Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Oliver" in All Categories

In the shadows of a seismic shift in American politics comes Tom Rachman's timely and hilarious new work. Basket of Deplorables takes an incisive and satirical look at the United States in the era of Trump data breaches, liberal self-righteousness, red-hat rancor, Starbucks macchiatos, Ultimate Fighting factories, and Internet sinkholes.

A young woman falls to her death. The only people with her are four schoolfriends. One - or maybe all of them - is responsible. Twenty years later someone is intent on letting them have their just desserts.

This engaging biography series focuses on the traits that made our heroes great - the traits that kids can aspire to in order to live heroically themselves. Each book tells the story of an icon in a lively, conversational way that works well for the youngest nonfiction listeners. This volume features Anne Frank, whose courage and hope during a time of terror are still an inspiration for people around the world today.

Having survived a terrifying attack as part of an investigation, Sergeant Louise Nightingale retreats to her remote family cottage to lick her wounds, comforted in the knowledge that her attacker is behind bars. But when a serial killer starts terrorising the country, her colleague, DCI Andrew Fenwick, questions whether or not they have the right man. For Nightingale, the true nightmare has only just begun....

Dissolute, disenchanted Dmitri Olénin decides to join the army as a cadet and is despatched to the Caucasus. There, he is transformed by seeing how the indigenous people live in harmony with nature, how their lives have more meaning than those of the superficial social elite in Moscow, and he finds a new sense of self and purpose. But nothing is ever quite that simple.

Love and loyalty are tested to the very limits in this semi-autobiographical novella, which is one of Tolstoy’s best-loved works.

It is 1636 - the height of the Thirty Years War. The Spanish armies swell out of the Artois Region of the Netherlands, flooding into King Louis XIII's France. The border village of Dax-en-roi stands in their way. The Chevalier de Roland rallies a valiant defence, but his household guard are no match for the invaders. The is only one survivor of the Spanish brutality: the lone heir the Roland name, a young boy called Andre de Roland.

When the managing director of Wainwright Enterprises dies everyone is amazed to find he was far richer than they supposed, and that he's left his estate to his nephew Alex and his wife Sally. She uncovers accounting irregularities within the company, but resists involving the police - until the firm's accountant is murdered. But DCI Andrew Fenwick's investigation reveals a web of corruption reaching the highest levels of the local community that puts his own child's life in peril.

A murdered woman is discovered in a City hotel room: Elena Danya, high-end prostitute.Another working girl,her friend,is found dead. Then aristocractic bad-girl Arabella,another friend of Elena's,goes missing. The evidence points to a voyeuristic predator, but D.I. Will Wagstaffe is not convinced.Instead his investigation leads towards three ruthless and dangerous men: a City banker,a Russian oligarch and a Turkish playboy.

In 1836, Charles Henry Harrod was convicted at the Old Bailey of receiving stolen goods and sentenced to seven years' hard labour in Tasmania. But he miraculously escaped his fate to found what would become the legendary Harrods. His son, Charles Digby, transformed the shop from a local grocer's to a department store patronised by the wealthy and famous. Robin Harrod's fascinating book reveals the previously unknown origins of the store and follows its fortunes through family scandal, the devastating fire of 1883 and its subsequent rise from the ashes, to 1889 when its shares were floated on the stock exchange, completing one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of commerce.

It is now three years since Justin Welby first published his Reimagining Britain. The fundamental message of that book remains as urgent as ever. But in this revised and expanded edition, Welby has taken fully into account the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and all the social and political unrest that has ensued. If anything, the new edition of Archbishop Welby's book is even more important than its predecessor. Here is a radical vision for 21st-century Britain.

This friendly, fun biography series focuses on the traits that made our heroes great - the traits that kids can aspire to in order to live heroically themselves. Each book tells the story of an icon in a lively, conversational way that works well for the youngest nonfiction listeners and that always includes the hero's childhood influences. This volume features Founding Father and scientist Benjamin Franklin.

A reformed Sicilian criminal, Carmelo Trapani, has been kidnapped, and his search for the aged Carmelo leads Staffe all the way back to a terrible act at the Battle of Cable Street. Meanwhile Staffe’s own loyal servant, DS Pulford, is in Pentonville awaiting trial for the murder of Jadus Golding, the very man who attempted to murder Staffe, leaving wounds from which Staffe is still recovering, and it suits some in the hierarchy to see Pulford go down.

From the introduction by Jonathan Santlofer: "Like film, literature has been no stranger to marijuana and hashish, going back to Charles Baudelaire's 1860 Artificial Paradises, in which the French poet not only describes the effects of hashish but postulates it could be an aid in creating an ideal world.

In Almagen, a village in the Andalucian mountains, Staffe nurses himself back from the brink of death. One day his friend, Manolo, takes Staffe to visit Almeria and tells him about a body that has been found buried in an old greenhouse. It emerges that this murder mirrors the methods of torture used during Spain’s civil war. Soon Almagen’s own secret past rises to the surface, bringing with it family feuds and an expatriate ménage of a famous British artist, a Vietnam war vet, and a beautiful German heiress.

A woman is discovered beneath the London streets, barely alive. Soon after, DC Josie Chancellor finds an abandoned, newborn baby close to Leadengate station. DI Will Wagstaffe puts woman and baby together. The woman is Kerry Degg, a burlesque singer. Kerry has bad friends, a dodgy husband and no idea about what it takes to build a family. As Kerry clings to life, Staffe hears only discord as he ventures from Whitehall’s clubland to Soho’s fleshpots trying to make his way through a labyrinth of trails that leads to another woman, seemingly forced - like Kerry Degg - to bear her child in captivity.

The gothic tale of Frankenstein and his construction of a human being who runs amok has, with the help of numerous films, become one of the most vivid horror stories. But Mary Shelley's original novel, written in 1816, dealt more sympathetically with "the daemon," showing how an initially beneficent creature is hammered into a daemon by the way he is treated. Her ideas, and her dramatic but poignant story, is brought to life in this sound dramatization.

Ivanhoe has never been superseded as the epitome of chivalric novels. The brave knight comes from the Crusades to claim the Anglo-Saxon princess, Rowena, as his bride. But he becomes caught up in the feud between Prince John and his brother, Richard the Lionheart, who has returned to England incognito.

René Descartes is one of the formative figures in Western philosophy, logic and mathematics. His famous statement: "I think, therefore I am," has become perhaps the most famous phrase in all of philosophy. Descartes’s ground-breaking writings attempted to establish unshakeable foundations of knowledge, and set a trend for subsequent Western philosophy, which has endlessly critiqued and expanded upon his ideas.

As the ship docked in Bombay,the shocking news of the rising by the Indian mutineers and their massacire of women, children, and civilians reached Anthony Morgan and his company. Even so,they were hardly prepared for what they now faced.Morgan himself has another quest. On discovering that the son he had fathered,his child's mother and her husband,Morgan's old sergeant, are captives up in the hills, he is determined to rescue them. A gripping tale of a soldier torn between orders and honour.

One of Tolstoy’s most important shorter works, The Kreutzer Sonata presents a problematic view of the relationship between the sexes and promotes abstinence as the solution. Pozdnyshev jealously observes the intimacy that emerges between his wife and a violin player. Haunted by The Kreutzer Sonata, over which they bonded, it plays round and round in Pozdnyshev’s head driving him to distraction and to an unquenchable rage.