Showing results by narrator "Edoardo Ballerini" in All Categories

At the Dalai Lama’s residence in Dharamsala, India, an unusual visitor has arrived. His Holiness interrupts his morning meditation to greet a troubled Giant Panda who has travelled many miles to see him. Welcoming him as a friend, His Holiness invites the Panda on a walk through a cedar forest. There in the shadow of the Himalayas, surrounded by beauty, they discuss matters great and small . . .

Brooks Haxton has been writing for years about the connections between human beings and the creatures we find fascinating. Mister Toebones, his new collection, draws its title from a nickname Haxton gives to a daddy longlegs he sees at his father's grave. In another poem, the poet and his mother, in search of a swimming hole, find a copperhead rearing to strike, about to birth its live young. Elsewhere, waist-deep in the Mississippi River, under the Atlantic Ocean, on the cracked ice of a frozen pond, even in outer space, the poet explores forces that seem past endurance.

Would you risk your life for total strangers? When she is assaulted while on vacation in Key West, the unforgettable Kate Bowers marshals her skills as a former homicide detective and Army MP. As she hunts down her assailant, she discovers women enslaved in a high-end sex trafficking operation on a luxury super-yacht. That’s only the first complication. The president’s daughter is missing and in mortal danger.

When Michael "Blue" Whitley -- a former party boy turned up-and-coming Brooklyn chef -- returns with three friends to the remote Canadian commune of his birth, he discovers that his entire life has been a carefully orchestrated lie. He is in fact someone else altogether, a replacement for a local child who disappeared twenty-five years earlier. He is something not quite human.

It’s the start of the Hollywood on Hudson film festival, and New York City is swept up in the glamour. There’s a red carpet premiere every night; the most exclusive restaurants are filled with wealthy producers and pre-eminent directors; and thousands of fans gather with the paparazzi, hoping to catch a glimpse of the most famous and beautiful faces in the world. With so many celebrities in town, special task force NYPD Red is on high alert - and it can’t afford to make a single mistake.

Centering us in Rome, but transporting us seamlessly into worlds as varied and exotic as they are emotionally real, these stories paint landscapes that are populated - vividly, hauntingly - by animals: from squawking, violent seagulls, to magical snakes, to a tiny dog on the side of a deserted road, to starlings circling the evening sky in exhilarating formation.

A jewel heist. A murdered actress. A killer case for NYPD Red. In a city where crime never sleeps, NYPD Red is the elite task force called in when a case involves the rich, famous and connected. Detectives Zach Jordan and Kylie MacDonald are the best of the best - brilliant and tireless investigators who will stop at nothing to catch a criminal, even if it means antagonising the same powerful people they're supposed to be helping.

NYPD Red – the task force attacking the most extreme crimes in America's most extreme city –hunts a killer who is on an impossible mission. A vigilante serial killer is on the loose in New York City, tracking down and murdering people whose crimes have not been punished. The number of victims grows, and many New Yorkers secretly applaud the idea of justice won at any price.

After a harrowing tour in Afghanistan, intelligence officer Amy Cornwall is eager to return home to her husband and their young daughter. But as soon as she steps into the house, she knows that something is terribly wrong. Her family is missing. The kidnappers leave a message: if she wants to see her husband and daughter alive again, Amy must complete a near impossible task...and she has 48 hours to do it. She'll do whatever it takes to bring them home.

Assigned to examine a portentous tape sneaked out of Moscow by a mole, CIA Kremlinologist Charlie Stone finds himself in an espionage investigation of staggering complexity. As he hops among three continents, often the target of both the KGB and the CIA, Stone succeeds in vindicating his father, branded a traitor by McCarthy, while nosing out a plot by the head of the KGB to stage a violent coup during a Moscow summit that will end glasnost and set the world on its ear.

Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and unpredictable father and his bewilderment and grief on his father’s death. When Karl Ove becomes a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature. Knausgaard has created a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives.

Paolo the dachshund is trapped. Although he lives in Rome, a city filled with history and adventure, he is confined to a hair salon. Paolo dreams of the sweet life - la dolce vita - in the Eternal City. And then, one day, he escapes! Paolo throws himself into the city, finding adventure at every turn. Join our hero as he discovers the wonders of Rome: the ruins, the food, the art, the opera, and - of course - the cats. Everyone will cheer the daring of this bighearted dog, whose story shows that even the smallest among us can achieve great things.

Jean Zimmerman's new novel tells of the dramatic events that transpire when an alluring, blazingly smart eighteen-year-old girl named Bronwyn, reputedly raised by wolves in the wilds of Nevada, is adopted in 1875 by the Delegates, an outlandishly wealthy Manhattan couple, and taken back East to be civilized and introduced into high society. Bronwyn hits the highly mannered world of Edith Wharton - era Manhattan like a bomb. A series of suitors, both young and old, find her irresistible, but the willful girl's illicit lovers begin to turn up murdered.

Caliban’s my name. Ah, but what’s in a name? You imagine you know me from The Tempest. But God damn that wretch Will Shakespeare to some special circle of hell. He had a nasty habit - recall Richard III - of skewing history to his own purposes. Caliban? He ain’t nothing like the inept villain painted by that upstart crow. I’m here to set the record straight. Bring my mom Sycorax, sorceress of captivating clefts, back from the grave. Relate how I came to triumph over her murderer, the magician Prospero.

A heartrending, at times darkly comic but ultimately redemptive novel, Paolo Giordano’s The Human Body is an exploration of brotherhood and family, of modern war, and the wars we wage within ourselves. It is a novel that reminds us of what it means to be human. A platoon of young men and a single woman leave Italy for one of the most dangerous places on Earth. At their forward operating base in Afghanistan; this band of inexperienced soldiers navigates the irreversible journey from youth to adulthood.

An epic poem for children of all ages, Here Come the Nothing Heads tells the tale of Sneezy McSneezerson, Grouchy McGroucherson, and Fluffy McFlufferson, who live in the fanciest pumpkin high atop Pumpkin Ridge, but they are banished by town elders because they can't get along with each other or anyone else. They must travel to Happy Hollow, home of the mysterious tribe of Nothing Heads, and learn how to live in peace. The trials and tribulations of their adventure force them to look at life in a brand new way that was as old as time itself.

Abandoned years ago to the foster-care system, two young brothers end up in an unimaginable hell, and when one dies, the other vows revenge on those responsible. Chicago Fire Department veteran Reed Solliday immediately knows he needs help when an autopsy reveals that a young girl found in the wreckage of an explosion was raped and murdered before fire ripped through the house. Determined to bury herself in work after her partner is shot, Detective Mia Mitchell understands Solliday's case will be her most challenging to date.

Legendary spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon has at long last severed ties with Israeli intelligence and settled quietly with his beautiful wife and their young twins in Venice, the only place he has ever truly known peace. But when the eccentric London art dealer Julian Isherwood asks Gabriel to investigate the circumstances surrounding the rediscovery and lucrative sale of a centuries-old painting, he is drawn into a deadly game of cat and mouse where nothing is as it seems.

The summer after World War II, two men form an uneasy bond that inevitably leads to a mysterious accident that shatters the tranquility between them.

It is 1943, and the Nazis' stranglehold over Europe is starting to loosen. In a corner of Norway, work is underway at a remote mountain factory to alter that course.... Kurt Nordstrum is a courageous fighter who has lost everything. His fiancée. His unit. His cause. When Kurt learns of the Nazis' atomic research in his homeland, he teams up with a group of patriotic fighters driven by one goal: to disrupt activity at the heavily guarded factory.