Showing results by narrator "Henrietta Meire" in All Categories

When Lady Althea accompanies her sister-in-law, Jane, to a house party at Ranleigh, she hopes it will be a welcome return to peace and tranquility. Long walks and lazy days are the things Althea needs to advance her scientific studies and to decide whether or not to give up her freedom and marry the handsome and enigmatic Duke of Norwich. However, when she finds the body of a guest in the ornamental pond, she is thrown into yet another mystery. In her search for the truth, she must unmask Napoleonic spies, dig up long buried secrets, and forge new breakthroughs in forensic science.

Nobody has written so powerfully of the relationship between and within India and the Western middle classes than Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In this selection of stories, chosen by her surviving family, her ability to tenderly and humorously view the situations faced by three (sometimes interacting) cultures - European, post-Independence Indian, and American - is never more acute.

In a land destabilized by unsafe air, wildfires, floods, viruses, supply shortages, and homegrown terror, Cass is raising three small children by herself in the city. Her husband, Nathaniel, has gone all too willingly to serve as a medic in an overseas war. His absence, and Cass's isolation, has brought her into an exhausted but harmonious rhythm with the children; while it's a frightening time, there is also a surprising, quiet tenderness in living on the edge of societal collapse.

The phony war has dragged out past Christmas into a dark and dreary New Year, 1940. In the blackout, someone murdered BBC engineer Frank Kennedy, making him more popular dead than alive. A blackmailer and bully, he sold out his friends, assaulted his Broadcasting House colleagues, and sabotaged his employer. Kennedy was also a government informant against the IRA. Despite arrests of members, the IRA is still planning more attacks against British civilians. Attacks Frank Kennedy might have been involved in.

When Emma Sky, an intrepid young British woman, volunteered to help rebuild Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, she had little idea what she was letting herself in for: a tour that would last over a decade, longer than that of any senior military or political official. As the only adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Kirkuk and the closest confidante to US General Odierno, Sky was valued for her controversial voice and outsider's point of view.

She arrives at the train station only to realize her bag had been stolen - her passport, credit cards, laptop, house key now all gone. And even more disturbing, when she goes to report the incident, she can’t recall her own name. All she has on her is a train ticket home. Suffering from stress-induced amnesia, the woman without a name is a source of mystery when she appears at the sleepy Wiltshire village where she thought she lived. She quickly becomes a source of conspiracy and fear among the townspeople. Why does one think he recognizes her from years earlier?

November, 1939. The British government has assembled a small group of intellectuals at an estate north of London as part of a top-secret codebreaking effort. Everything about it is clandestine. The facility is ringed with a veil of silence until one of the young female linguists is murdered. Britain's counterintelligence spymaster tasks Olivia Redmond with finding the killer and the motive. Olivia is sent in alone, without clues or suspects. Did the murder victim uncover a mole? Could Britain's program to break German enigma cyphers be compromised?

England, 1957. Olive Kersey’s only love never returned from World War II, and now she’s alone and penniless. Then the last person she ever expected to see again returns to Southwold. Olive’s childhood friend, Margery Paxton, arrives to claim her inheritance: Mersea House, a stately old home she plans to turn into the town’s only lodging. Olive’s life takes a sunny turn when Margery hires her to run the establishment. But Mersea House holds its own mysteries—and its own dangers. The past is never far behind for its inhabitants.

In a sparkling debut in the entertaining pop science vein of Mary Roach, scientist Emma Byrne examines the latest research to show how swearing can be good for you. She reveals how swearing has been around since the earliest humans began to communicate, and has been shown to reduce physical pain, to lower anxiety, to prevent physical violence, to help trauma victims recover language, and to promote human cooperation.

Miss V. Conroy is good at keeping secrets. She likes to sit as quiet as a mouse, neat and discreet. But when her father sends her to Kensington Palace to become the companion to Princess Victoria, Miss V soon finds that she can no longer remain in the shadows. Her father is Sir John Conroy, confidant and financial advisor to Victoria's mother, and he has devised a strict set of rules for the young princess that he calls the Kensington System.

London, 1944: As bombs start raining from the sky, two women rush out of a restaurant, leaving their possessions behind. Their chance meeting amid the chaos and destruction will have long-lasting consequences. Both beset by desperate problems, they take advantage of the wartime chaos to escape their humdrum lives and start again.

When Lu Spinney's 29-year-old son, Miles, flies up on his snowboard, "he knows he is not in control as he is taken by force up the ramp," writes his mother, "skewing sideways as his board clips the edge and then he is hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky ahead.... " He lands hard on the ice and falls into a coma. Thus begins the erratic loss - Miles first in a coma and then trapped in a fluctuating state of minimal consciousness - that unravels over the next five years.

1979. Leading businesswoman Rebecca is struggling to build healthy relationships. Her on off partner is a philandering police officer, part of the team chasing the Yorkshire Ripper who’s striking terror across the county. Then Rebecca meets Larry, the charming American, with a troubled past. And then of course there’s Mervyn, the creepy journalist who’s desperate for a girlfriend and willing to do anything to keep her in his life. With three very different men craving her attention, and a serial killer on the loose, Rebecca finds herself in a twisted game of cat and mouse.

When young English nurse Sibyl Lake is recruited as a spy to support the French resistance, she doesn’t realize the ultimate price she will end up paying. She arrives in Colmar, a French town surrounded by vineyards and swarming with German soldiers. Her fear is dampened by the joy of being reunited with her childhood sweetheart Jacques. Sibyl’s arrival has not gone unnoticed by Commander Wolfgang von Haagan. She realizes that letting him get closer is her best chance of learning enemy secrets. Yet despite her best intentions, Sibyl finds that betrayal does not come easy to her.

An unabridged audio collection spotlighting the "best of the best" science fiction stories published in 2016 by current and emerging masters of the genre, edited by Allan Kaster, as narrated by top voice talents.

The Club is a blistering, timely, and gripping novel set at Cambridge University, centering around an all-male dining club for the most privileged and wealthy young men at Cambridge and following an outsider who exposes the dark secrets of this group, the Pitt Club.

Anya Marleigh is a singer and sitar player in Queen Charlotte’s court. She is left a fortune by Dowager Countess Budleigh, one of her elderly clients who used to hire her for musical evenings. But there is a condition attached. Anya must marry before her next birthday if she wants to see any of the fortune. The executor of the will is an insufferably conceited man who must consent to her marriage—if he doesn’t give his consent, the fortune reverts to him.

Emma Temple sits looking out of the window in her beautiful apartment in the heart of London, surrounded by memories of her younger years as one of England’s most influential artists. Nearly 90, it would be easy to overlook her as a forgetful older lady. But Emma’s past, including her great love affair which survived two world wars, is about to come crashing into the present.

As she prepares for her wedding to Dominic, Catherine has never been happier or more excited about her future. But when she receives an anonymous package - a familiar snow globe with a very grisly addition - that happiness is abruptly threatened by secrets from her past. Her older sister, Rachel, died on a skiing holiday as a child. But Rachel was no angel: she was vicious and highly disturbed, and she made Catherine's life a misery. Catherine has spent years trying to forget her dead sister's cruel tricks.

Violently gang-raped when she was 13 years old, and raped three more times before the age of 18, Madeleine has experienced more trauma in her life than most ever will. Living in a state of shock and self-loathing, it took her years of struggle to confront the buried memories of that first attack and begin to undo the damage it wrought, as men continued to take advantage of her fragility in the worst possible way. Yet she found the heart to carry out the best revenge plan of all: leading a fulfilling and happy life.