Regular price: $31.97
Winter in Madrid is set just after the bloody Spanish Civil War, with World War II looming over Europe. Reluctantly, Harry Brett looks for an old schoolmate who's become a person of interest for British intelligence.
Oxford, Spring 1353. When young bookseller Nicholas Elyot discovers the body of student William Farringdon floating in the river Cherwell, it looks like a drowning. Soon, however, Nicholas finds evidence of murder. Who could have wanted to kill this promising student? As Nicholas and his scholar friend Jordain try to unravel what lies behind William's death, they learn that he was innocently caught up in a criminal plot.
It is 1502, and Rodrigo Borgia, a self-confessed womanizer and master of political corruption, is now on the papal throne as Alexander VI. His daughter Lucrezia, age 22 - already three times married and a pawn in her father's plans - is discovering her own power. And then there is his son Cesare Borgia, brilliant, ruthless, and increasingly unstable; it is his relationship with Machiavelli that gives the Florentine diplomat a master class in the dark arts of power and politics.
Masters of the historical mystery, authors Michael Jecks, Susanna Gregory, Bernard Knight, Ian Morson, Philip Gooden, Simon Beaufort, and C.J. Sansom band together as The Medieval Murderers to craft this thrilling tale. In 1067 Greenland, a strange stone falls from the sky. Over the next 600 years, violence and death follow whoever possesses it, including crusading knights, a dying King Henry III, and a troupe of His Majesty King James I’s players.
From "the master of alternate history" comes a new trilogy that reimagines a mid-20th century in which General MacArthur, without bothering to consult President Truman, detonates nuclear warheads in several Manchurian cities after China enters the Korean War. In his acclaimed novels of alternate history, Harry Turtledove has scrutinized the twisted soul of the 20th century, from the forces that set World War I in motion to the rise of fascism in the decades that followed.
Aleksi Ivanovich Smirnov, an orphan and a thief, has been living by his wits and surviving below the ever-watchful eye of the Soviet system until his luck finally runs out. In 1936, at the age of 16, Aleksi is caught by the NKVD and transported to Moscow. There, in the notorious headquarters of the secret police, he is given a choice: be trained and inserted as a spy into Nazi Germany under the identity of his best friend, the long lost nephew of a high-ranking Nazi official, or disappear forever in the basement of the Lubyanka. For Aleksi it's no choice at all.
Winter in Madrid is set just after the bloody Spanish Civil War, with World War II looming over Europe. Reluctantly, Harry Brett looks for an old schoolmate who's become a person of interest for British intelligence.
Oxford, Spring 1353. When young bookseller Nicholas Elyot discovers the body of student William Farringdon floating in the river Cherwell, it looks like a drowning. Soon, however, Nicholas finds evidence of murder. Who could have wanted to kill this promising student? As Nicholas and his scholar friend Jordain try to unravel what lies behind William's death, they learn that he was innocently caught up in a criminal plot.
It is 1502, and Rodrigo Borgia, a self-confessed womanizer and master of political corruption, is now on the papal throne as Alexander VI. His daughter Lucrezia, age 22 - already three times married and a pawn in her father's plans - is discovering her own power. And then there is his son Cesare Borgia, brilliant, ruthless, and increasingly unstable; it is his relationship with Machiavelli that gives the Florentine diplomat a master class in the dark arts of power and politics.
Masters of the historical mystery, authors Michael Jecks, Susanna Gregory, Bernard Knight, Ian Morson, Philip Gooden, Simon Beaufort, and C.J. Sansom band together as The Medieval Murderers to craft this thrilling tale. In 1067 Greenland, a strange stone falls from the sky. Over the next 600 years, violence and death follow whoever possesses it, including crusading knights, a dying King Henry III, and a troupe of His Majesty King James I’s players.
From "the master of alternate history" comes a new trilogy that reimagines a mid-20th century in which General MacArthur, without bothering to consult President Truman, detonates nuclear warheads in several Manchurian cities after China enters the Korean War. In his acclaimed novels of alternate history, Harry Turtledove has scrutinized the twisted soul of the 20th century, from the forces that set World War I in motion to the rise of fascism in the decades that followed.
Aleksi Ivanovich Smirnov, an orphan and a thief, has been living by his wits and surviving below the ever-watchful eye of the Soviet system until his luck finally runs out. In 1936, at the age of 16, Aleksi is caught by the NKVD and transported to Moscow. There, in the notorious headquarters of the secret police, he is given a choice: be trained and inserted as a spy into Nazi Germany under the identity of his best friend, the long lost nephew of a high-ranking Nazi official, or disappear forever in the basement of the Lubyanka. For Aleksi it's no choice at all.
Berlin, 1964. The Greater German Reich stretches from the Rhine to the Urals and keeps an uneasy peace with its nuclear rival, the United States. As the Fatherland prepares for a grand celebration honoring Adolf Hitler's 75th birthday and anticipates a conciliatory visit from US president Joseph Kennedy and ambassador Charles Lindbergh, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lake near Berlin's most prestigious suburb.
In Berlin, Kurt Müller, an Abwehr signalman, discovers a colleague lying dead at his radio receiver. The criminal police dismiss the death as suicide, but Kurt is not convinced. Kurt follows a trail of mysteries, witnessing several atrocities that expose the Nazi regime for what it truly is. When the trail leads him to the German resistance, he faces the most difficult choices of his life. He must choose between his duty and his conscience, between his country and his family, between love and death.
In his new life as a bartender at the Little Shamrock, Dismas Hardy is just hoping for a little peace. He's left both the police force and his law career behind. Unfortunately it's not as easy to leave behind the memory of a shattering personal loss - but for the time being, he can always take the edge off with a stiff drink and a round of darts.
The first of Josephine Tey's Inspector Grant mysteries concerns the murder of a man, standing in a ticket queue for a London musical comedy. With his customary tenacity, Grant pursues his suspects through the length of Britain and the labyrinth of the city.
The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known...of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect - a man divided in his soul...of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame...and of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state, and brother against brother.
War seethed across the planet. Machines soared through the air, churned through the seas, crawled across the surface, pushing ever forward, carrying death. Earth was engaged in titanic struggle. Germany, Russia, France, China, Japan: the maps were changing day by day. The hostilities spread in ever-widening ripples of destruction: Britain, Italy, Africa...the fate of the world hung in the balance. Then the real enemy came.
When editor Susan Ryeland is given the manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has no reason to think it will be much different from any of his others. After working with the best-selling crime writer for years, she's intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. An homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, Alan's traditional formula has proved hugely successful.
Exodus is an international publishing phenomenon - the towering novel of the 20th century's most dramatic geopolitical event. Leon Uris magnificently portrays the birth of a new nation in the midst of enemies - the beginning of an earthshaking struggle for power. Here is the tale that swept the world with its fury: the story of an American nurse, an Israeli freedom fighter caught up in a glorious, heartbreaking, triumphant era. Here is Exodus - one of the great best-selling novels of all time.
A boy literally disappears from Main Street. A security camera captures the moment of his instant, inexplicable vanishing. An audacious bank robbery goes seriously wrong: four cops are gunned down; a TV news helicopter is shot and spins crazily out of the sky, triggering a disastrous cascade of events that ricochet across twenty different lives over the course of just thirty-six hours. Nick Kavanaugh, a cop with a dark side, investigates.
Everyone who lives at 23 Beulah Grove has a secret. If they didn't, they wouldn't be renting rooms in a dodgy old building for cash - no credit check, no lease. It's the kind of place you end up when you you've run out of other options.The six residents mostly keep to themselves, but one unbearably hot summer night, a terrible accident pushes them into an uneasy alliance. What they don't know is that one of them is a killer. He's already chosen his next victim, and he'll do anything to protect his secret.
In 1986, Eddie and his friend are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy little English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code; little chalk stick figures they leave for each other as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing will ever be the same.
A hyper-fast quantum computer is the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb: whoever possesses one will be able to shred any encryption in existence, effectively owning the digital world. The question is: Who will build it first, the United States or China? The latest of David Ignatius' timely, sharp-eyed espionage novels follows CIA agent Harris Chang into a quantum research lab compromised by a suspected Chinese informant. The breach provokes a mole hunt that is obsessive, destructive, and - above all - uncertain.
The Great Smog. London. A dense, choking fog engulfs the city and beneath it, history is re-written…1952. Twelve years have passed since Churchill lost to the appeasers and Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany after Dunkirk. As the long German war against Russia rages on in the east, the British people find themselves under dark authoritarian rule: the press, radio and television are controlled; the streets patrolled by violent auxiliary police and British Jews face ever greater constraints. There are terrible rumours too about what is happening in the basement of the German Embassy at Senate House.
Defiance, though, is growing. In Britain, Winston Churchill's Resistance organization is increasingly a thorn in the government's side. And in a Birmingham mental hospital an incarcerated scientist, Frank Muncaster, may hold a secret that could change the balance of the world struggle for ever. Civil Servant David Fitzgerald, secretly acting as a spy for the Resistance, is given the mission by them to rescue his old friend Frank and get him out of the country.
Before long he, together with a disparate group of Resistance activists, will find themselves fugitives in the midst of London's Great Smog; as David's wife Sarah finds herself drawn into a world more terrifying than she ever could have imagined. And hard on their heels is Gestapo Sturmbannfuhrer Gunther Hoth, brilliant, implacable hunter of men… At once a vivid, haunting reimagining of 1950s Britain, a gripping, humane spy thriller and a poignant love story, with Dominion C. J. Sansom once again asserts himself as the master of the historical novel.
What made the experience of listening to Dominion the most enjoyable?
Good scene setting and thoughtful character development. Good fictional account of an alternative ending to the second World War.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
What about Daniel Weyman’s performance did you like?
Sonorific voice that suited the main character
Any additional comments?
In May 1940 the meeting between Halifax Chamberlain and Churchill really did have a slightly surprising outcome - Churchill formed the government - despite the King and much of the Conservative party favouring Halifax - this what if book looks at what would have happened if the meeting had gone the other way.My real life great uncle (a member of the war cabinet) is killed in this book!
Just wanted to say, this is my first C.J Sansom book and certainly not my last. What a great listen and very well narrated by Daniel Weyman, who's dulcet voice and diverse range of accents, settles you perfectly into the mood of the story. Set in an alternative historical Post-WWII 1950s period, Great Britain by then had made a truce with Nazi Germany. This ended the war prematurely by 1940, turning the British government into a anti-Semitic, fascist regime under the German 3rd Reich control. Yet somehow the novel doesn't come across as a yawnful 'Period' piece novel. It has a modern contemporary flow about it which is so much easier on the ear. Dominion is certainly one of my favourite, and most exciting books i've listened to in a long time and recommend this to anyone who likes a good atmospheric spy thriller! Should be made into a film in my opinion! Good job C.J Sansom!
16 of 17 people found this review helpful
A fantastic novel that is well written with slowly building tension. It draws you into an England that just might have been, if the cards had fallen just a little differently. C J Sansom always writes entertaining books, but I think this is his best yet.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful
Dominion, such an apt title. A cleverly crafted "What if" scenario that came so close to coming to pass. This is a genuinely intelligent book that pits known characters from history into this alternate reality alongside the main protaganists. It's a supremely atmospheric book that very quickly draws you into its rather uncomfortable world.
It's also a very decent thriller once you make the shift to the altered state of history. with good narration from Daniel Weyman to complete the package.
A thoroughly recommended departure from the norm. A book that will make you think because only by a small margin was this seemingly unthinkable scenario in Britain avoided.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful
I have enjoyed the author's Shardrake novels set in Tudor England and was surprised by this novel set in the late in the nineteen forties and early fifties. Dominion speculates about a Britain that has made peace with Hitler soon after the outbreak of war and is a pacy thriller as an underground of resistance strives to undermine German domination. There are many historical characters in this "what if" scenario, such as Oswald Mosley, Beaverbrook and Enoch Powell, supporting the Nazis opposed by the likes of Churchill and Attlee as the underdogs. It is certainly a though-provoking book, but also a great listen that kept me rapt from start to finish. The reader does a superb job of bringing the characters to life as he switches back and forth with different accents.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful
I usually dont like mid way reviews, but as this audiobook has non yet, I wanted to throw my 2 cents on.
It is deep and excellently written, the characters are believable, the setting, although fictional, feels exceptionally realistic and tangeable.
It draws you in from the start and within 1 day I have already listened to a half of it!
Brilliantly read and with superb accents that really seperate the characters, (even a cracking Winston Churchill impression!).
Another 'Must Read' from C J Sansom
14 of 17 people found this review helpful
If anyone ever doubts the debt we owe to our forefathers who fought facism this book should be compulsory reading.
Unlike some reviewers I have no problem with the alternate history - it is just that, so applying events from our 50's doesn't work, much of our timeline particularly technology was war driven so a short 1939-40 war and no pacific war would explain the disparities.
What it does show is the creeping evil that spread through many occupied and satellite states of Nazi Germany where regimes competed to out do each other to follow the master race. The distinctly British twist of Star of David lapel badges, the repatriation of German Jewish refugees, the disappearance of "undesirable" authors from library shelves. Like an avalanche starting with the merest movement of a snowflake.
Gripping from beginning to end I would thoroughly recommend it.
9 of 11 people found this review helpful
Don't miss this brilliant book. This is certainly the most exciting listen I've had from Audible for a long time. Some of it is very bleak in a Sansom-ish sort of way, but the story soon picks up and you just can't stop listening - I won't give away any of the plot but stick with it for the first hour or so and you will not be disappointed.
9 of 11 people found this review helpful
I was really sorry when this ended. While it is a bit slow to get started, when it does it's completely absorbing. It's a 'what if' book based on the UK losing the war in 1940 and the Nazis encroaching into the UK. The story relates the effects this has on a civil servant-turned-spy and his wife; and the people they come across in the Resistance and the German security police.
The narrator is excellent.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful
The best book/audio book I've listened to in a while. Fabulous descriptive imagery, totally believable characters and edge of the seat plot. What more could a girl want?
4 of 5 people found this review helpful
I very rarely bother to review my two listens a month - but this one really stands out. I've just finished it and can scarcely bear to leave the characters and location. Superb - I'm just off to see what other CJ Sansom I can download.
8 of 11 people found this review helpful