Showing results by narrator "Justin Avoth" in All Categories

English writer Hilary Wainwright lost all trace of his young son when Lisa, his wife, was killed by the Gestapo in Paris. Several years later, an acquaintance travels to England with news that Hilary’s son may be alive in France. Doubting whether five-year-old Jean is indeed his, and determined not to feel vulnerable to love and tenderness again, Hilary travels to France to find the boy. Amidst a war-torn Northern French town, he gets to know young Jean, as well as the town’s inhabitants.

Unexpectedly thrust into the role of the Ferryman, young Milo is tasked with taking the lingering Dead across the dark sea to the Island of the Broken Tower, where they can finally move on. On his first perilious journey, his ghostly passengers include his own father and the teenage daughter of the Lord of Merlank, who is unprepared to give her up and follows in pursuit in a bigger boat, filled with armed men and two dark magicians at his command. Milo must face untold traps, dangers and fears as he carries his ghostly passengers across secret seas.

London, 1861: Ten-year-old Nell belongs to a crew of mudlarks who work a stretch of the Thames along the Ratcliffe Highway. An orphan since her mother died four years past, leaving Nell with only broken dreams and a pair of satin slippers in her possession, she spends her days dredging up coals, copper and pieces of iron spilled by the river barges – searching for treasure in the mud in order to appease her master, Benjamin Murdstone. But one day, Nell discovers a body on the shore. It’s not the first corpse she’s encountered, but by far the strangest.

Nicolas Nabokov, a Russian-born composer and cultural diplomat, befriended many of the 20th century’s greatest musicians and artists. With delightful anecdotes and personal reflections, his memoir is a truly unique historical document that enriches our understanding of the Cold War’s impact on culture.

The Fable of the Bees—a satirical poem, prose discussion, three essays and six dialogues completed in 1729—exposes human vices but defends them as a necessity within a wealthy society. Mandeville’s bees thrive until they start living by honesty and virtue… then they are impoverished. Mandeville did not play by the rules: he satirized the sins of society but also ridiculed the widespread hypocrisy of deploring these sins whilst reaping their benefits. He and his work were attacked for the rest of the century.

Six lives, connected through blood and history, each rooted in the dirt of their inheritance, look to the future, and what it might hold. In 1855, Edward Feebes travels to the guano islands of South America, to investigate an irregularity in the accounts of the House of Feebes & Co. In 1912, post-mortem photographer and reluctant blackmailer Annie Connolly plots her escape from Ireland to America on board the Titanic.