Showing results by narrator "Helen Lloyd" in All Categories

From the tennis court to the boxing ring, the athletics track to the football pitch, the visibility of women in sport has been gathering pace. Women's competitions are increasingly popular. In Roar Sam takes a deep dive into the experiences of some of sport's most high-profile female athletes -...

In 1979, Ursula Westmacott impulsively left London and her modelling career to join her boyfriend Chris Crocker on board Spero, a 42-foot sailing boat built in 1909 and never modernized - no engine and just a sextant for navigation. The two intrepid sailors headed south for Gibraltar, then Africa, finally crossing the Atlantic to reach Brazil.

As this final volume of the Jewelfire Trilogy opens, all seems lost for the humans of Aventuria. The shape-changing Bhahdradomen have invaded their lands and usurped their Queen, aided by the Aelyr lord Falthorn. Queen Helananthe has been forced to stand down or see the deaths of her mother and brother. Tanthe, imprisoned with her company of friends in the Amber Citadel, must face great peril as they make desperate plans to escape.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, humans defeated the shape-changing Bhahdradomen in the War of the Silver Plains. Although they are exiled - or even thought to be extinct - the shape-changers' hatred and jealousy of the humans live on. Now, in the failings of a human king, they find a way to assuage that hatred. Meanwhile the third race, the mysterious Aelyr, although they also consider the Bhahdradomen enemies, keep apart from human realms.

Alice’s husband is missing. Has he left her for another woman, or has something more sinister happened? In a world that is becoming increasingly muddled, Alice is unsure whom she can trust. Even her daughter appears to be lying to her. How much heartache can one person endure?

A wedding on picturesque Martha's Vineyard promises to be the affair of the season when Penny Arbuthnot asks her cousin, feisty 92-year-old poet Victoria Trumbull, if she can use her property for the reception. Victoria agrees - but she has no idea what's in store for the hapless couple. For one, Penny is seriously in debt and desperate to marry money. She thinks she's on the road to riches when she hooks Rocco Bufano, whose father is a multi-billionaire. But unbeknownst to Penny, Rocco's been disowned by dad.

Vee Smith is 22 when she starts work on Gosport's ferries, taking a job left vacant by the men gone off to war. She soon makes friends with the other women workers, and together they enjoy nights out dancing in Gosport. Vee even feels herself falling for Sam, the skipper of the ferry and her unhappily married boss. But Vee has a secret: her real name is Violetta Schmidt, and she is half German. If her true nationality is discovered, she and her mother could find themselves interned as enemy aliens.

Raconteurs Audio and Spoken Realms team up once again to bring this second collection of short stories by H. G. Wells to audio. Written between 1894 and 1902, this anthology of 13 stories delves into botany, flying machines, travel, distant lands and customs, virology, magic, taxidermy, journalism - and there’s even a ghost story.

They were the unsung heroines of World War II: the women who clocked in daily to work in vast munitions factories, helping to make explosives, bullets, shells, bombs and war machines that would ensure victory. A factory accident could mean blindness, loss of limb or worse. Yet this hidden army of nearly two million women toiled on, regardless, through the hardest years of the war.

After the defeated Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte goes into exile on tiny St. Helena Island in the remote South Atlantic, he and his lover, Albine de Montholon, plot to escape and rescue his young son. Banding together African slaves, British sympathizers, a Jewish merchant, a Corsican rogue, and French followers, they confront British opposition as well as treachery within their own ranks with sometimes subtle, sometimes bold, but always desperate action. When Napoleon and Albine break faith with one another, ambition and Albine’s husband threaten their reconciliation.

Brought to you by Penguin. **A BOOK OF 2023 IN IRISH TIMES, RTÉ GUIDE AND SUNDAY INDEPENDENT** An unforgettable and sweeping interwar love story, from the Costa-shortlisted and bestselling Irish author of Life Sentences 1980s Cork. Jack Shine discovers a shoe box full of love letters in his...

Good parents everywhere know the tension of wanting our kids to be curious, to have rich experiences and friends...but to be perfectly safe while doing it. Little Fox knows all about it! His father warns him of the danger everywhere. But Little Fox still frolics with butterflies, scavenges for food, and searches for new friends. Then one day he takes a tumble, bumps his head, and starts dreaming of things that reflect both the beauty he's seen and the scary things he's heard. And when Little Fox wakes up, he's perhaps a little wiser, but still every bit as curious and full of life. 

Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan presents a stunning retrospective of the first 10 years of the author’s work. It is a compilation of more than 200,000 words of short fiction, including many of her most acclaimed stories as well as some of the author’s personal favorites; several previously uncollected, hard-to-find pieces; her sci-fi novella, The Dry Salvages; and a rare collaboration with Poppy Z. Brite.

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol - A Ghost Story of Christmas in Five Staves when he was 31. Now with numerous adaptations for film, television, radio, stage - and indeed in audio - it has become an essential part of Christmas for many. Raconteurs Audio has created this collection to include Dickens’ two Christmas novellas, The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth, as well as some of his lesser known short stories with a Christmas theme.

The war appears to be over. Helananthe, granddaughter of the mad king, Garnelys, has gathered her forces and reclaimed the Amber Citadel of Parione, defeating its evil Bhahdradomen advisers... but matters are never simple. The destinies of Tanthe and Ysomir, sisters whose journeys from their village home of Riverwynde had a massive impact on the war, have driven them apart. Ysomir is held in the Citadel, accused of killing King Garnelys.

Honor - Adam Stanford, Earl of Ashworth, has always done the right thing. Desire - Lady Catherine Bourgeault, lonely and rejected, longs to experience passion, to love just once in her life. Treachery - The Baron Bourgeault: to what extremes will an obsessive, unstable man go to achieve his own dark ends? Seduction - In the face of a love that will not be denied, Adam and Catherine risk everything to be together.

February, 1586. When the queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, learns that Ursula is to visit her relatives in Devon, he asks her to find out what has happened to two of his local agents, who have been strangely silent recently. On arrival in the small Devon village of Zeal Aquatio, Ursula discovers that both spies in question have met with mysterious - and fatal - accidents. Or is there more to it than that? What did the two spies find out that got them killed?

Mystery writer Lorinda Lucas tosses yet another paperback in the trash, appalled at the gruesome direction of today's crime fiction. She's even more disturbed at the half-starved state of Roscoe, the cat next door. Before Lorinda left for her latest book tour, Roscoe was as plump and pampered as her own two felines. It only takes a modicum of sleuthing to find out that in Lorinda's absence Roscoe's owner, Macho Magee, has acquired a new girlfriend-a harridan who has put the gentle Macho and his pet on a strict diet. And that's only the first disturbing news in Brimful Coffers.

One of Amazon’s Best Books of September! Strangers on a London bus unite to help an elderly man find his missed love connection in the heartwarming new novel from the acclaimed author of The Last Chance Library. When Libby Nicholls arrives in London, brokenhearted and with her life in tatters...

From the authors of Horror Hotel, called "fast-paced and freaky" by #1 NYT bestselling author Kendare Blake, comes another addictive YA horror about a group of teen ghost hunters who are invited to travel onboard a haunted historic cruise ship. All aboard... After their fateful stay at the...