Showing results by narrator "Peter Kenny" in All Categories

Eighteen-year-old Kit is weird: big, strange, odd, socially disabled, on a spectrum that stretches from "highly gifted" at one end, to "nutter" at the other. At least Kit knows who his father is; he and Guy live together in a decaying country house on the unstable brink of a vast quarry. His mother's identity is another matter. Now, though, his father's dying, and old friends are gathering for one last time.

Ben's double life continues at the Royal Institute of Magic. To most, he's a talented apprentice and an exceptional spellshooter, but Ben is also a Guardian, responsible for uniting Elizabeth's Armour, the only artifact powerful enough to overthrow the evil dark elves. With two pieces of the armour secure, finding the third may be Ben's toughest challenge yet. His only clue is a magical key, a tenuous link to a legend called the Silver Dwarf.

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.

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.

Sweden, late summer of 2011. Self-taught astrophysicist Petra has calculated that the atmosphere will collapse on the 21st of September that year, around 21.20 to be more precise, bringing about the end of times. Armed with this terrible knowledge, Petra meets Johan, a doomsday prophet, and Agnes, a widow of 75 who has made bank living a double life on social media as a young influencer. Together, the trio race through Europe as they plan to make the most out of the time they have left, in more ways than one. But of course, things rarely go to plan, even the end of the world.

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. 

London, 1958. By crafting magical outfits for his friend, Princess Katherine, cloth mage Paul Gallagher is getting ahead. It’s not a seamless path. Not since the Virtuis Party came to power. The far-right faction is using criminals to create a protective barrier around England. The enchanted uniforms the prisoners wear may beget a demand for mages, but using luckless convicts as tools for warmongering reactionaries isn’t Paul’s dream for cloth magic.

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

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.

It was one of the less glorious incidents of a long-ago war. It led to the destruction of two suns and the billions of lives they supported. Now, 800 years later, the light from the first of those ancient mistakes has reached the Culture Orbital, Masaq. The light from the second may not.

A psychological thriller before its time, James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published in 1824, takes us back to the world of 18th-century Scotland, into a mind haunted by religious obsession, and driven to commit murder. The events are told from several different viewpoints, so that truth and reality appear to dissolve in this disturbing story of the dark legacy of Calvinist doctrine, and how it led one man to madness.

Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the civilisation based around the planet Golter. Now she is hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes that she is the last obstacle before the faith's apotheosis, and her only hope of escape is to find the last of the apocalyptically powerful Lazy Guns before the Huhsz find her.

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?

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.

"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.

Two years after his parents' sudden disappearance, Ben Greenwood stumbles upon a cryptic letter that could shed some light on their whereabouts. But before he can track them down, he'll need to find the mysterious organization that sent the letter: The Royal Institute of Magic. To succeed, Ben will have to navigate a land filled with fantastic creatures and spellshooters, where magic can be bought and sold, to unravel an ancient family secret that could hold the key to defeating an evil the institute has been fighting for the last 500 years.

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.

In a tiny shack in the largest township in South Africa, Nombeko Mayeki is born. Put to work at five years old and orphaned at 10, she quickly learns that the world expects nothing more from her than to die young, be it from drugs, alcohol, or just plain despair. But Nombeko has grander plans. She learns to read and write, and at just 15, using her cunning and fearlessness, she makes it out of Soweto with millions of smuggled diamonds in her possession. Then things take a turn for the worse....

Siv and the others may have escaped Ekaran IV on the Outworld Ranger, but now they’re on the run with two governments, several criminal organizations, and a host of bounty hunters in pursuit. If they want to protect Oona, the young hyperphasic messiah, they need allies, resources, and information. The girl’s father, Ambassador Vim, could provide those things. The problem: he’s missing. He was last seen on a planet named Titus II. And all the groups hunting them know it.

The Wizards Guild has been shattered by a coup and, in the uproar, Geralt was seriously injured. The Witcher is supposed to be a guardian of the innocent, a protector of those in need, a defender against powerful and dangerous monsters that prey on men in dark times. But now that dark times have fallen upon the world, Geralt is helpless until he has recovered from his injuries. While war rages across all of the lands, the future of magic is under threat and those sorcerers who survive are determined to protect it.