Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Oliver" in All Categories

With an introduction by Will Self. A classic work of psychology, this international best seller provides a groundbreaking insight into the human mind. If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it. In this extraordinary book, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder.

Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.

The true crime best seller about Fred and Rose West, a couple virtually unique in British criminal history - who loved and killed together as husband and wife. During their long relationship the Wests murdered a series of young women, burying the remains of nine victims under their home at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, including those of their teenage daughter, Heather.

The novel that launched the astonishing career of one of the 20th century's greatest writers of action and suspense - an acclaimed classic of heroism and the sea in World War II. The story of men who rose to heroism, and then to something greater, HMS Ulysses takes its place alongside The Caine Mutiny and The Cruel Sea as one of the classic novels of the navy at war. It is the compelling story of Convoy FR77 to Murmansk - a voyage that pushes men to the limits of human endurance.

The classic World War II thriller from the acclaimed master of action and suspense. One winter night, seven men and a woman are parachuted onto a mountainside in wartime Germany. Their objective: an apparently inaccessible castle, headquarters of the Gestapo. Their mission: to rescue a crashed American general before the Nazi interrogators can force him to reveal secret D-day plans.

As with his previous best seller, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, in An Anthropologist on Mars Oliver Sacks uses case studies to illustrate the myriad ways in which neurological conditions can affect our sense of self, our experience of the world and how we relate to those around us. Writing with his trademark blend of scientific rigour and human compassion, he describes patients such as the colour-blind painter or the surgeon with compulsive tics that disappear in the operating theatre - patients for whom disorientation and alienation but also adaptation are inescapable facts of life.

The atomic submarine Dolphin has impossible orders: to sail beneath the ice floes of the Arctic Ocean to locate and rescue the men of weather station Zebra, gutted by fire and drifting with the ice pack somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. But the orders do not say what the Dolphin will find if she succeeds - that the fire at Ice Station Zebra was sabotage and that one of the survivors is a killer....

Hailed as a medical classic, and the subject of a major feature film as well as radio and stage plays and various TV documentaries, Awakenings by Oliver Sacks is the extraordinary account of a group of 20 patients. Rendered catatonic by the sleeping-sickness epidemic that swept the world just after the First World War, all 20 had spent 40 years in hospital - motionless and speechless; aware of the world around them but exhibiting no interest in it - until Dr Sacks administered the then-new drug L-DOPA, which caused them, temporarily, to awake from their decades-long slumber.

Upon inheriting the Moonstone, a huge and priceless diamond, Rachel Verinder's delight turns to dismay when the gem suddenly disappears. But this is no ordinary theft. Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard is called in and immediately suspects an intricate plot. However, not even his powers of detection can penetrate fully the mysteries surrounding the diamond.

Whilst checking up on the volatile situation in Kosovo, the US president's right-hand man, Blake Johnson, meets Major Harry Miller, a member of the British Cabinet. Miller is there doing his own checks for the British Prime Minister. When both men get involved with a group of Russian soldiers about to commit an atrocity, Miller puts an end to the scuffle with a bullet in the forehead of the ringleader. But this action has dire consequences not only for Miller and Johnson but for their associates, too.

It is night in Manhattan. The president of the United States is scheduled to have dinner with an old friend, but in the building across the street a man has disabled the security and stands at a window, a rifle in his hand. The assassination doesn't go according to plan, but this is only the beginning. Someone is recruiting a shadowy network of agents with the intention of creating terror. Their range is broad, their identities masked, their methods subtle.

Disillusioned with the Putin government, famous Russian writer and ex-paratrooper Alexander Kurbsky decides he wants to disappear into the West. However, he is under no illusions about how the news will be greeted at home - he has seen too many of his countrymen die mysteriously at the hands of the thuggish Russian security services, so he makes elaborate plans with Charles Ferguson, Sean Dillon, and the rest of the group known informally as the Prime Minister's private army for his escape and concealment.

They gave Sean Dillon a choice: life in prison or a suicide mission. In the inky depths beneath Thunder Point, a diver discovers a priceless treasure: a German U-boat sunk in American waters three weeks after the end of the Second World War. Inside is final proof that Martin Bormann escaped Hitler's bunker and that he took with him the most explosive secrets of the Reich.

In Jack Higgins' acclaimed best seller Dark Justice, intelligence operative Sean Dillon and his colleagues in Britain and the United States beat back a terrible enemy but at an equally terrible cost. One of them was shot, another run down in the street. Both were expected to survive - but only one of them does. As Detective Superintendent Hannah Bernstein of Special Branch lies recuperating in the hospital, a dark shadow from their past, scarred deep by hatred, steals across the room and finishes the job.

In the waning days of World War II, Hitler entrusted his diary to a young aide, Baron Max von Berger. Over the years von Berger has used his inheritance to become one of the richest men in the world, developing a secret alliance with the Rashid family - longtime foes of Major Ferguson of British Intelligence; his undercover enforcer, Sean Dillon; and their American colleague, Blake Johnson. Now the ultimate confrontation is drawing near.

Putin and the Russians have suffered too many killings of their own people in the past. Now they want the whole of the 'Prime Minister's private army' wiped out, including Blake Johnson and Charles Ferguson. Somebody is after them: Blake, Harry Miller, his sister, Monica, Harry Salter and Billy. The only people spared are Roper and Dillon. After surviving a car bomb, Ferguson heads a desperate search to uncover the perpetrator.

For intelligence operative Sean Dillon, it is a routine passport check. But the events it will lead to will be as bloody as any he has ever known. The man he stops at Heathrow Airport is Caspar Rashid, born in England, with ties to a Bedouin tribe fiercely wedded to the old ways. Rashid's 13-year-old daughter, Sara, has been kidnapped by Rashid's own father and taken to Iraq to be married to one of the Middle East's most feared terrorists. When Rashid begs Dillon for help, he sees a chance to settle some old scores.

Treachery has a price, in the mesmerizing new Sean Dillon thriller from the Sunday Times-bestselling author. Helmand Province, Afghanistan: a lone convoy edges its way towards a deserted mountain village, led by US Army Rangers in Mastiff APVs. Stopping to search the area, the Rangers are hit by a massive roadside bomb, and as half the patrol lie dead or injured, the rest are ambushed with military precision.

Twenty years ago a young war hero saved a life and began a passionate affair. Now that young war hero is president of the United States, and a souvenir from his past, a beautiful daughter he never knew existed, surfaces as the first of many secrets to be kept from public knowledge. But someone, somewhere, has uncovered the truth. The girl is seized by religious zealots, and unless the president complies with their demands, her execution is certain. Yet if he gives in, the Middle East will ignite in war. He calls in the only men who can help: Sean Dillon and Blake Johnson.

In Ulster, Northern Ireland, a petty criminal kills a woman in a drunken car crash. Her sons swear revenge. In London, Sean Dillon and his colleagues in the 'Prime Minister's private army', fresh from defeating a deadly al-Qaeda operation, receive a warning: 'You may think you have weakened us, but you have only made us stronger'. In Washington, DC, a special projects director with the CIA, frustrated at not getting permission from the president for his daring antiterrorism plan, decides to put it in motion anyway. Soon the ripples from these events meet and overlap.