Showing results by narrator "Leighton Pugh" in All Categories

An urban fairy tale from the acclaimed author of 99 Reasons Why. Arthur Braxton runs away from school. He hides out in an abandoned building, an old Edwardian bathhouse. He discovers a naked woman swimming in the pool. From this point on, nothing will ever be the same. The Drowning of Arthur Braxton is an unflinching account of the pain and trauma of adolescence and of how first love can transform the most unhappy of lives into something miraculous.

Man is a delicate mechanism...he can easily be set off course. It is the late 18th century, and a young Sicilian nobleman, Vitellio Scarpia, finds himself penniless and in disgrace on the streets of Rome. After leaving his home to pursue a military career, his impulsive and undisciplined nature has led to his expulsion from Spanish royal guard, and he must now seek his fortune in Italy - a fortune inseparably bound up with the ruler of the Eternal City, the Pope.

It's 1782. The 13-year-old daughter of a Venetian merchant family is lured naked from her bath by a stray cat and finds herself in the arms of Casanova - the legendary seducer of women. Twenty-five years later Cecilia is in Albania, now a portrait painter of some renown. Enter a young man from England, a troubled poet, looking for adventure at any price - a man who begins his affair with Cecilia.

When Dillon's dad turns up unannounced to take him and his brother on a trip, Dillon isn't sure what to do - Mum's at work and they haven't seen Dad in months. Dillon's little brother Robbie is ecstatic to see his father and desperate to go. But why won't Dad let them use their phones? And why are their faces plastered all over the news? What exactly does Dad want with them?

Deep in the grounds of Welland House lies an ancient memorial tower, surrounded by a prehistoric wilderness that isolates it from the rest of the land. When one day Viviette Constantine, the wife of the estate's owner, investigates the tower, she there discovers Swithin St. Cleeve, a young astronomer who introduces her to the majesty and wonders of the night sky. Instantly drawn to Swithin, and with her husband abroad, Viviette offers him use of the tower and becomes a kind of apprentice to him, and then, eventually, a lover.

Brought to you by Penguin. It has never been more important for business leaders to look to the future. Yet, when we are living through some of the most uncertain times we have ever faced, it can feel daunting to know where to start. In Future-Proof Your Business, applied futurist Tom...

Iceland. In the winter it gets light at 10am and dark at 2pm. The daily announcement of the Chill Factor allows you to calculate how quickly you could die from exposure… Iceland is erupting – and not just its volcano. It is 1971, the height of the Cold War, and anti-American feeling among...

Brought up in Switzerland, the only son of well-to-do parents, Charles Fryerne is somewhat unprepared for the world he meets when he goes up to Oxford University in the early 1980s. There he meets a fascinating social set, including a stellar young playwright, a student dubbed 'the future leader of the Conservative party' and a mercurial figure with ambitions to become the youngest prime minister since Pitt. When they leave university, the characters go their separate ways.

The essays in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics have a rather special place in Schopenhauer’s work, both being written as entries to Scandinavian philosophy competitions, one in Norway and one in Sweden.

Franz Schubert was regarded chiefly as a composer of domestic music, and during his all-too-brief life managed to publish only a quarter of his works. Without patronage and without ever becoming well known or a virtuoso, how did Schubert manage to achieve unprecedented expressivity in song composition, or to create his chamber, symphonic and piano masterpieces? And how did he reconcile the warring elements of his tempestuous personality?

Felix Mendelssohn was a child prodigy to rival Mozart and achieved great fame during his lifetime, fêted across Europe, and composing in the widest possible range of musical genres. However, his music has also been denigrated for its elegance, charm and symmetry. This insightful biography explores the breadth of his achievements, the complexities of his privileged upbringing, and the reasons for the fluctuating nature of his reputation. Musical excerpts include the Violin Concerto, String Octet and Elijah, as well as his choral works, symphonies, sonatas and songs.

The unresolved and ambiguous details of Robert Schumann’s psychological decline and death have tended to dominate his biography. Yet in his time Schumann was lauded as a protean Romantic literary genius whose writings, as a music critic, poet, novelist and dramatist, eclipsed his musical creativity. How did Schumann reconcile these elements? Does his music suggest he suffered from bipolar disorder? How did his pianist wife, Clara, influence his compositions?

In this fourth volume of The Deals of Warren Buffett, we trace Buffett’s journey as he made Berkshire Hathaway the most respected company in the world. When we left Buffett at the end of Volume 3 toward the end of the 1990s, he was leading the largest corporation in America, and his personal fortune had reached $40bn. In this enthralling next instalment, we follow Buffett's investment deals over the first few years of the twenty-first century, as Berkshire grew to be a giant making annual profits north of $8bn.

A tense murder mystery set in a hotel amongst the brooding Tatra mountains. A once in a century blizzard hits the Tatra Mountains in Poland with astounding force. A lonely man is lost in the snow storm, going blind, quickly running out of strength and hope. On the verge of collapsing he sees...