Showing results by narrator "Seán Barrett" in All Categories

Newly and uneasily allied, two tribes from different worlds set off across the Ocean of Grass. Their mission is to fulfil a prophecy and take Ottar the Moaner west of west, to save mankind. In their way are the denizens of the Badlands, the most terrifying and powerful collection of murderers and monsters the world has ever seen.

The leader of a religious cult in Guyana instigates a mass suicide. He succeeds in killing himself and his whole flock of worshippers, save one. One man escapes. In the wood in the country land outside Ystad, the police make an horrific discovery: a severed head, and hands locked together in an attitude of prayer. A Bible lies at the victim's side, handwritten corrections and amendments on every page.

Octa, the son of a mighty Saxon warlord, stands in the shield wall for the first time, eager to make a name for himself. But instead of the promised battle glory, fear overpowers him and he flees the battle, causing the death of his cousin and bringing shame to his family. Disowned by his father, and hunted by his own people, Octa is spurred on by his mother’s vision for his future, a promise of greatness to come. A chance encounter with a wiry traveller offers Octa a chance of redemption with a quest to retrieve a sacred weapon.

Night falls. It came like a malignant shadow with seductive promises of power. And somewhere in the night...a small girl smiled as her mother burned...asylum inmates slaughtered their attendants...in slimy tunnels once-human creatures gathered. Madness raged as the lights began to fade and humanity was attacked by an ancient, unstoppable evil.

An unsettling collection of full-cast dramas from the long-running BBC Radio 4 horror series. Throughout five series of Fear on 4 from 1988-1997, Edward de Souza was The Man in Black, a sinister raconteur who introduced a weekly half hour of terror and suspense. Here, he welcomes us to his house of horrors as he presents 13 terrifying tales that will make your flesh crawl. With eerie sound effects that enhance the atmosphere of dread, these bloodcurdling adaptations run the gamut from the mysterious to the macabre. With superb casts including Imelda Staunton, Bernard Cribbins, Anna Massey, Thora Hird and Sean Barrett.

Warrior queens and Roman invaders do battle in the final volume of this thrilling epic fantasy trilogy. Caesar's soldiers have murdered, massacred, and pillaged their way through Gaul and loom on the far side of the sea, ready to descend upon Britain; with them are an unstoppable legion of men twisted by dark magic. Somehow Queen Lowa must repel the invasion, although her best general is dead and her young druid powerless.

A collection of 98 enthralling and pulse-quickening stories, spanning five decades, venerates the remarkable imagination of J. G. Ballard. With a body of work unparalleled in twentieth-century literature, J. G. Ballard is recognized as one of the greatest and most prophetic writers in the world. With the much-hailed release of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, readers now have a means to celebrate the unmatched range and mesmerizing cadences of a literary genius.

Leaders are forged in the fires of war. Iron Age warriors Dug and Lowa captured Maidun castle and freed its slaves. But now they have conquered it, they must defend it. A Roman invasion is coming from Gaul, but rather than uniting to protect their home, the British tribes battle each other - and see Maidun as an easy target. Meanwhile Lowa's spies infiltrate Gaul, discovering the Romans have recruited bloodthirsty British druids, and Maidunite Ragnall finds his loyalties torn when he meets Rome's charismatic general, Julius Caesar.

Old crimes, new consequences. In wartime Reykjavik, a young woman is found strangled behind the National Theatre, a rough and dangerous area of the city known as 'the shadow district'. An Icelandic detective and a member of the American military police are on the trail of a brutal killer. A 90-year-old man is discovered dead on his bed, smothered with his own pillow. Konrad, a former detective now bored with retirement, finds newspaper cuttings in the dead man's home reporting the shadow district murder....

They are voices lost to time. Beginning in the late 1970s, five veteran airmen sat for private interviews. Decades after the guns fell silent, they recounted in vivid detail the most dangerous missions that made the difference in the war. Ed Haydon dueled with the deadliest of German aces - and forced him to the ground. Robert Johnson racked up 27 kills in his P-47 Thunderbolt, but nearly lost his life when his plane was shot to ribbons and his guns jammed. Cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay was the Air Corps general who devised the bomber tactics that pummeled Germany's war machine.

Winner of the Costa Biography Award, 2007
Young Stalin is a remarkable adventure story about an exceptional, turbulent young man, born in exoticism, raised in the church, fancying himself a poet, then embracing revolutionary idealism and thereby finding his romantic Messianic mission in life.

A rare and unrecorded sea bird captures all the birders attention whilst right under their noses the most fanatical birder of them all disappears. Later, Greg Franks’s corpse, the head bludgeoned, is found floating in the sea. Had it not been for Greg Franks, amateur detective George Palmer-Jones would not have been on the bird watching trip in Cornwall to the first place. He had been hired by Greg Franks’s anxious parents to try and persuade their errant son to return home.

The Chuzzlewits are a family divided by money and selfishness; even young Martin, the eponymous hero, is arrogant and self-centred. He offends his grandfather by falling in love with the latter’s ward, Mary, and sets out to make his own fortune in life, travelling as far as America - which produces from Dickens a savage satire on a new world tainted with the vices of the old. Martin’s nature slowly changes through his bitter experience of life and his enduring love for Mary.

Following a previous investigation, which implicated those at the very top in Soviet Russia, Captain Alexei Korolev finds himself hailed as an example to all. But Korolev lives in an uneasy peace - if it is discovered what his real actions were during the case, he will face deportation to Siberia. Instead, Colonel Rodinov of the NKVD security service asks the detective to look into the suspected suicide of a young woman on a film set in the Ukraine. The feared commissar for State Security, Ezhov, wants the matter looked into.

Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s most compelling Roman plays. The plot against Caesar and the infamous assassination scene make for unforgettable listening. Brutus, the true protagonist of the play, is mesmerizing in his psychological state of anguish, forced to choose between the bonds of friendship and his desire for patriotic justice.

Moscow, 1936. In a deconsecrated church, a young woman is found dead, her mutilated body displayed on the altar for all to see. Captain Alexei Dimitrevich Korolev is asked to investigate. But when he discovers that the victim is an American citizen, the NKVD - the most feared organisation in Russia - becomes involved. Soon, Korolev’s every step is under close scrutiny and one false move will mean exile to the frozen camps of the far north. Committed to uncovering the truth, Korolov enters the realm of the Thieves, who run Moscow’s underworld.

Legends aren't born. They're forged. Dug Sealskinner is a down-on-his-luck mercenary travelling south to join up with King Zadar's army. But he keeps rescuing the wrong people. First, Spring, a child he finds scavenging on the battlefield, and then Lowa, one of Zadar's most fearsome warriors, who's vowed revenge on the king for her sister's execution. Now Dug's on the wrong side of that thousands-strong army he hoped to join ­- and worse, Zadar has bloodthirsty druid magic on his side.

Moscow, 1937. Captain Korolev, a police investigator, is enjoying a long-overdue visit from his young son, Yuri, when an eminent scientist is shot dead within sight of the Kremlin, and Korolev is ordered to find the killer. It soon emerges that the victim, a man who it appears would stop at nothing to fulfil his ambitions, was engaged in research of great interest to those at the very top ranks of Soviet power.

Lennox liked Quiet Tommy Quaid. Perhaps it's odd for a private detective to like - even admire - a career thief, but Quiet Tommy Quaid was the sort of man everyone liked. Amiable, easygoing, well dressed, with no vices to speak of - well, aside from his excessive drinking and womanising, but then, in 1950s Glasgow those were practically virtues. And besides, throughout his many exploits outside the law, Quiet Tommy never once used violence.

The classic spiritual travelogue by one of Tibet’s best-known explorers, The Way of the White Clouds is the remarkable narrative of a pilgrimage which could not be made today. In 1948, Lama Anagarika Govinda made an unforgettable journey into Tibet before its invasion by the Chinese. His unique account is not only a spectacular and gloriously poetic story of exploration and discovery; it is also invaluable for its sensitivity and clearly presented interpretation of the Tibetan tradition.