Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios for Bloomsbury" in All Categories

Fizzlebert Stump's second adventure. The bearded Barboozul family are the new stars of Fizz's circus. Their act is full of magic, mystery, fear and fun. And it's nice to have another boy around, even if he is a bit... hairy round the chin. But then things start going wrong. The lion loses his dentures. The clowns lose their noses. The Ringmaster loses his temper. And the circus is about to lose its licence. Is the bearded boy to blame? Can Fizz save the day?

James is exactly what you'd expect from one of London's most promising, young town planners. He's cautious, respected by colleagues and performs well in team meetings. But while James understands the glitter and grime of the city better than almost anyone, he hasn't actually experienced much of it. And, as he watches his university friends blossom bewilderingly into rich and successful adults, he has the nagging sense that he has somehow fallen by the wayside.

Sixteen-year-old Kayla was born with the ability to move things with her mind-things like credit cards and buttons on cash registers - and she has become a master shoplifter. She steals to build up enough money for her and her mom to be able to flee if her dad finds them again… which would mean grave danger for them both. When she's caught stealing by a boy named Daniel - a boy with the ability to teleport - he needs her help and is willing to blackmail her to get it.

Following his star turn in I Am a Tree Tim is back for more comic fun. This time he's spending half term cleaning cars, and screaming toddlers have taken over his home. He's not happy. Luckily his friend Flora is on hand to help out and have a joke with. Things start to look up. Until, that is, they encounter a very angry customer and a very wet Rottweiler. But in this comedy, who will have the last laugh?

Millions of people witnessed Emma Taylor's first kiss - a kiss that needed 12 takes and four camera angles to get right. After spending years performing on cue, Emma can't help but wonder if any part of her life is real anymore… particularly her romances. She's been burned by heartthrobs (and the press) one too many times, but there's something about Emma's co-star on her new TV show Coyote Hills that is irresistible. Jake Elliott is gorgeous, smart and actually cares about Emma's charitable foundation.

Nicky has always known Russell was rich, but he has no idea how astronomically rich Russell is until his friend drops dead, on his 50th birthday, in his San Francisco mansion, with Nicky as the only witness. For forty years the two men have kept up their friendship, with Russell's birthday offering him an annual opportunity to remind Nicky of how much more successful Russell is, and how much further he has come since their English suburban childhood.

Fizzlebert Stump lives in a circus. His mum's a clown, his best friend is a bearded boy, and he sticks his head in a lion's mouth every night. Other than that, he's pretty normal. When Fish the sea lion goes missing Fizzlebert tracks down the runaway beast to the Aquarium, with its piratical owner Admiral Spratt-Haddock, invisible octopus, and colour-coded fish. But the Aquarium has problems of its own. Fish (not Fish the sea lion, fish. Keep up.) are going missing, and the Admiral blames the circus.

On a hot summer afternoon in 1944, SS troops wiped out an entire French village. 644 men, women and children died that day. Just one child survived. This book tells the story of what happened in Oradour, and imagines what drove both the SS officer who ordered the massacre, and the seven-year-old boy who escaped it. Powerful, moving and almost unbearably tense, this book weaves the truth about what happened to the people in Oradour into a powerful fictional story centred on two characters: the plucky, inspirational seven-year-old Alfred Fournier, refugee and resident of Oradour, and the hot-headed, power-hungry SS commander who shattered his world and changed his life for ever, Major Gustav Dietrich. As their two worlds collide, we gain a fascinating insight into the extremes and contradictions of human behaviour and emotion. With a twist in the tale, this is a story which leaves the reader surprised, inspired and profoundly moved.

Vienna, 1948: The war is over, and as the initial phase of denazification winds down, the citizens of Vienna struggle to rebuild their lives amid the rubble. Anna Beer returns to the city she fled nine years earlier upon discovering her husband’s infidelity. She has come back to find him and, perhaps, to forgive him. Traveling on the same train from Switzerland is 18-year-old Robert Seidel, a schoolboy summoned home to his stepfather’s sickbed and the secrets of his family’s past.

Central Park is perhaps the most well-trod and familiar green space in the country. It is both a refuge from the city and Manhattan's very heart; a respite from the urban grind and a hive of activity all its own. Eight hundred forty-three carefully planned acres allow some 37 million visitors each year to come and get lost in a sense of nature. Unsurprisingly, the park also inspires a wealth of great writing, and here Andrew Blauner collects some of the finest fiction and nonfiction - 20 pieces in all.

The budget battles of recent years have amplified the warnings of demographic doomsayers who predicted that a wave of baby boomers would bleed America dry, bankrupting Social Security and Medicare as they faded into an impoverished old age. On the contrary, argues award-winning journalist Chris Farrell, we are instead on the verge of a broad, positive transformation of our economy and society.

Darkus Knightley, tweed-wearing, mega-brained, thoroughly logical 13-year-old investigator of the weird, was just getting used to having his dad back in his life. Then Alan Knightley went off-radar, again, leaving Darkus with a traumatised ex-bomb-disposal dog as his only partner in crime-solving. Now things are getting even stranger. Family pets are being savaged by a beast at a top London beauty spot. Policemen have been tracked and attacked by a particularly aggressive canine.

Lynn Barber, by her own admission, has always suffered from a compelling sense of nosiness. An exceptionally inquisitive child she constantly questioned everyone she knew about imitate details of their lives. This talent for nosiness, coupled with her unusual lack of the very English fear of social embarrassment, is the perfect blend for a celebrity interviewer.

Conventional histories of the Great War have tended to focus on the terrible attritional battles of Ypres, of Arras and of the Somme. What they do not tell us is what life was like for the ordinary soldier, what mattered to him, and how he survived, both physically and mentally. Now for the first time, one of Britain's leading military historians, Richard van Emden tells the story of the Great War exclusively through the words and images of soldiers on the ground.

It’s been years since Skye Elliot has seen her biological father. He left when she was 12, breaking her heart, and her life hasn’t exactly been going uphill since. A drug user and alcoholic, Skye is given a choice after a car accident: jail or rehab. It takes eight months to get clean, but the day Skye is released, she has one plan: to be a good mother to her four-year-old daughter, Gracie. But first she has to find her.When no one shows up to pick up Skye from the centre she gets a surprise visitor: her father.

Desperate to escape an arranged marriage and the life her high-ranking government official father planned for her, Cat Hunter does the unthinkable. She runs away from her homeland, Tellus, disguises herself as a boy, and stows away on an air ship. She’s ready for life in a new land where the general population isn’t poverty stricken and at the mercy of the cruel officials. What she isn’t quite ready for is meeting Fox, a crew member aboard the Stormdancer - which turns out to be a smugglers’ ship.

Despite a thoroughly comprehensive list of potential cherry poppers, er…suitors, and careful plotting, Charlie is three weeks into her devirginization campaign, still untouched, and getting desperate. In the movie of her life, this aspiring screenwriter is giving herself a PG, for please, get some. Her project goes into freeze frame when her mom checks herself into rehab and packs Charlie off to live with her estranged, or just plain strange, grandfather, Monty.

Brigid Keenan was a successful young London fashion journalist when she fell in love with a diplomat and left behind the gilt chairs of the Paris salons for a large chicken shed in Nepal. Her bestselling account of life as a 'trailing spouse', Diplomatic Baggage, won the hearts of thousands in countries all over the world. Now, in her further adventures, we find Brigid in Kazakhstan, where AW, her husband, contracts Lyme disease from a tick and Brigid’s visit to a market leads to a full-scale riot from which she requires a police escort.

The Confessions of Frances Godwin is the fictional memoir of a retired high school Latin teacher looking back on a life of trying to do her best amidst transgressions - starting with her affair with Paul, whom she later marries. Now that Paul is dead and she’s retired, Frances Godwin thinks her story is over - but of course the rest of her life is full of surprises, including the truly shocking turn of events that occurs when she takes matters into her own hands after her daughter Stella’s husband grows increasingly abusive.

During the height of the crack epidemic that decimated the streets of D.C., Ruben Castaneda covered the crime beat for the Washington Post. The first in his family to graduate from college, he had landed a job at one of the country’s premier newspapers. But his apparent success masked a devastating secret: he was a crack addict. Even as he covered the drug-fueled violence that was destroying the city, he was prowling S Street, a 24/7 open-air crack market, during his off hours, looking for his next fix.