controversial enough to get him killed.

In Foreign Native, RW Johnson looks back with affection and humour on his life in Africa. From schooldays in Durban - fresh off the boat from Merseyside - to later years as an academic, director of the Helen Suzman Foundation and formidable political commentator, he has produced an entertaining and occasionally eye-popping memoir brimming with history, anecdote and insight. Johnson charts his evolution from enthusiastic, left-leaning Africanist to political realist, relating the episodes that influenced his intellectual worldview.

Two sets of cousins, Boer and Brit, find their destinies inexorably intertwined in the politics and mayhem that led up to and encompassed the Anglo Boer War of 1899-1902. From Transvaal to Victorian England, the cousins form strong bonds that are tested on the battlefields of South Africa. Martin de Winter, nurtured to lead his country, Transvaal, into the 20th century, instead finds himself excelling as a gifted young general, fighting a desperate war to keep his nation from ruin, all the while being haunted by his love for a British woman.

Haunted by terrifying nightmares and a mysterious prophecy, a young man embarks on a 3,000-mile trek through the African bush. From Victoria Falls at night during a lunar rainbow to the great African Savannah stampeding with wildebeest to the evocative Serengeti with Mt. Kilimanjaro rising up with the dawn, The Light Behind Blue Circles captures some of Africa's most iconic scenery.

How deep do sharks swim? Have more people been into space than the deep ocean? And what effect are we having on the health of our seas? In Ask an Ocean Explorer, marine biologist of over 20 years and advisor for the BBC's Blue Planet II, Dr Jon Copley, explains the science and wonder of the deep ocean.

Why do we keep sheep? Alex Lindén ruminates as he watches his sheep ruminating. Naive and inexperienced, he has ditched his doctoral studies in order to move to a fully working farm in the country with his family, where he is tasked with the responsibility of caring for a herd of sheep. Lindén records his new life in his diary as he tries to manage life on the farm, the ever-escaping sheep and the trials and tribulations that come with being a shepherd - shearing, lambing and confronting the slaughterhouse.

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.

In 1865 a broken Admiral Robert FitzRoy locked himself in his dressing room and cut his throat. His grand meteorological project had failed. Yet only a decade later, FitzRoy’s storm-warning system and ‘forecasts’ would return, the model for what we use today. In an age when a storm at sea was evidence of God’s great wrath, 19th-century meteorologists had to fight against convention and religious dogma.

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….