Showing results by narrator "Nick" in All Categories

For almost 40 years, from its genesis in 1967 to its eventual live unveiling at London's Royal Festival Hall in 2004, the album SMiLE has been written into music mythology. SMiLE: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Brian Wilson documents the history of the album, drawing on interviews with collaborator Van Dyke Parks, Brian's band (especially Darian Sahanaja), close friends, family, and many others who were part of its story.

Mankind has ceded the night to the corelings, demons that rise up out of the ground each day at dusk, killing and destroying at will until dawn, when the sun banishes them back to the Core. As darkness falls, the world’s few surviving humans hide behind magical wards, praying the magic can see them through another night. As years pass, the distances between each tiny village seem longer and longer. It seems nothing can harm the corelings, or bring humanity back together.

Percy is a poor child with nothing to his name. He has no power, no family–only an old mentor in his wooden hut outside town. Even that is taken away from him when the old man dies. But everything changes when he gains access to mana and manifests what is known as an Ego. His Ego doesn’t grant him strength like others would. It's rare, allowing him to consume what he owns and to reforge the ordinary into the extraordinary.

The journey towards becoming the best version of yourself is a continuous process that requires a commitment to learning and growth. The most effective way to jump-start and fuel that change is by improving your habits, routines, and mindset. In this book, best-selling author and speaker, Allistair McCaw provides you with 77 easy-to-read bite size takeaways to ACHIEVE EXCELLENCE in your career and life.

After viciously assaulting a corrupt but powerful clergyman Robin Hood flees the only home he has ever known in Wakefield, Yorkshire. Becoming a member of a notorious band of outlaws, Hood and his new companions - including John Little and Will Scaflock - hide out in the great forests of Barnsdale, fighting for their very existence as the law hunts them down like animals. When they are betrayed, and their harsh lives become even more unbearable, the band of friends seeks bloody vengeance.

Life in foster care wasn’t easy. Life after prison? Unforgiving. But I’m determined to stay out of trouble, and I’m gaining a foothold on the closest I’ve ever known to normal. Then, thanks to a pair of escape-artist dogs from the sanctuary where I’ve found work, I cross paths with my boss’ neighbor, Ty Adams. He’s a horse trainer, and winter is his quiet season. It’s also the season when he gets restless and lonely—two things I know all about. He’s not interested in love or romance. I’m just happy someone’s interested in me at all.

These stories and more are featured in the third short story anthology for the System Apocalypse, continuing the saga of survival in a world transformed by the arrival of the System. Humanity has adapted to a new reality filled with Classes, magic and monsters, but the struggle for life, love and purpose never ends. This anthology brings together gripping tales from returning authors and two new short stories by Tao Wong.

A mysterious incident in Russia, a blip buried in the news - it’s the only warning humanity receives that civilization will soon be destroyed by a single, voracious virus that creates monsters of men. A lawyer, still grieving over the death of his young wife, begins to write as a form of therapy. But he never expected that his anonymous blog and journal would ultimately record humanity’s last days. Governments scramble to stop the zombie virus, people panic, so-called Safe Havens are established, the world erupts into chaos; soon it’s every man, woman, and child for themselves.

Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yowie, Yeti...the idea that monstrous man-apes lurk in the remote forests and high mountain valleys of the world is an enduring and popular one. Hardly a week goes by without some report of a fresh encounter.

Justin Yerbury made a promise to his mother while she was dying of motor neurone disease (MND) that he would do everything he could to find a cure. MND had already taken several members of Justin's family, and he learned that they carried a rare genetic form of the disease that gave them a fifty-fifty chance of inheritance. Desperate to help his loved ones, Justin went to university to study science, eventually becoming a professor of molecular biology at the University of Wollongong and one of the world's leading experts on MND.

Detective Quaid Valor has too much on his plate. Between his shaky, brand-new relationship with reformed office playboy Detective Aslan Doyle, his sister’s case going from cold to hot overnight, his father insisting on being involved, and his boss breathing down his neck, Quaid is on edge.

On the 8th August 1963 a gang of 15 men stopped a mail train in Buckinghamshire and proceeded to steal sacks of money worth £2.6 million. It was the biggest heist ever carried out in the UK and frontpage news around the world. The mastermind behind this most audacious crime of the twentieth century was Bruce Reynolds. Perhaps the last of the 'gentlemen villains'; Reynolds epitomised that particular breed of sharply dressed post-war criminals who mixed with royalty and movie stars, and never carried a gun. They thrived on adventure and glamour, and the Great Train Robbery was their last ride.

For 25 years, I’ve been in an exclusive, all-consuming relationship with Stone’s Throw Tavern, my family’s local bar. I don’t need a boyfriend. What I need is a new bartender. And what I get is Charlie, my daughter’s old college boyfriend, a guy who still acts like he’s chillin’ at the frat house.

In high school, Derek ruled the school with his fellow hockey players, while I fantasized from afar. He only knew me as his little brother’s shy friend who, thanks to one vicious rumor from a former flame, had garnered a reputation as the school freak. Twenty years later, I’m a successful real estate agent who’s put my embarrassing past behind me and smartly stayed away from love. I have things under control…until Derek suddenly returns to Sourwood sans wedding ring, and in dire need of a house for him and his daughter.

Despite believing he was bionic as a child, Ira Rainey was far from an elite athlete with superhuman running abilities like the ones he read about in books. He was in fact an overweight and unfit slacker who felt a bit sorry for himself because he had sore feet. Sure he ran a bit, but he also sat around a lot and ate and drank too much. Why? Because he could, and because he was a delusional optimist who thought everything would always be just fine.

Roark von Graf fought his way up from the bottom to become not only the Dungeon Lord of the Cruel Citadel, but the leader of the Troll Nation, making underhanded alliances with other dungeons and players along the way. To stop Lowen and his Divine armies once and for all, Roark will have to drag the magics of the game into the real world, harness deadly new technologies, and build dungeons in places no Dungeon Lord has ever gone before. The fate of Earth hangs in the balance. The duel between Dungeon Lords has begun. And one of them isn’t leaving Hearthworld alive.

Last year was a “blood year” in the Middle East - massacres and beheadings, fallen cities, collapsed and collapsing states, the unravelling of a decade of Western strategy. We saw the rise of ISIS, the splintering of government in Iraq, and foreign fighters - many from Europe, Australia and Africa - flowing into Syria at a rate ten times that during the height of the Iraq War. What went wrong?In Blood Year, David Kilcullen calls on twenty-five years’ experience to answer that question.

Bill is a dedicated young lawyer working at his family’s prestigious New York firm, who leaves everything he trained for to follow his dream and become a minister in rural Wyoming. Jenny, his wife, is a stylist whose heart and soul are invested in fashion. She leaves the milieu and life she loves to join him. The certainty they share is that their destinies are linked forever.

With allies trying to kill him and enemies readying a horde of zombie vampires to roll over all of Texas, it will take every shred of Christian’s power and Natalie’s determination to win this war and give North America a brand new lord of the South.

Big Bend is my home. I love it here. I love everything about it. It's my senior year, and I'm determined to have the best one yet. Of course, that's when life gets confusing. I think I may have a little bit of a crush on my nemesis. Something I never saw coming. I just hope I can find a way to make him give me a chance because being together would make not only this year great but this life of ours—absolutely epic.