Showing results by narrator "James Langton" in All Categories

This wondrous guide for the curious and the intrepid takes listeners on a tour of eighteen of the world’s most captivating architectural mysteries. Delve into both the secretive places themselves and the eccentric and obsessive minds that created them. Visit a chamber of skulls high in the Swiss Alps, a Japanese temple full of traps, a Parisian apartment locked and untouched since World War II, a Prohibition-era speakeasy in Washington, DC, and a spooky “initiation” well in Portugal built by a secret society.

Once upon a time there was a wizard called Aquarius who lived in a castle with his parents, who were also wizards. Each night after supper, he would go up to the roof of the castle, transform himself into a bird, and fly across the countryside, helping animals, children, and anyone else who might be in trouble.

Tales of blood, magic, and steel by masters of the craft!

Aristocratic sleuth Charles Lenox makes a triumphant return to London from his travels to America to investigate a mystery hidden in the architecture of the city itself, in The Hidden City by critically acclaimed author Charles Finch...

High adventure from a master storyteller about one boy's attempt to fend for himself among cruel orphan masters, corrupt magistrates, and conniving thieves. In the seaside town of Melcombe Regis, England, 1724, Oliver Cromwell Pitts wakes to find his father missing and his house flooded by a recent storm. He's alone in his ruined home, with no money and no food. Oliver's father has left behind a barely legible waterlogged note: he's gone to London, where Oliver's sister, Charity, is in trouble.

After recovering from near-fatal injuries sustained on a mission, Luke Porterfield is offered a second opportunity to fight terrorism by a private venture. He is stored in bleeding-edge technology before agreeing to the deal and wakes to an uncertain fate. In the vastly changed and advanced city of London, Luke is tasked to defeat a deadly and elusive terrorist group. When his mission unearths a five-decades-long conspiracy, the explosive consequences force him into a fight against the power of a demented dictator.

In a tiny village in Northeast Hungary, close to the Romanian border, a young unnamed boy warily observes day-to-day life and chronicles his family's struggles to survive. Like most of the villagers, his family is desperately poor, but their situation is worse than most - they are ostracized because of his father's Jewish heritage and his mother's connections to the Kulaks, who once owned land and supported the fascist Horthy regime before it was toppled by Communists.

Following a devastating betrayal, Beth Bradley, a sixteen-year-old graffiti artist, is suspended from school. Running from a home that she shares with her father who has never recovered after Beth's mother's death, Beth stumbles into the hidden city and meets Filius Viae, London's asphalt-hued crown prince. And her timing couldn't have been more perfect.

In the winter of 1836, a young journalist named Charles Dickens held an infant in his arms. Only eight months of age, Ruby Spriggs was living under the most deplorable conditions that existed in London. Crushing poverty seemed her only future. Through the intervention of kind patrons, the child blossoms into a young woman instilled with a love of learning and books. But the forces that Dickens fought against for most of his life threaten to destroy her.

Nashville's Bart and the Cousins, in England on a road trip, have a chart-topping song. Unfortunately, Bart also has an indictment back in the USA over an underage groupie. Keeping that hot news out of the London papers is a job for Doug Perkins of the PR firm Perkins and Tate. Doug soon finds that you can take the boy out of the country...but he's still going to run after jailbait.

Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos, is a luminous work of fiction inspired by the real-life, 37-year friendship between two towering figures of the late 19th century, famed writer and humorist Mark Twain and legendary explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley.

Told from the point of view of William Crimsworth, the only male narrator that Bronte used, the work formulated a new aesthetic that questioned many of the presuppositions of Victorian society. Bronte's hero escapes from a humiliating clerkship in a Yorkshire mill to find work as a teacher in Belgium, where he falls in love with an impoverished student-teacher, who is perhaps the author's most realistic feminist heroine.

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's latest fact-inspired fictions have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters. They cross other borders, too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress. Donoghue describes the brutal plot hatched by a slave in conjunction with his master's wife to set them both free.

"Under the Sunset" was Bram Stoker's first short story collection written in 1881. These short stories were intended for children and includes the following stories: "Under The Sunset", "The Rose Prince", "The Invisible Giant", and much more.

It's 1973, and David Leveraux has landed his dream job as a Flavorist-in-Training, working in the secretive industry where chemists create the flavors for everything from the cherry in your can of soda to the butter on your popcorn. While testing a new artificial sweetener - Sweetness #9 - he notices unusual side-effects in the laboratory rats and monkeys: anxiety, obesity, mutism, and a generalized dissatisfaction with life. David tries to blow the whistle, but he swallows it instead.

Elizabethan spy Mal Catlyn has everything he ever wanted - his twin brother Sandy restored to health, his family estate reclaimed and a son to inherit it - and while his work is far from over, Mal still has a slim chance of eliminating his enemies whilst they are at their weakest. With Sandy's help, Mal learns to harness his own magic in the fight against the guisers, but it may be too late to save England. Schemes set in motion decades ago are at last coming to fruition, and the barrier between the dreamlands and the waking world is wearing thin…

"The Seer", a short story, is actually the first two chapters of Stoker’s seventh novel, The Mystery of the Sea. The tale is set in Cruden Bay, a locale Stoker used in other works, as well. The narrator encounters a strange woman during his stay at the Kilmarnock Arms, a small hotel that was actually located in the town of Cruden Bay and that Stoker himself frequented. The strange woman educates the narrator about the Second Sight, giving the listener a closer look into the supernatural elements that Stoker was so fond of.

A fabulous yellow diamond becomes the dangerous inheritance of Rachel Verinder. Outside her Yorkshire country house watch the Hindu priests who have waited for many years to reclaim their ancient talisman, looted from the holy city of Somnauth. When the Moonstone disappears, the case looks simple, but in mid-Victorian England no one is what they seem, and nothing can be taken for granted.

Inspector Duff works with the Scotland Yard. He is called in to investigate a mysterious murder that occurred at a famous local London hotel. He finds himself wishing for the assistance of his old friend, Charlie Chan, who now resides in Hawaii. The plot thickens when one of the suspects is found dead at a further stop on the trip.

An old man recounts the story of a death he witnessed as a young boy working in the theater: His boss, Mr. Haliday, had married a pretty young lady from the theater, much to the chagrin of the other women working in the company. It was a marriage of convenience, but in the beginning they got along well enough. After a handsome younger man, Henry Mortimer, joins the theater company, Mrs. Haliday and Mortimer start up a romance that everyone but Mr. Haliday seem to notice.