Showing results by narrator "James Langton" in All Categories

The story is about a two-dimensional world referred to as Flatland. All existence is limited to length and breadth in Flatland, its inhabitants unable even to imagine a third dimension. The amiable narrator, A Square, provides an overview of this fantastic world---its physics and metaphysics, its history, customs, and religious beliefs. But when a strange visitor mysteriously appears and transports the incredulous Flatlander to Spaceland, a land of three dimensions, his worldview is forever shattered.

In 1946, after five years as a prisoner - first as a Soviet POW in Nazi concentration camps, then as a deportee in the Arctic Gulag - 29-year-old Lev Mishchenko unexpectedly received a letter from Sveta, the sweetheart he had hardly dared hope was still alive. Amazingly, over the next eight years, the lovers managed to exchange more than 1,500 messages and even to smuggle Sveta herself into the camp for secret meetings. Their recently discovered correspondence is the only known real-time record of life in Stalin's Gulag.

In modern-day London, architectural historian and recovering alcoholic Annie Kendall hopes to turn her life around and restart her career by locating several long-missing pieces of ancient Judaica. Geoff Harris, an investigative reporter, is soon drawn into her quest, both by romantic interest and suspicions about the head of the Shalom Foundation, the organization sponsoring her work. He's also a dead ringer for the ghost of a monk Annie believes she has seen at the flat she is subletting in Bristol House.

1351 BC: Akhenaten the Sun-Pharaoh rules supreme in Egypt... until the day he casts off his crown and mysteriously disappears into the desert, his legacy seemingly swallowed up by the remote sands beneath the Great Pyramids of Giza.

Elixir spans five thousand years, from the beginnings of civilization to the parched American Sun Belt of today. It is a story of human endeavor: our present-day interaction with this most essential resource has deep roots in the remote past, and every human culture has been shaped by its relationship to water.

Set in contemporary India as well as that of several hundred years in the past, The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming continues the adventures of Anand and his efforts to become a fully fledged member of The Brotherhood of the Conch. This time Anand's journey takes him back to Moghul times, as he encounters powerful sorcerers, spoiled princes, noble warriors and evil jinns. Divakaruni is a master storyteller, and once again she weaves a vibrant tapestry of action, suspense, and rare beauty.

The fascinating characters that roam in Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress. With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present.

King Cullin may be known as "the Dragon Slayer", but he fears his son’s legacy will be as "King Maurice Who Speaks with Proper Grammar". The boy keeps his nose buried in parchments, starry-eyed at the idea of noble knights and eager to hand royal gold to any con man hawking a unicorn horn. Tonight, though, Cullin will educate the prince in the truth behind minstrels’ silly songs of glory….

A Yellow Duster follows the story of a couple that has recently come into a large amount of money. They spend a year traveling with an old friend of the husband, who notices that the husband is never without a certain collection of curios. The friend is fascinated by the curios, and decides that he needs to talk to the husband about the collection. When he asks about a specific piece, a yellow duster, the husband recounts the tale of how he discovered his wife's true love for him.

Hermann Hesse's famous and influential novel Siddhartha is perhaps the most important and compelling allegory produced in the last hundred years. Integrating Eastern and Western spiritual traditions with psychoanalysis and philosophy, this strangely simple tale, written with a deep and moving empathy for humanity, has touched the lives of millions since its original publication in 1922.

Raymond Gunt likes to think of himself as a pretty decent guy - he believes in karma, and helping his fellow man, and all that other good stuff. Sure, he can be foulmouthed, occasionally misogynistic, and can just generally rub people the wrong way - through no fault of his own! So with all the positive energy he’s creating, it’s a little perplexing to consider the recent downward spiral his life has taken.… Could the universe be trying to tell him something?

Nashville's Bart and the Cousins, in England on a road trip, have a chart-topping song. Unfortunately, Bart also has an indictment back in the USA over an underage groupie. Keeping that hot news out of the London papers is a job for Doug Perkins of the PR firm Perkins and Tate. Doug soon finds that you can take the boy out of the country...but he's still going to run after jailbait.

In the World War II era, Geoffrey Pyke was described as one of the world's great minds - to rank alongside Einstein. Pyke was an inventor, adventurer, polymath, and unlikely hero of both world wars. He earned a fortune on the stock market, founded an influential pre-school, wrote a bestseller, and came up with the idea for the US and Canadian Special Forces. Henry Hemming is the first reporter to sift through this extraordinary new information and finally tell Pyke's astonishing story in full: his brilliance, his flaws, and his life of adventures, ideas, and secrets.

Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus distill their remarkable firsthand experiences of political and military interventions into a potent examination of what we can and cannot achieve in a new era of "nation building." As they delve into the massive, military-driven efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans, the expansion of the EU, and the bloodless "color" revolutions in the former Soviet states, they reveal each effort's consequences for international relations, human rights, and our understanding of state building.

Livia’s been planning her wedding to Jed for ages. Now, at the venue in beautiful Barcelona, with her dress pressed and the guests all on their way, she’s only left one tiny detail until the last minute: letting the groom know he’s about to get hitched. But as far as Jed’s concerned, they’ve been bumping along just fine for ten years and even have a baby on the way, so why spoil things with an ‘I do’? Especially when he’d really rather not. Meanwhile the guests are arriving with plenty of baggage of their own.

Somebody’s gunning for Josh Michaels. They must be. There’s no other reason why a stranger would run him off the road, taunt him with a “thumbs-down”, and leave him to die. Josh may have made some messy mistakes in the past, but who’s suddenly decided that he’s worth more dead than alive? As more and more near-fatal accidents befall him, there can be no denying it: he’s got a bull’s-eye on his back. But why? Is it revenge? Mistaken identity? Or is it something far more insidious?

Buster, an English springer spaniel who has served his comrades and his country with unstinting devotion, has saved thousands of lives. This is the story of his partnership with RAF Police Sergeant Will Barrow, told by Will himself, describing how each came to save the other's life. It is a relationship that produced some heroic feats - including sniffing out explosive vests that led to the arrests of two suicide bombers - in the dust and desert heat of Afghanistan and beyond.

Listeners will discover lost and forgotten women who wrote horror every bit as effectively as their male contemporaries. They will learn about their lives and careers, the challenges they faced as women working in a male-dominated field, the way they overcame those challenges, and the way they approached the genre - which was often subtler, more psychological, and more disturbing.

In a tiny village in Northeast Hungary, close to the Romanian border, a young unnamed boy warily observes day-to-day life and chronicles his family's struggles to survive. Like most of the villagers, his family is desperately poor, but their situation is worse than most - they are ostracized because of his father's Jewish heritage and his mother's connections to the Kulaks, who once owned land and supported the fascist Horthy regime before it was toppled by Communists.

Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos, is a luminous work of fiction inspired by the real-life, 37-year friendship between two towering figures of the late 19th century, famed writer and humorist Mark Twain and legendary explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley.