Showing results by narrator "Adam Sims" in All Categories

When Armand Gamache receives a letter inviting him to an abandoned farmhouse outside of Three Pines, the former head of the Sûreté du Québec discovers that a complete stranger has named him as an executor of her will. Armand never knew the elderly woman, and the bequests are so wildly unlikely that he suspects the woman must have been delusional - until a body is found, and the terms of the bizarre will suddenly seem far more menacing. But it isn't the only menace Gamache is facing.

For years, major New York law firm Harland & Sinton has operated a massive global fraud. The FBI are on to them, but they need witnesses to secure their case. When a major client of the firm, David Child, is arrested for murder, the FBI ask con artist turned lawyer Eddie Flynn to secure Child as his client and force him to testify against the firm. Eddie's not a man to be forced into representing a guilty client, but the FBI have incriminating files on Eddie's wife, Christine, and if Eddie won't play ball, she'll pay the price.

Seventeen is a hitman, the best in the world, so-called because there were 16 before him, stretching back through the decades. Every government organisation in the world wants his services and every other high-level hitman has placed a target on his back. Because to be the best, you have to beat the best. When Seventeen is ordered to find and kill his predecessor, the hit goes wrong and hunter turns to hunted. An ultraviolent duel develops between two assassins at the height of their powers, but when they fight themselves to a standstill, the real target of the hit emerges.

On July 15, 1994, ten-year-old Ethan and his best friend Billy fell asleep together in their quiet New Jersey cul de sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. The tent was sliced open, and Billy was gone, taken. He was never seen again. Thirty years later, Ethan has returned to Hemlock Circle, still desperate for answers. Who took Billy? Plagued by bad dreams and insomnia, he begins to notice strange things happening on the street under the cover of darkness. Someone is prowling the cul de sac when no one is awake to see them.

Once a con artist, now a hotshot lawyer, Eddie Flynn's learnt that fast talk and sleight of hand are just as important in the courtroom are they are on the street. That's why Leonard Howell asks for Eddie's help when his 19-year-old daughter goes missing - he needs someone willing to break the rules. But what if the whole thing was a setup from the very beginning? With a client on trial for his life and the body count rising, the only question is which is deadlier - a man who keeps his oath or one who breaks it?

My daughter is getting married to the man of her dreams. But will she pay for it with her life? My beautiful daughter Ellie walks down the aisle in her full-length lace dress, beaming with happiness. As she exchanges her vows with Kyle, who looks devastatingly handsome in his smart black suit, I hope this time will be different.

Daniel Miller murdered fourteen people before he vanished. His wife, Carrie, now faces trial as his accomplice. The FBI, the District Attorney, the media and everyone in America believe she knew and helped cover up her husband's crimes. Eddie Flynn won't take a case unless his client is innocent. Now, he has to prove to a jury, and the entire world, that Carrie Miller didn't know her husband's dark side. But so far, Eddie and his team are the only ones who believe that she had no part in the murders.

In our 24-7 global economy, rest feels like a luxury at best and a weakness at worst. We see work and rest as competitors - but what if they're actually partners in a productive, balanced life? Blending rigorous scientific research with examples of writers, painters and thinkers - from Darwin to Stephen King - Silicon Valley futurist and business consultant Alex Soojung-Kim Pang exposes how we've underestimated the power of rest for our success. Though it's as natural as breathing, it's also a skill we can all learn to boost our creativity and productivity.

Tom Ripley is now the owner of a beautiful estate in France, a wealthy art collector and married to an heiress. The Buckmaster Gallery is staging an exhibition by the celebrated artist Derwatt, but an American collector claims that the expensive masterpiece he bought three years ago is a fake. It is, of course, and he wants to talk to Derwatt - but Derwatt, inconveniently, is dead. Ripley needs the perfect solution to keep his role in the fraud a secret and his reputation clean, but not everyone's nerves are as steady as his.

In the green depths of spring, morning breaks on a woman splayed in a bed of flowers - her eyes wide, her neck broken. Her death is a mystery; so is the woman herself. But as Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team peer into the dark corners of the victim's past, they expose a secret that rots at the very heart of their community - a secret that will implicate someone they've trusted for years. And as Gamache knows too well, in the flickering shadows of death, the truth may be just a trick of the light.

A worldwide best seller since its publication, Irving's classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S. Garp, struggling writer and illegitimate son of Jenny Fields - an unlikely feminist heroine ahead of her time. Beautifully written, The World According to Garp is a powerfully compelling and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. 

George Orr is a mild and unremarkable man who finds the world a less than pleasant place to live: seven billion people jostle for living space and food. But George dreams dreams which do in fact change reality - and he has no means of controlling this extraordinary power. Psychiatrist Dr William Haber offers to help. At first sceptical of George's powers, he comes to astonished belief. When he allows ambition to get the better of ethics, George finds himself caught up in a situation of alarming peril.

Prepare to be terrified with C. J. Tudor's first collection of short stories, featuring eleven twisted tales of the macabre, including: The Lion at the Gate in which a strange piece of graffiti leads to a terrifying encounter for four school friends; Butterfly Island which tells the story of a group of survivors who wash up on a deserted island and make a horrifying discovery; Gloria where a cold-hearted killer encounters a strange young girl at a motorway service station with unexpected consequences.

Assembled from notes and jottings left unpublished at the time of the author’s death, The Book of Disquiet is a collection of aphoristic prose-poetry musings on dreams, solitude, time and memory. Credited to Pessoa’s alter ego, Bernardo Soares, who chronicles his contemplations in this so-called "factless" autobiography, the work is a journey of one man’s soul and, by extension, of all human souls that allow their minds and hearts to roam far and free.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind by Shoukei Matsumoto, read by Adam Sims. We remove dust to sweep away our worldly desires. We scrub dirt to free ourselves of attachments. We live simply and take time to contemplate the self, mindfully living each moment. It's not just monks that need to live this way. Everyone in today's busy world today needs it.

In a great English house, a young woman offers herself to one of the most powerful and influential figures in the land - but this is no ordinary seduction. She plans to ensure his death.... On holiday in France, Professor Tom Wilde discovers his brilliant student Marcus Marfield, who disappeared two years earlier to join the International Brigades in Spain, in the Le Vernet concentration camp in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Wilde secures his release just as German tanks roll into Poland. Meanwhile, a U-boat sinks the liner Athenia in the Atlantic with many casualties....

In Bunker, acclaimed urban explorer and cultural geographer Bradley Garrett explores the global and rapidly growing movement of 'prepping' for social and environmental collapse, or 'Doomsday'. From the 'dread merchants' hustling safe spaces in the American mid-West to eco-fortresses in Thailand, from geoscrapers to armoured mobile bunkers, Bunker is a brilliant, original and never less than deeply disturbing story from the frontlines of the way we live now: an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings it into new, sharp focus.

The eve of war: a secret so deadly, nothing and no-one is safe. June, 1939. England is partying like there is no tomorrow, gas masks at the ready. In Cambridge, the May Balls are played out with a frantic intensity - but the good times won't last. When one of Cavendish Laboratory's finest minds is murdered, Professor Tom Wilde is once more drawn into intrigue. In a conspiracy that stretches from Cambridge to Berlin and from Washington, DC to the west coast of Ireland, he faces deadly forces that threaten the fate of the world.

Satsuki has spent 30 years hating one man: did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Miyake left his family in Kobe to make midnight bonfires on a beach hundreds of miles away. Fourteen-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her inside a little box. Katagiri returns home to find a giant frog in his apartment on a mission to save Tokyo from a massive burrowing worm. 

Harry and Charlie are teenagers whose lives are shaped by a society that's shifting around them. He is a lonely Brit in his first term at a Las Vegas high school. She is an unlikely friend who gets accused of mixing a batch of explosives that blew up a football player. The two of them are drawn together at a time when gene editing technology is starting to explode. With a lab in the garage anyone can beat cancer, enhance their brain to pass exams, or tweak a few genes for that year-round tan and perfect beach body. But in the wrong hands, cheap gene editing is the most deadly weapon in history.