Showing results by narrator "Peter Kenny" in All Categories

Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the greatest footballers of all time, a dream he pursued from the age of just 12 when he left his humble origins on Madeira behind. It wasn't long before he had the biggest clubs in Europe knocking on his door, but it was Manchester United who won the race for his signature. Under the tutelage of Sir Alex Ferguson, Ronaldo developed into the complete footballer and athlete, winning three league titles and a Champions League along the way. He then became the biggest galáctico of them all when he transferred to Real Madrid for a record-breaking fee. 

Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms. Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices.

The world of Erafore is one full of magic and mystery. Heroes battle dragons, mages confront demons, and the gods watch over it all. Yet among these incredible beings, a single creature is born with the power to rewrite the destiny of the land. Taken in as a pet by the princess of the Kingdom of Varia, a mere Ooze will rise to stand in the tide of fate and defend the ones he loves from an encroaching void. But can a monster ever truly become a man?

The Scavenger species are circling. It is, truly, provably, the End Days for the Gzilt civilization. An ancient people, organized on military principles and yet almost perversely peaceful, the Gzilt helped set up the Culture 10,000 years earlier and were very nearly one of its founding societies, deciding not to join only at the last moment. Now they've made the collective decision to follow the well-trodden path of millions of other civilizations; they are going to Sublime, elevating themselves to a new and almost infinitely more rich and complex existence.

It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars but Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year. The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilisation. In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data without order, hunting their own young and fighting pointless formal wars.

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.

The Outworld Ranger crew has dodged government forces, criminal guilds, and bounty hunters numerous times since fleeing Ekaran IV. But with the warships of the Dark Messiah closing in on them, their mission has never been in greater jeopardy. Cornered, their options and allies are few. And the Outworld Ranger suffered extensive damage getting them this far.

Time is running out for Ben Greenwood - not as an apprentice for the Royal Institute of Magic, but as the Head Guardian, secretly responsible for uniting Queen Elizabeth's Armour. The dark elves are coming and the only chance of stopping them is to find the last Guardian and the final two pieces of the armour. They will be difficult to find and heavily protected, as they are the most important of all. To make matters worse, Ben's only clue to their whereabouts comes from a particularly unreliable and dangerous source.

In a tradition that runs from R. M. Williamson’s Bits from an Old Bookshop in 1904 to Jen Campbell’s Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops in 2012 (with George Orwell’s 1936 Bookshop Memories in between), here is the latest and perhaps most complete attempt to classify people who shop in bookstores. It does take all kinds. Employing something like Linnaean taxonomic groups, there’s the Expert (divided into subspecies from the Bore to the Helpful Person), the Young Family (ranging from the Exhausted to the Aspirational), and more.

Reinmar of Bielau, called Reynevan, flees after being caught in an affair with a knight's wife.With strange, mystical forces gathering in the shadows and pursued not only by the Stercza brothers bent on vengeance, but also by the Holy Inquisition, Reynevan finds himself in the Narrenturm, the Tower of Fools, a medieval asylum for the mad, or for those who dare to think differently and challenge the prevailing order.

Parmenion, the Lion of Macedon - a lone hero in search of salvation and instead finding destiny. Alexander, the Dark Prince - a child who will become Alexander, founder of the greatest empire the world has ever known. He will conquer all, save for the Chaos Spirit, the immortal evil that dwells in his soul. Together they will be forced into other dimensions, across time, into enchanted worlds full of wonder and sorcery....

The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland is a book lover’s paradise, with thousands of books across nearly a mile of shelves, a real log fire, and Captain, the portly bookshop cat. You’d think that after twenty years, owner Shaun Bythell would be used to his quirky customers by now. Don’t get him wrong, there are some good ones among the antiquarian porn-hunters, die-hard train book lovers, people who confuse bookshops for libraries, and the toddlers just looking for a nice cozy corner in which to wee. He’s sure there are some good ones. There must be.

Nûd, the servant who turned out to be a king, plus young wizards Eynon and Merry and their friends try to survive an invasion by a deposed Roma emperor bent on conquering Orluin.

Theus is sold into servanthood by his poverty-stricken family and taken by his kindly master on a journey across a continent, following the course of the Landwide River. From there, he begins to learn the secrets of the memory stones, the extraordinary objects that can store information for people.

Geralt of Rivia is a Witcher, a man whose magic powers and lifelong training have made him a brilliant fighter and a merciless assassin. Yet he is no ordinary killer: he hunts the vile fiends that ravage the land and attack the innocent. But not everything monstrous-looking is evil; not everything fair is good...and in every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.

Geralt of Rivia is a Witcher, one of the few capable of hunting the monsters that prey on humanity. He uses magical signs, potions, and the pride of every Witcher—two swords, steel and silver. But a contract has gone wrong, and Geralt finds himself without his signature weapons. Now he needs them back, because sorcerers are scheming, and across the world clouds are gathering. The season of storms is coming.

Tension is high at the Royal Institute of Magic, as the directors of each of the departments - Spellswords, Wardens, Traders, Scholars and Diplomats - work together with their allies to push back the dark elf invasion, led by King Suktar. But Ben Greenwood knows the truth: the only real way they are going to win is if he and the Guardians do the unthinkable and infiltrate the heart of the dark elf homeland - ending the evil king’s rule once and for all.

There is a world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse. Such a world requires a firm hand and a guiding light. But does it need the Concern: an all-powerful organization with a malevolent presiding genius, pervasive influence and numberless invisible operatives in possession of extraordinary powers?

Young wizards Eynon and Merry suddenly have to cope with a huge, scaly, ill-tempered fire-breathing problem allied with their worst enemy.

A best seller in the UK and a memoir every bit as warm and welcoming as a visit to your very favorite bookstore. Inside a stone-faced Georgian townhouse on the Wigtown highroad, jammed with more than 100,000 books and one portly shop cat, Shaun Bythell manages the ups and downs of Scotland's largest used bookshop with a sharp eye and even sharper wit.