Showing results by narrator "Alex Jennings" in All Categories

This is the story of an ancient religious icon pilfered at the end of WWII and its consequences for a family and a nation. Theft of the Master aims to appeal to the listener seeking more from a novel than a good listen. It weaves an intricate web, speckled with an assortment of finely described characters spanning different historical periods and continents. Theft of the Master has all the ingredients of a top-class thriller.

For 40 years, Willy Chapman has struck a strange but steadfast bargain between the two poles of his life: his beautiful but emotionally damaged wife and the sweet shop he runs on a South London high street. Devoted to each, he has maintained a delicate, precarious balance. Now, on a hot summer’s day, he attempts to settle his final accounts and reach an understanding with a third, disruptive element in his reckoning: his angry, unforgiving daughter.

Join the critically-acclaimed Pantaloons for a Victorian adventure that's so full of fog it's better heard and not seen... Hilarious, tragic and romantic by turns, Dickens' tale is retold by "The Pantaloons" in their own inimitable style directly into your ears.

By Peter Souter. Hugh and Bella, are running to the same timetable, the timetable you're on if someone you love has just died, and they keep running into each other. They visit the same undertakers at the same time; Hugh's Mum is cremated immediately after Bella's husband; and they even end up in the same bereavement-counselling group. But Hugh and Bella are dealing with very different types of grief.

In 1944, P.G. Wodehouse, the creator of 'Jeeves and Wooster', was questioned by MI5 after broadcasting to America from a German internment camp. One of the interrogators was an up-and-coming journalist called Malcolm Muggeridge. The other was Major E.J.P. Cussen, who later became a high court judge. The stakes were high: one of Britain's best loved authors was facing the possibility of the death penalty.

The ultimate Rome story. The young Caesar must overcome enemies on land and at sea to become a battle-hardened leader – in the spectacular new novel from the bestselling author of The Gates of Rome. Forced to flee Rome, Julius Caesar is serving on board a war galley in the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean and rapidly gaining a fearsome reputation. But no sooner has he had a memorable victory than his ship is captured by pirates and he is held to ransom.

Fresh from triumph in Britain and Gaul, Caesar is marching on Rome with his legions of hardened veterans. To unseat Pompey, now dictator of the empire, he must make the terrible decision to wage war on his own people. The glory that Julius, Brutus, Mark Antony and Octavian enjoy is short lived. There are lands to conquer and choices to make that may yet tear them apart. What cost will Caesar suffer for the path he has walked? Who will make him pay?

Patrick Melrose, cleaned-up and world-weary, is a reluctant guest at a glittering party deep in the English countryside. Amid a crowd of flitting social dragonflies, he finds his search for redemption and capacity for forgiveness challenged by his observation of the cruelties around him. Armed with his biting wit and a newly fashioned openness, can Patrick, who has been to the furthest limits of experience and back again, find release from the savageries of his childhood?

We follow in the footsteps of the intrepid British traveller as they explore the far-flung shores of the world in the company of some of the world’s finest chroniclers, including Charles Darwin, Kenneth Williams, James Boswell, Freya Stark, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Fanny Trollope, Mungo Park, Nancy Mitford, Wilfred Thesiger, Horace Walpole, Evelyn Waugh and many others, in this entertaining collection of travellers’ tales.

It is June 1941 and Denmark is under German occupation. On the rocky coast of Denmark, two brothers, Harald and Arne Olufsen, starkly different in nature, unite in an effort to overcome the Nazis. A disused Hornet Moth biplane is their only means of getting a vital message to the British.

Silence is rare in Nature. When we really listen, Nature is conducting symphonies of sound as her world goes about the day and night. Her invisible heartbeat is everywhere, for everyone. Our eyes are constantly bathed in the wonder of her ways, the soft drizzle of rain from soft grey clouds, the bleached harsh desert sand of a noon day, a wave caressing the shore, to the ravenous colours of a departing sunset. Indeed, whenever we look and listen to the vastness of our world Nature’s beauty is always there for us..

Graham Swift’s first collection of short stories confirms his power to bring an edge of the extraordinary, the dangerous or the subversive into otherwise familiar, safe, even comforting settings. On a holiday beach, a mismatched couple wage a sexually charged war for the devotion of their literally floundering son. A family doctor, oppressed by his own domestic insecurities, intimidates an apparent time-wasting patient. A zookeeper becomes the keeper of a bizarre fixation.

Meet Dr Shah, who has never been to India, and Mrs Kaminski, on her way to Poland via A&E. Meet Holly and Polly, who have come to their own Anglo-Irish understanding. Charlie and Don, who have seen the docks turn into Docklands. Daisy Baker, terrified of Yorkshire and Johnny Dewhurst, stranded on Exmoor. Binding these stories together is Graham Swift's affectionate but unflinching instinct for the story of us all.

In Making an Elephant, Graham Swift brings together a richly varied selection of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. Full of insights into his passions and motivations, and wise about the friends, family and other writers who have mattered to him over the years, this is a revealing and intimate collection. Kazuo Ishiguro advises on how to choose a guitar, Salman Rushdie arrives for Christmas under guard and Ted Hughes shares the secrets of a Devon river. There are private moments, too, with long-dead writers.

Twenty-two years old and in the grip of a massive addiction, Patrick Melrose is forced to fly to New York to collect his father's ashes. Over the course of a weekend, Patrick’s remorseless search for drugs on the avenues of Manhattan, haunted by old acquaintances and insistent inner voices, sends him into a nightmarish spiral. Alone in his room at the Pierre Hotel, he pushes body and mind to the very edge - desperate always to stay one step ahead of his rapidly encroaching past.

Newspaper columnist Hilary gets thousands for telling it like it is; Henry's turning hospitals into carparks; Roddy's selling art in return for sex; down on the farm Dorothy's squeezing every last pound from her livestock; Thomas is making a killing on the stock exchange; and Mark is selling arms to dictators.

England 1819: Thomas Shield, a new master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the boy's sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Drawn to Frant's beautiful, unhappy mother, Thomas becomes caught up in her family's twisted intrigues.

The summer of 1967, at a decaying house in the heart of Suffolk: an artist is painting a portrait of 13-year-old Maisie and her elder sisters, beautiful Julia and bookish Finn. Maisie embarks on a portrait of her own: she begins an account of her family and of her village friend Daniel Nunn, a young man she idolises, whom she watches over the chasm of a class divide. This is the summer when the three sisters' lives will irrevocably, and terribly, change.

Those who guard us speak of us, in whispers as...'the Immortals.'' Nate Quarter is a lowly lamplighter in the phraxmines of the Eastern Woods.Until treachery forces him to flee for his life - to the mighty city of Great Glade. But these are turbulent times. In far-off Hive - the spectacular city founded by the goblin tribes - the clan leaders are preparing for war. And out beyond the dread Nightwoods, in the fabled gardens of Riverrise, a one-eyed waif jealously guards the life-giving waters of the mystical Riverrise spring.

Prentis, employed in the police archives, is becoming confused. His obsession with the plight of his father, a wartime hero, now the mute inmate of a mental hospital, is alienating him from his wife and children, while at work, he feels under scrutiny from his intimidating boss, Quinn. Gradually, Prentis suspects that his father’s breakdown and Quinn’s menacing behaviour are related and that the connection is to be found in his father’s memoir: 'Shuttlecock'.