Showing results by narrator "Fiona" in All Categories

1950: Margaret Devonshire (Megs) is a 17-year-old student of mathematics and physics at Oxford University. When her beloved eight-year-old brother asks Megs if Narnia is real, logical Megs tells him it’s just a book for children, and certainly not true. Homebound due to his illness, and remaining fixated on his favorite books, George presses her to ask the author of the recently released novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe a question: “Where did Narnia come from?”

Ava is sick of online dating. She’s always trusted her own instincts over an algorithm, anyway, and she wants a break from it all. So when she signs up to a semi-silent, anonymous writing retreat in glorious Italy, love is the last thing on her mind. Until she meets a handsome stranger. All she knows is that he’s funny, he’s kind and - she soon learns - he’s great in bed. He’s equally smitten, and after a whirlwind, intoxicating affair, they pledge their love without even knowing each other’s real names.

Novelist JB Blackwood is on a cruise with her husband, Patrick, to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Her one-time professor, Patrick is much older than JB. A maverick when they met, he seemed somehow ageless, as all new gods appear in the eyes of those who worship them. He is a film director. A cult figure. But now his success is starting to wane and JB is on the cusp of winning a major literary prize. Her art, that has been forever overseen by Patrick, is starting to overshadow his.

After being together for ten years, Sylvie and Dan have a comfortable home, fulfilling jobs, beautiful twin girls, and communicate so seamlessly, they finish each other's sentences. They have a happy marriage and believe they know everything there is to know about each other. Until it's casually mentioned to them that they could be together for another sixty-eight years... and panic sets in.

How did a once faceless bureaucrat, a man whose own wife said he was born under the sign of the vampire, become the idealized face of Russian manhood and its authoritarian leader? Deputy Mayor Putin examines the man behind the myth. We will explore how Putin’s formative years shaped and drove him and how the supporting cast of characters he gathered along the way helped him get to the Kremlin’s inner sanctum.

In the story, two young women centuries apart - one a troubled, magic-wielding queen, the other a bounty hunter serving a ruthless empire - must fight in a cosmic war that spans millennia, only to discover as their stories intersect that they have the power to save their world or doom it.

Working as a quality-assurance grunt in the gaming industry sounds like fun, right? You get to play the coolest new games before anyone else. And all you have to do is to find, reproduce, and report bugs before the last pixel is locked in and the games are launched to an eager public. Sure, there’s the unpaid overtime, the office politics, and the ever-present threat of layoffs. But you get to game!

The night of my birthday looked as boring as the rest of my life. Sitting on my own, trying to avoid my insanely gorgeous but horribly mean flatmate, all while waiting for him to leave so I could have a party for one…if you know what I mean. But that was before I almost crashed on the way home, when a big top rolled into town. Before I locked eyes with the hottest guy I’d ever seen swinging a sledgehammer in the rain. Before I read the flyer promoting the once-in-a-lifetime circus. A circus that wasn’t the usual garish carnival…oh, no…this one was most definitely not for children.

Are you bored with everything that’s hanging in your closet, and think that the only solution is to go out and buy something new? Well, this book shows you how to learn to love dressing yourself again, starting with what you already own and combining that with a new season’s mindset…so you can have fun, feel good, look fabulous and all without spending a bomb. Sound good? If you don't know how to appreciate the clothes you already have, you will forever be adding to your closet and wondering why nothing feels exciting to you.

Have you ever wished magic was real? Do you ever feel powerless, as though the world has it in for you, or that nothing ever goes your way? Have you wished there were a magic word you could utter that would change everything? If so, I have good news for you. Magic is real. This audiobook will teach you the technique of using magic words. It’s the most spectacularly effective method for creating change in just about any area you can think of.

Truths from an Unreliable Witness is a fiercely honest and wryly funny memoir of melancholy, love, marriage, the loss of love and marriage, homelessness, of hotel rooms strewn with empty mini-bar bottles of vodka, of waking from a two-week coma, of putrid drug dens and using a jungle to confront yourself. It is about hitting rock bottom and then realising you are only halfway down. Ultimately, it's about hanging on to your last straw of sanity and finding laughter in the darkest of times. You may want to sit down for this....

Isobel Gamble is a young seamstress carrying generations of secrets when she sets sail from Scotland in the early 1800s with her husband, Edward. An apothecary who has fallen under the spell of opium, his pile of debts have forced them to flee Edinburgh for a fresh start in the New World. But only days after they've arrived in Salem, Edward abruptly joins a departing ship as a medic—leaving Isobel penniless and alone in a strange country, forced to make her way by any means possible.

An exclusive hotel on a tiny picturesque island seems to be the ideal retreat for Hercule Poirot from the stresses of criminal detection. But with the appearance of the beautiful Arlena Stuart, the quiet and peaceful atmosphere becomes charged with an indefinable erotic tension. And when she is found viciously strangled in a secluded cove, there are few, especially among the women, who seem to feel either surprise or regret.

Maria knew about guilt. It was a stubborn, pervasive and toxic emotion, and incredibly difficult to shake. Especially if really, deep down, you didn't think you deserved to let it go. Maria Lindsey is content. She spends her solitary days tending her bees and creating delicious honey products to fund orphaned children. A former nun, her life at Honeybee Haven has long been shaped by her self-imposed penance for terrible past events.

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857.

Claire grew up in a small town, far from the glitz and glamour of London. Ridiculed by her stepmother, Linda, and harboring a painful crush on her brother’s best friend, she has begun to outgrow the life laid out before her. On the cusp of adulthood in the late 1960s, Claire yearns for the adventure and independence of a counterculture taking root across the world.

After a life of hurt and disappointment, Raya, the spiky-haired, Doc Marten-wearing 14-year-old decides it’s time to strike out on her own. She leaves the boring English village and what she's determined will be her last foster placement for the excitement of London. But it turns out she’s a witch, with the annoying habit of time-traveling - by accident. And a sarcastic witch’s cat Oscar tags along for the ride. Why would she fling herself into the midst of the Essex Witch Trials in 1645 England?

What do you do when your freakishly smart and wickedly sarcastic Research Methods professor sees you mostly naked? You befriend him, of course.

In this profound and intelligent book, Fiona Robertson acts as companion and guide through the dark night of the soul, one of life’s most challenging experiences. The dark night - or spiritual emergency - is the underbelly of awakening, an aspect of inner transformation that is often minimized, misunderstood, or denied. Fiona has captured the essence of the dark night journey with compassion and clarity.

A 35-year-old unsolved murder. Mary’s murder gripped the town of Partick for years after her death. A cold case reawakened because of the Daily Record with women at the heart of it. The victim, the daughter, the detective, the forensic scientist, the reporter. For 35 years Gina McGavin hunted for her mother’s killer. Mary McLaughlin’s senseless brutal murder ignited in Gina a deep sense of injustice and an insatiable need to seek the truth about her death.