Showing results by narrator "Adjoa Andoh" in All Categories

A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was 10 years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over the next century her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood and the death of children.

No one is perfectly happy, but when are we happy enough? Laura is a happily married mother of two until an ex-lover contacts her. Suddenly passion and excitement are rekindled, but how much happiness has she a right to expect, and what about the pain she would cause to achieve it? Unknown to Laura, several others in her Sussex village are also living with their own unresolved crises, where every decision they take has an impact on those around them.

A full-cast dramatisation of Malorie Blackman's best-selling novel, starring Zawe Ashton (Fresh Meat) as Sephy and Rikki Lawton as Callum. Callum and Sephy have known each other since they were babies, when his mum worked for hers. But Callum is a Nought - a second class citizen - and Sephy a Cross, one of the elite. Her father is also one of the country's leading politicians. No matter how much they may want to be together, the world is telling them they can't. And soon bigger things will prevail. Like the bombing.... 

Abie follows the arc of a letter from London back to Africa to a coffee plantation that now could be hers if she wants it. Standing among the ruined groves she strains to hear the sound of the past, but the layers of years are too many. Thus begins the gathering of her family's history through the tales of her aunts - four women born to four different wives of a wealthy plantation owner, her grandfather.

Mma Ramotswe reads the foreword she has written to these tales, then goes on to narrate them all herself, passing them on to us verbally as did her father's aunt to her. From animal fables to mysterious forces residing in the landscape, this collection demonstrates the wealth and variety of African folk tales and the particular magic of Africa's spiritual roots.

From the pages of The New Yorker comes a bold and telling portrait of Black life in America, with astonishing early work from Rebecca West’s account of a lynching trial and James Baldwin’s ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’ (which later formed the basis of The Fire Next Time) to more recent writing by Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Zadie Smith, Hilton Als, Jamaica Kincaid, Malcolm Gladwell, Elizabeth Alexander, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Doreen St. Félix, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kelefa Sanneh and more.

Cinders lives a boring life with her selfish stepsisters and mean stepmother. So when her wishes start magically coming true it’s a surprise, to say the least. Then Cinders meets her fairy godmother: she’s magic, she can fly, and she’s called...Brian. Soon, Cinders finds herself heading to the glamorous ball at the King’s palace. But Brian is not very reliable, and Cinders is not very good at magic. Now her life isn’t boring at all - it’s total chaos!

An intimate and moving portrait of a family combined with an account of the events which swept through Africa in the postindependence period. Aminatta Forna’s intensely personal history is a passionate and vivid account of an African childhood - of an idyll that became a nightmare. As a child she witnessed the upheavals of post-colonial Africa, the bitterness of exile in Britain and the terrible consequences of her dissident father’s stand against tyranny.

Once upon a time, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories - fantastical yarns of wondrous creatures in faraway places-bewitched children across the world. But times change. Today, Kipling's writing tells us a different tale; of a love of Empire, and the troubling legacy of British colonialism. In Not So Stories, writers of colour from around the world reclaim these stories and remake them into something new. Something different. 

Inspire your little one to be passionate about the environment with simple, engaging stories about impactful people in environmental research and campaigning, to listen to at home or on the go. The most famous environmentalists started out as little dreamers with wild hopes of changing the world. With their unique ideas about planet Earth, they went on to change people’s perceptions with their activism and passion for doing the right thing.

The Castor, a vast and seemingly deserted starship, is spinning slowly in the void of deep space. Martha and the Doctor explore the drifting tomb and discover that they may not be alone after all. Who could have survived the disaster that overcame the rest of the crew?

Eydrth is a Master Songsmith...who has no magic. She will do anything to save her father from the evil that has stolen his mind. But the paths to the magic of the Witch World are many — and to save the ones you love, the truest magic must come from the heart.

Edie is struggling. She’s increasingly confused, but she can’t let the women in the village find that out - they’d only talk. But she’s forgetting so much - forgetting to wear matching clothes, forgetting to bake one of her walnut cakes for the church sale...and forgetting to lock the front door...until one day she wakes to find Jonah in her house and herself in her past. Jonah is struggling. The journey to England was illegal and dangerous, and he’s the only one who survived - and he still hasn’t made it to London.

Eleven-year-old Maggie lives in Fennis Wick, enclosed and protected from the outside world by a boundary, beyond which the Quiet War rages and the dirty, dangerous wanderers roam. Her brother Jed is an eldest, revered and special. A hero. Her younger brother is Trig - everyone loves Trig. But Maggie’s just a middler; invisible and left behind. Then, one hot September day, she meets Una, a hungry wanderer girl in need of help, and everything Maggie has ever known gets turned on its head.

Kerovan of Ulmsdale has long borne the curse of his ancestors’ depredations. After pillaging a sanctum of the Old Ones, his bloodline has been forever marred by painful sickness and death. Kerovan was born strong and hardy, but he walks on hooves instead of human feet and sees through eyes of amber - just as the Old Ones had. Bound in marriage to the beautiful Joisan of Ithkrypt, Kerovan seeks to claim his rightful place as lord-heir of Ulmsdale. But first, the couple - separated by distance, yet linked in spirit - must unlock the powers held within a mystical necklace Joisan wears.

In the 17th century, a wall is built around the deer park of a great house. Wychwood is a world in itself, its ornamental lakes and majestic avenues planned by Mr Norris, a master of the new art of landscaping. A world where, after decades of civil war, everyone has something to hide or something to fear, where dissidents hide in the forest and Londoners fleeing the plague are at the gate.

This is the story of the battle between appeasers and anti-appeasers in the period before - and just after - the start of the Second World War, and the formation of the 1940 coalition government which, like the election of 2010, abruptly ruptured all previous political alignments. Based on real events, this is a fascinating and little known tale of idealism, blackmail, and political skulduggery.

Discover one of the two masterful hit novels adapted for the massive new BBC One Drama series In The Dark, featuring brilliant heroine Helen Weeks - continuing in number one best seller Time of Death. A rainy night in London. Shots are fired into a car which swerves on to the pavement, ploughing into a bus stop. It seems that a chilling gang initiation has cost an innocent victim their life. But the reality is far more sinister....

Adapted from Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker, Our Country’s Good tells the true story of the convicts and marines sent to Australia as part of the first penal colony. An eloquent argument for the redemptive power of theatre, Wertenbaker’s classic drama celebrates the beauty of language – in the slang of the criminal classes and the poetry of the play – and at the same time examines how it is used as an instrument of power.

Born into slavery on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat, Doll bought her freedom from her Irish planter father and built a legacy of wealth and power as an entrepreneur, merchant, hotelier, and planter that extended from the marketplaces and sugar plantations of Dominica and Barbados to a glittering luxury hotel in Demerara on the South American continent. Vanessa Riley’s novel brings Doll to vivid life as she rises above the harsh realities of slavery and colonialism by working the system and leveraging the competing attentions of the men in her life