Showing results by narrator "Alana Collins" in All Categories

King Midas once had the ability to turn all he touched into gold. But after his gift - or curse - almost killed his daughter, Midas relinquished "The Touch" forever. Ten years later, Princess Kora still bears the consequences of her father’s wish: Her skin shines golden, rumors follow her everywhere she goes, and she harbors secret powers that are getting harder to hide. Kora spends her days locked in the palace, concealed behind gloves and veils, trying to ignore the stares and gossip of courtiers.

Ciara and Oliver meet in a supermarket queue in Dublin and start dating the same week COVID-19 reaches Irish shores. When lockdown threatens to keep them apart, Oliver suggests they move in together. Ciara sees a unique opportunity for a relationship to flourish without the scrutiny of family and friends. Oliver sees a chance to hide who - and what - he really is.

Just after midnight on April 15, 1912, the passenger steamship Carpathia receives a distress signal from the largest passenger liner ever built, RMS Titanic, which is on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York. Captain Arthur Rostron is awakened to an enormous maritime emergency with little information to guide his actions in answering the call for help. Is the dire threat to the unsinkable Titanic accurate? His ship is more than four hours away; will Carpathia hold together if pushed to never-before-tested speeds?

Feeling her stardom fading, struggling soap-actress Adele Rafferty is ready to give up on her dreams when she gets a last-minute offer to play the lead in upcoming horror film Final Draft. Could this be her big break? Will she have redemption for what happened the last time she was on a film set? Adele doesn’t think twice before signing the dotted line. But when life on set starts to mirror the sinister events portrayed in the script, Adele fears the real horror lies off the page. Isolated and unsure who in the crew she can trust, is there anywhere or any time left to run?

Seventeen-year-old cynic Saoirse Clarke isn't looking for a relationship. But when she meets mischievous Ruby, that rule goes right out the window. Sort of. Because Ruby has a loophole in mind: a summer of all the best cliché movie montage dates, with a definite ending come fall - no broken hearts, no messy breakup. It would be the perfect plan, if they weren’t forgetting one thing about the Falling in Love Montage: when it's over, the characters have fallen in love...for real.

A voyage across the ocean becomes the odyssey of a lifetime for a young Irish woman…. Inspired by true events, The Girl Who Came Home poignantly blends fact and fiction to explore the Titanic tragedy's impact and its lasting repercussions on survivors and their descendants.

Don’t be like Ciara, a twelve-year-old girl living in the tiny village of Skael. When she used a spell from within this book, she ended up summoning a dragon. A DRAGON! Those things breathe fire! From their mouths! She’s obviously doomed. And don’t listen if Ciara tells you that dragons won’t hurt humans, and that they even once taught us magic, a thousand years ago. Definitely don’t pay any attention to the fact that the dragon she summoned, Scorch, might be willing to help rescue Ciara’s mother and free her village from the Emperor and his Warden, because it’s all obviously a big lie.

A dreamer is born - the exhilarating prequel to the ground-breaking, extraordinary Bone Season series. In the perilous heart of Scion London, a dangerous and valuable poltergeist is on the loose - and it must be caught before chaos erupts on the streets of the capital. Here, the clairvoyant underworld plays by its own rules, and rival gangs will stop at nothing to win such a magnificent prize. Sixteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working for Jaxon Hall, the most notorious mime-lord in the city. He thinks she is hiding a powerful gift.

One year ago, Lucy’s sister, Nicki, left to meet friends at a pub in Dublin and never came home. The third Irish woman to vanish inexplicably in as many years, the agony of not knowing what happened that night has turned Lucy’s life into a waking nightmare. So, she’s going to take matters into her own hands. Angela works as a paper-pusher in the Missing Persons Unit, but wants nothing more than to be a fully fledged member of An Garda Síochána, the Irish police force. With the investigation into the missing women stalled, she begins pulling on a thread that could break the case wide open.

At 97 years old, Winnifred Ellis knows she doesn’t have much time left, and it is almost a relief to realize that once she is gone, the truth about her shameful past will die with her. But when her great-grandson Jamie, the spitting image of her dear late husband, asks about his family tree, Winnifred can’t lie any longer, even if it means breaking a promise she made so long ago....

PLAY. Andrew, the manager of Shanamore Cottages, watches his only guest via a hidden camera in her room. One night the unthinkable happens: a shadowy figure emerges on-screen, kills her, and destroys the camera. But who is the murderer? How did they know about the camera? And how will Andrew live with himself? PAUSE. Natalie wishes she'd stayed at home as soon as she arrives in the wintry isolation of Shanamore. There's something creepy about the manager. She wants to leave, but she can't - not until she's found what she's looking for.... REWIND.

Spanning 30 years, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irreparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen's four children leave the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in Dublin, New York, and Mali, West Africa. In her early old age, their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she's decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds.

Dublin, 1962. Within the gated grounds of the convent of the Sisters of the Holy Redemption lies one of the city's Magdalen Laundries. Once places of refuge, the laundries have evolved into grim workhouses. Some inmates are "fallen" women - unwed mothers, prostitutes, or petty criminals. Most are ordinary girls whose only sin lies in being too pretty, too independent, or tempting the wrong man. Among them is 16-year-old Teagan Tiernan, sent by her family when her beauty provokes a lustful revelation from a young priest.

Will Hurley was an attractive, charming, and impressive student at Dublin's elite St. John's College - and Ireland's most prolific serial killer. Having stalked his five young victims, he drowned them in the muddy waters of the Grand Canal. Sentenced to life imprisonment when he was just 19, Will is locked away in the city's Central Psychiatric Hospital.

Regeneration offers a visionary new approach to climate change, one that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, equity, and human dignity into a seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation that can end the climate crisis in one generation. It is the first book to describe and define the burgeoning regeneration movement spreading rapidly throughout the world.

From the haunted hills of Roman Britain to the sewers of occupied Warsaw … in the bloodied streets of Revolutionary Paris, and the anarchy World War II Shanghai … out of the wilds of America, India, Africa and Europe … down the long savage darkness of the centuries, monsters have fed upon us. They are shapeshifters, vampires, sorcerers and spirits—things named only in myth, and things for which we have no name. They are our demons, our reflections, our desires and our nightmares. And all too often, they are … only human.

Vivian doesn't feel like she fits in - and never has. As a child, she was so whimsical that her parents told her she was "left by fairies". Now, she is living alone in Dublin, where the neighbors treat her like she's crazy, her older sister condescends to her, social workers seem to have registered her as troubled, and she hasn't a friend in the world. So, she decides it's time to change her life. She begins by advertising for a friend. Not just any friend. She wants one named Penelope.

Lottie’s relationship with Greg ends when he leaves her for Emma, a decision that intertwines their lives in ways neither woman could foresee. Emma traps Greg in marriage by falling pregnant. Later, a one-night stand leaves Lottie carrying Greg’s child, forcing them into an uneasy co-parenting arrangement. Then Lottie is diagnosed with breast cancer.

Set against the backdrop of Dublin in the 1980s, a place of political, social and religious change, the two friends yearn for an unbound life and, together, begin to fight to take up the space of who they truly are. As their defiance reverberates through their lives, they are further alienated from society through acts of bravery and cowardice. Finding themselves as outsiders, they are feared and watched but rarely truly seen.

Grace sees her boyfriend, Henry, everywhere. In the supermarket, on the street, at the graveyard. Only Henry is dead. He died two months earlier, leaving a huge hole in Grace's life and in her heart. But then, Henry turns up to fix the boiler one evening, and Grace can't decide if she's hallucinating or has suddenly developed psychic powers. Grace isn't going mad - the man in front of her is not Henry at all, but someone else who looks uncannily like him.