Showing results by narrator "Michael Whalley" in All Categories

In 2011, following the Taliban siege on Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel, an SAS soldier identified only as Serviceman J was awarded New Zealand's second highest military honor by showing outstanding gallantry in the face of danger. After eighteen years in the New Zealand SAS, ex-commander Jamie Pennell is now ready to tell his story. From patrols across desert territories run by warlords to hostile fire and near-death combat, Serviceman J is a heart-stopping account of life inside one of the world's most elite military forces.

It's January 1983. During his university summer break, Ryan Bradley returns to the remote town of Nashville in New Zealand's rugged King Country. It's a bittersweet trip: he's working long, punishing hours as a woolpresser, he needs to sell his late mother's house, and he's increasingly feeling like an outcast in his childhood town. But mostly he's haunted by memories of Sanna Sovernen, a Finnish backpacker and his secret lover, who worked with him in the shearing shed the summer before - then vanished without trace.

It's a beautiful day to be alive, Bill Dickerson thought, seconds before he tumbled from the viaduct onto the jagged rocks below . . . His awful death made national news. But still, one year on, Bill's widow Carol has received no explanation about what happened. Was it suicide? An accident?...

As Jews tried to escape Nazi Germany in the 1930s, they faced unthinkable roadblocks in obtaining exit visas. And while they were denied entry in one country after another, a bureaucratic oddity enabled some of them to flee to an unlikely destination: Shanghai, China. In this LATW original commission, playwright Kate McAll used the survivors’ own words to create a narrative of people starting their lives over in a completely new land.