Showing results by narrator "Des Fitzgerald" in All Categories

Connie can't deny she's nervous about meeting her boyfriend's family. Spending the weekend at their ritzy woodland summer home, Evan's already given her fair warning that his parents are cold, snobbish, and especially unpleasant toward those outside their usual social circles. So when Evan's mother warmly greets them with open arms, Connie is as confused as he is. They're so friendly, in fact, Evan himself can hardly believe they're real. Then, while helping Evan's mother with dinner, Connie overhears strange noises coming from the basement—what almost sounds like voices calling out for help.

Awkward, hapless Marick is still struggling with the loss of his wife, his child and his faith when he is reluctantly thrust into the position of chaplain at a large public hospital. Shortly after arriving, he meets Hugo, a hospital scientist and a man almost as lost as Marick himself, who is working in a forgotten lab, deep in the subterranean realms of the hospital. Hugo is convinced that the bacteria he uses for protein production have - unbelievably - begun to produce gold. Is it alchemy, evolution, a hoax or even ... possibly ... a miracle?

A heart-warming story about family secrets and one woman’s escape to dreamy Sandy Cove on the stunning west coast of Ireland. The picturesque beach of Wild Rose Bay is the last place Lydia Butler thought she’d be. But having just lost everything, the run-down cottage she inherited from her Great Aunt Nellie is the only place she can take her daughter, Sunny. Hidden away in a tiny Irish village, she can protect Sunny from the gossip in Dublin, and the real reason they have nowhere else to live....

The night Jack Smyth ran into flames in a desperate attempt to save his wife from their burning home, he was, tragically, too late - but hailed a hero. Until it emerged that Kate was dead long before the fire began. Suspicion has stalked him ever since. After all, there's no smoke without fire. A year on, he's signed a book deal. He wants to tell his side of the story, to prove his own innocence in print. He just needs someone to help him write it. Emily has never ghostwritten anything before, but she knows what it’s like to live with a guilty secret.

Jack Higgins (the pen name of Henry Patterson) was the internationally bestselling author of 85 novels. He shot to fame with The Eagle Has Landed, which sold 50 million copies worldwide and became a hit film. Adapted for radio, it is included here, together with its gripping sequel The Eagle Has Flown and the sensational Falklands War thriller Exocet.

Profoundly deaf since early childhood, Caleb has always lived on the outside - watching and picking up tell-tale signs people hide in a smile, a cough or a kiss. When a childhood friend is murdered, a sense of guilt and a determination to prove his own innocence sends Caleb on a hunt for the killer. But he can’t do it alone....

Two days before Jack O'Rourke's embarkment to the Western Front in 1916, he leaps into Sydney Harbour to save an elderly Russian man, named Samuel Lomond, from drowning. What happens when Jack returns from the front and discover Lomond's brutal murder, is at the heart of this thrilling historical fiction saga.

A house perched impossibly on a cliff overlooking the stunning, iconic Bluebird Beach. Prime real estate, yet somehow not real estate at all, The Lodge is, like those who live in it, falling apart. Gordon Grimes has become the accidental keeper of this last relic of an endangered world. He lives in The Lodge with his wife, Kelly, who is trying to leave him, their son, Ben, who will do anything to save him, his goddaughter Lou who is hiding from her own troubles, and Leonie, the family matriarch who has trapped them here for their own good.

Based on a real-life event, an epic historical novel from the award-winning author of Things in Jars, The Night Ship illuminates the lives of two characters: a girl shipwrecked on an island off Western Australia and, 300 years later, a boy finding a home with his grandfather on the very same island.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Last Stories by William Trevor, read by Niamh Cusack, Stephen Hogan and Tara Fitzgerald. In this final collection of ten exquisite, perceptive and profound stories, William Trevor probes into the depths of the human spirit. Here we encounter a tutor and his pupil, whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they meet again years later; a young girl who discovers the mother she believed dead is alive and well; and a piano teacher who accepts her pupil's theft in exchange for his beautiful music.

Jock Serong reimagines in urgent, compelling prose the ill-fated exploits of George Augustus Robinson at the settlement of Wybalenna. On the windswept point of an island at the edge of van Diemen’s Land, the Commandant huddles with a small force of white men and women. He has gathered together, under varying degrees of coercion and duress, the last of the Tasmanians, or so he believes. His purpose is to save them—from a number of things, but most pressingly from the murderous intent of the pastoral settlers on their country.

It is 1908, and Max Brod is the rising star of Prague's literary world. But when a rival appears on the scene, Max discovers how quickly he can lose everything he has worked so hard to attain. The Lost Pages is a richly reimagined story of Max Brod's life filtered through his relationship with Franz Kafka. In this inspired novel of friendship, fraud, madness and betrayal, Marija Pericic writes vividly and compellingly of an extraordinary literary rivalry.

Doesn’t it feel like the world could use a major spiritual upgrade these days? But what would that look like? Perhaps something completely unexpected, something everyone could understand, something easy and incorruptible, something unifying... Perhaps a symbol that doesn't even require language to work its wonders… In its elegant simplicity, the Infinity Wave could be just that.

Pompous, vain and a self-professed charmer, George Brewster moves from one unfulfilling journalism job to the next, one empty relationship to another, his faithful wife and daughter ever the afterthought. The Well Dressed Explorer is the story of a man of his time, but as a story of toxic workplaces and an Australia where comfort and self-interest breed men like George, it might well feel familiar to a new generation of listeners.

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

Acclaimed explorer Rob Nash has lost his way. Grieving the death of his wife, and blaming himself, he sees no reason to carry on. But when 'Uncle' Frank Douglas offers him the chance to lead a cave-diving expedition in the jungles of Papua, Nash can see some light at the end of the tunnel. But the expedition might not be what it seems. With a decades-old Japanese submarine buried deep in a cavern, and a team hellbent on unleashing the treasures it hides, Nash finds himself on a ship heading for danger.

Trainee private investigator Lee Southern finds himself drawn into a web of danger and deceit as he investigates a series of bribery attempts targeting a wealthy entrepreneur. Under the expert tutelage of retiring PI Frank Swann, Lee uses all of his developing skills, instincts and cunning to get to the heart of a sordid mystery. As Lee delves deeper into the case and questions the intentions of those he's working for, he finds himself the target of increasingly ominous threats and several attempts on his life.

David Fitzgerald previously pointed out the top 10 fatal flaws of Christianity’s origin story. Now, Jesus: Mything in Action presents the most compelling new findings in Jesus myth theory and critically examines its controversial reception by biblical scholars, the extent and reliability of our sources for Jesus, and the surprising history behind Jesus’ evolution.

Virgil's Aeneid, one of the greatest classical poems, tells the story of Aeneas, son of Priam, after the fall of Troy. His quest is to find the site "in the west" where he will found a new town prophesied to be the seat of a world empire: Rome.

In 2004, the body of a young Perth woman was found on the grounds of a primary school. Her name was Rebecca Ryle. The killing would mystify investigators, lawyers, and psychologists - and profoundly rearrange the life of the victim's family. It would also involve the author's family, because his brother knew the man charged with the murder. For years, the two had circled each other suspiciously, in a world of violence, drugs, and rotten aspirations.