Showing results by narrator "Katie Leung" in All Categories

It’s 1984, and life has changed beyond recognition. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, is a place where Big Brother is always watching, and nobody can hide. Except, perhaps, for Winston Smith. Whilst working at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history, he secretly dreams of freedom. And in a world where love and sex are forbidden, where it’s hard to distinguish between friend and foe, he meets Julia and O’Brien and vows to rebel.

A boy meets a girl. The past meets the future. A finger meets a trigger. The beginning meets the end. England is forever; England must fall. The Ministry of Time is a novel about Commander Graham Gore (R.N. c.1809-c.1847) and a woman known only as the bridge. As their relationship turns from the strictly professional into something more and uneasy truths begin to emerge, they are forced to face the reality of the project that brought them together.

1979. It is the winter of discontent, and reporter Allie Burns is chasing her first big scoop. There are few women in the newsroom, and she needs something explosive for the boys' club to take her seriously. Soon Allie and fellow journalist Danny Sullivan are exposing the criminal underbelly of respectable Scotland. They risk making powerful enemies - and Allie won't stop there.

Fresh from their adventure in Hong Kong, Daisy and Hazel face an entirely new challenge at the Rue Theatre. But there there's trouble afoot, and when a body is found, the pair must take centre stage to solve the crime. Then they are back to Deepdean for the school's 50th anniversary, where a shocking incident threatens Deepdean's future. Finally, the Christmas holidays see them in Egypt, taking a cruise along the Nile. They are looking forward to seeing the ancient temples and monuments but then the body of a fellow traveller is found stabbed to death in her bunk.

Daisy and Hazel are back at Deepdean for a new term, and murder is still never far away when Head Girl, Elizabeth Hurst, is found dead on Bonfire Night. As Christmas approaches, the pair are off to Cambridge for the holidays, but there's danger lurking in the dark stairwells of ancient Maudlin College. And when summer comes around and they visit Hazel's family in Hong Kong, they become mixed up in a truly terrible crime that sees Hazel's half brother kidnapped and the family maid murdered.

Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong are spending the Christmas hols in snowy Cambridge. Hazel has high hopes of its beautiful spires, cosy libraries and inviting tearooms - but there is danger lurking in the dark stairwells of ancient Maudlin College. Two days before Christmas, there is a terrible accident. At least it appears to be an accident - until the Detective Society look a little closer and realise a murder has taken place.

From the artfully sinister The Case of the Second Scream, set aboard the ship carrying Daisy and Hazel's back from Hong Kong, to The Case of the Uninvited Guest, where a Uncle Felix and Aunt Lucy's wedding ceremony is the target for an unlikely threat. The Hound of Weston School sees the Junior Pinkerton's lead the detecting, and May Wong steps up and shows her ambition to be the greatest spy ever when war breaks out in The Case of the Deadly Flat.

As a child, Little Flower is sold to Linjing's wealthy family to become a muizai. In a fit of childish jealousy over her new handmaiden's ladylike bound feet and talent for embroidery, Linjing ensures Little Flower can never leave her to ascend in society. Despite their starkly different places in the Fong household, over the years the two girls must work together to secure both their futures through Linjing's marriage. As the two grow up, they are by turns bitter rivals and tentative friends.

In the near future in a broken down rural America, Flynne Fisher scrapes a living as a gamer for rich players. One night, working a game set in a futuristic but puzzlingly empty London, she sees a death that's unnervingly vivid. Soon after she gets word that it isn't a game after all—the future she saw is all too real, she's the only witness to a murder and someone from that unreal tomorrow now wants her dead. The story of a young woman caught between two worlds, The Peripheral interweaves two futures to tell a story which gets right to heart of the way we live now.

It's 1989, and Allie Burns is back. Older and maybe wiser, she's running the northern news operation of the Sunday Globe, chafing at losing her role in investigative journalism and at the descent into the gutter of the UK tabloid media. But there's plenty to keep her occupied. The year begins with the memorial service to the victims of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, but Allie has barely filed her copy when she stumbles over a story about HIV/AIDS that will shock her into a major change of direction.

Santo Domingo de la Calzada, 1532. London, 1837. Boston, 2019. Three young women, their bodies planted in the same soil, their stories tangling like roots. One grows high and one grows deep and one grows wild. And all of them grow teeth.

Someone is about to take their final bow . . . Fresh from their adventures in Hong Kong, Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells return to England. But they're not going straight back to school - first they're staying with Daisy's uncle Felix in his London flat. But when London life gets a bit too exciting, the girls are packed off to the Rue Theatre to face an entirely new challenge: acting.

How to Be Both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.

Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong are paying a visit to Hazel's family estate in hot, sultry Hong Kong. It may be the holidays, but the Detective Society is never far away from a mystery - and soon they are mixed up in a truly terrible crime. Hazel's little half brother is kidnapped - and the family maid murdered. Daisy and Hazel know another life could be at stake if they don't crack this case quickly. And when Hazel is framed for the crime, the detectives are faced with their toughest mystery yet - one that will test them and their friendship more than ever before.

Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong have returned to Deepdean for a new school term, but nothing is the same. There's a new Head Girl, Elizabeth Hurst, and a team of Prefects - and these bullying Big Girls are certainly not good eggs. Then, after the fireworks display on Bonfire Night, Elizabeth is found - murdered. Many girls at Deepdean had reason to hate Elizabeth, but who might have committed such foul play?

Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong are in Egypt, where they are taking a cruise along the Nile. They are hoping to see some ancient temples and a mummy or two; what they get, instead, is murder. Also travelling on the SS Hatshepsut is a mysterious society called the Breath of Life: a group of genteel English ladies and gentlemen, who believe themselves to be reincarnations of the ancient pharaohs. Three days into the cruise their leader, Theodora Miller, is found dead in her cabin, stabbed during the night.

It is the end of the 19th Century and the world is awash with marvels. But there is nothing so marvellous as the Wastelands: a terrain of terrible miracles that lies between Beijing and Moscow. Nothing touches this abandoned wilderness except the Great Trans-Siberian Express: an impenetrable train built to carry cargo across continents, but which now transports anyone who dares to cross the shadowy Wastelands. On to the platform steps a curious cast of characters. But the old rules are changing, and there are whispers that the train isn't safe.

A dinner party is held in the penthouse of a multimillion-pound development. All the guests are strangers - even to their host, the billionaire owner of the building. None of them know why they were selected to receive his invitation. Besides a postcode, they share only one thing in common - they've all experienced an unsettling occurrence within the building's walls. By the end of the night, their host is dead, and none of the guests will say what happened. His death remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries - until now.

Conjured up one 'golden afternoon' in 1862 to entertain Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Carroll's college, the dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and back-to-front Looking Glass kingdom depict order turned upside down. Following the white rabbit into his warren, Alice falls into a world where croquet is played with hedgehogs and flamingos, a baby turns into a pig, time runs amok at a the Mad Hatter's tea-party, a chaotic game of chess makes Alice a Queen and the Mock Turtle and Gryphon dance the Lobster Quadrille.

Lydia is hungry. She's always wanted to try sashimi, ramen, onigiri with sour plum stuffed inside—the food her Japanese father liked to eat. And then there is bubble tea and the vegetables grown by the other young artists at the London studio space she is secretly squatting in. But Lydia can't eat any of this. The only thing she can digest is blood, and it turns out that sourcing fresh pigs' blood in London—where she is living away from her vampire mother for the first time—is much more difficult than she'd anticipated.