Showing results by narrator "John Curless" in All Categories

When Joe is traveling to stay with his mother and stepfather for Christmas, little does he imagine the excitement and magical intrigue that await him when he falls headfirst into an evil plot to rid England of witches. With great bravery and more than a little help from his half sister, Esme, and a new friend, Twiggy, he has to muster all his courage and ingenuity to solve the riddles surrounding him and save his newfound friends.

Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer's intellectual and personal odyssey. The 70 essays collected here, written over the last 10 years, cover an astonishing range of subjects.

Once the toast of good society in Victoria's England, the extraordinary conjurer Edward Moon no longer commands the respect that he did in earlier times. Still, each night he returns to the stage of his theater to amaze his devoted, albeit dwindling, audience, aided by his partner, the Somnambulist - a silent, hairless, hulking giant who, when stabbed, does not bleed. But these are strange, strange times in England, with the oddest of sorts prowling London's dank underbelly.

Central Europe is not just a space on a map but also a region of shared experience - of mutual borrowings, impositions and misapprehensions. From the Roman Empire onwards, it has been the target of invasion from the east. In the Middle Ages, Central Europeans cast their eastern foes as 'the dogmen'. They would later become the Turks, Swedes, Russians and Soviets, all of whom pulled the region apart and remade it according to their own vision.

David Mark draws on his experience as a journalist to pen Original Skin, the sequel to his debut novel, The Dark Winter. Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy is a cop with a troubled past and a deep-seated need to see justice served. Here, he faces off against a new foe - a serial killer bent on revealing his victims’ darkest sins.

It should be an open-and-shut case. Samuel Szajkowski, a recently hired history teacher, walked into a school assembly with a gun and murdered three students and a colleague before turning the weapon on himself. It was a tragedy that could not have been predicted. Szajkowski, it seems clear, was a psychopath beyond help. Yet as Detective Inspector Lucia May begins to piece together the testimonies of the various witnesses, an uglier and more complex picture emerges.

The Well-Tuned Brain is a call to action. Swept along by the cascading advances of today's technology, most of us take for granted that progress brings improvement. Despite spectacular material advance, however, the evidence grows that we are failing to create a sustainable future for humanity. We are out of tune with the planet that nurtures us.

A History of the Church Through Its Buildings takes the listener to meet people who lived through momentous religious changes in the very spaces where the story of the Church took shape. Buildings are about people, the people who conceived, designed, financed, and used them. Their stories become embedded in the very fabric itself, and as the fabric is changed through time in response to changing use, relationships, and beliefs, the architecture becomes the standing history of passing waves of humanity.

In the New York Police Department's 7th Precinct on the Lower East Side, Detective Ronny Alto is investigating a crime that's left one man dead and the other in a medically induced coma after surviving a shot to the head. One hope is that Brishen Ayres, a boxing coach and legend in the gypsy community in England, will wake up and reveal the person - or people - responsible for the murder of his protégé Shay Helden and his own mutilation. Another hope is Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy.

It's been three months since Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy returned home, or to what was left of it after a horrific tragedy. All that remained was charred masonry, broken timbers, and dried blood - a crude reminder of the home invasion and explosion that tore his family apart. McAvoy's wife and daughter are safe, he's been assured; he just wishes he knew where they were. As McAvoy wrestles with his guilt, self-hatred, and helplessness, trouble persists in stormy Hull.

R. N. Morris received accolades from numerous publications, including the Sunday Times, who called this work "extraordinarily vivid" and "sophisticated." This enveloping crime novel ventures into the dark heart of 19th century Russia as detective Porfiry Petrovich investigates the poisoning of a doctor's wife and their autistic son.

In this fascinating exploration, geneticist Bryan Sykes turns his sights on the United States, one of the most genetically variegated countries in the world. From the blue-blooded pockets of old-WASP New England to the vast tribal lands of the Navajo, Bryan Sykes takes us on a historical genetic tour, interviewing genealogists, geneticists, anthropologists, and everyday Americans with compelling ancestral stories.

He was a solitary, sightless adventurer who fought the slave trade in Africa, survived a frozen captivity in Siberia, hunted rogue elephants in Ceylon, and helped chart the Australian outback. James Holman (1786-1857) became "one of the greatest wonders of the world he so sagaciously explored". In his day a celebrity, he was a best-selling author, but one who outlived his fame and died in obscurity. A Sense of the World is a spellbinding and moving rediscovery of one of history's most epic lives.