Showing results by narrator "Simon Vance" in All Categories

A struggling boy begins a life-changing journey when a disgusting guest disturbs his dinner. As he encounters other sources of suffering, the boy must investigate fundamental truths he has believed about himself, love, and life. He confronts the most persistent questions of life: What am I? What causes me to suffer? How can I be at peace with the traumas of the past and the uncertainty of the future? What determines how I experience all this?

A sinister masterpiece, Our Mutual Friend was Dickens' last completed novel. It is perhaps his ultimate vision of a dark, macabre London and the corrupting power of money.

Seventeen years ago, Criminal Inspector Ewert Grens was called to the scene of a brutal crime. A family had been murdered, and the only survivor - and witness - was the five-year-old daughter. The girl was placed in the witness protection program, and the case went cold, but years later, Grens is still haunted by the seemingly random slaying and the little girl who was spared. So when he learns that the apartment where the crime occurred is now the scene of a mysterious break-in, Grens immediately fears that someone is intent on silencing the only witness.

Current events have deep roots, and the key to navigating today’s roiling policies lies in the events that started it all — the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath. Despite initial attempts to downplay the crisis as a local incident, what happened on Wall Street beginning in 2008 was, in fact, a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and dockyards of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

At the height of World War I, as battles raged in the trenches and in the air, another struggle for survival was being waged in the most notorious POW camp in all of Germany: Holzminden. A land-locked Alcatraz of sorts, it was home to the most troublesome Allied prisoners - and the most talented at escape. The Grand Escape tells the remarkable tale of a band of pilots who pulled off an ingenious plan and made it out of enemy territory in the biggest breakout of WWI, inspiring their countrymen in the darkest hours of the war.

Having learned the identity of her father's assassin, Adare flees the Dawn Palace in search of allies to challenge the coup against her family. Few trust her, but when she is believed to be touched by Intarra, patron goddess of the empire, the people rally to help her retake the capital city. As armies prepare to clash, the threat of invasion from barbarian hordes compels the rival forces to unite against their common enemy.

An exploration of love, need, and the ineluctable force of the past, Nocturnes reveals these individuals to us with extraordinary precision and subtlety, and with the arresting psychological and emotional detail that has marked all of Kazuo Ishiguro's acclaimed works of fiction.

Once a member of the king's personal guard, Guillot dal Villevauvais spends most days drinking and mourning his wife and child. He’s astonished - and wary - when the Prince Bishop orders him to find and destroy a dragon. He and the Prince Bishop have never exactly been friends, and Gill left the capital in disgrace five years ago. So why him? And, more importantly, how is there a dragon to fight when the beasts were hunted to extinction centuries ago by the ancient Chevaliers of the Silver Circle?

A disturbing audiotape has made its way to General Charles Ferguson, adviser to the Prime Minister, and from him to the President of the United States: battlefield chatter from an ambush in Helmand province, Afghanistan, in which twelve U.S. Army Rangers and a British medical team died. Most of the Taliban voices are Afghan, but not all of them — shockingly, some of them are British, and one in particular, the voice of the commander, bears an Irish accent.

From Victorian India to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes listeners on a wondrous journey through time as a computer programmer trapped in a mind-numbing job hits upon a curious item that will forever change his life. When Antar discovers the battered I.D. card of a long-lost acquaintance, he is suddenly drawn into a spellbinding adventure across centuries and around the globe, into the strange life of L. Murugan....

In this epic culmination of the series, in a war in which thousands are dying, Desil must protect the only thing that can stop the massacre. But there is little he can do with only two allies. They must somehow elude their many enemies while figuring out how to unite their comrades, who face seemingly insurmountable challenges of their own. There is no room for error, no time to hide. The only way success even seems possible is with a plan that might just destroy part of Desil’s world.

Gavin Guile is the Prism, the most powerful man in the world. He is high priest and emperor, a man whose power, wit, and charm are all that preserves a tenuous peace. But Prisms never last, and Guile knows exactly how long he has left to live: Five years to achieve five impossible goals. But when Guile discovers he has a son, born in a far kingdom after the war that put him in power, he must decide how much he's willing to pay to protect a secret that could tear his world apart.

In his most dazzling novel since the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and arms dealer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents.

Kate and her younger brother, Tom, lead dull, uninteresting lives. And if their dull, uninteresting parents are anything to go by, they don't have much to look forward to. Why can't Kate have thrilling adventures and save the world the way people do in books? Even her 11th birthday is shaping up to be mundane - that is, until her mysterious and highly irresponsible Uncle Herbert, whom she's never even met before, surprises her with the most unexpected, exhilarating, inappropriate birthday present of all time: a colossal steam locomotive called the Silver Arrow.

A year has passed since Auric Manteo descended into the haunted depths of a Djao ruin to return a lethal artifact, only to face down a bloodthirsty, imprisoned god. Now, his daughter, Agnes, comes to bring him back to the capital with promises of hidden secrets finally revealed. But the city decays, poisonous disorder is rife, and whispered prophecy foretells of cataclysm and doom. Summoned by their no-longer human queen, Auric and Agnes are commanded to carry out an impossible task, one that can be accomplished only with the mysterious blade, Szaa’da’shaela.

Bond was supposed to be on leave. But SPECTRE leader Tamil Rahani, dying from injuries suffered at Bond's hand, is determined to make it the holiday to die for. With a price on his head, Bond must evade the world's greatest assassins in a ruthless game of cat-and-mouse across Europe, while trying to save the lives of the two women who matter to him most, his housekeeper May and Miss Moneypenny. But Bond has been a target before. And when it comes to staying alive, nobody does it better than 007.

In all of literature, few antagonists have displayed the ruthless cunning and unscrupulous deceit of Iago, the antagonist to Othello. Often described as Machiavellian, Iago is a fascinating psychological specimen: at once a shrewd expert of the human mind and yet, himself a deeply troubled man.

The Man Who Laughs (“L’Homme qui Rit”) was called by its author “A Romance of English History,” and was written during the period Hugo spent in exile in Guernsey. Like The Toilers of the Sea, its immediate predecessor, the main theme of the story is human heroism, confronted with the superhuman tyranny of blind chance. As a passionate cry on behalf of the tortured and deformed, and the despised and oppressed of the world, The Man Who Laughs is irresistible.

In the long hot summer of 1939, Britain is preparing for war, but on a riverside farm in Suffolk there is excitement of another kind. Mrs. Pretty, a widowed farmer, has had her hunch proved correct that the strange mounds on her land hold buried treasure. As an archaeological dig proceeds against a background of mounting national anxiety, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary find, and the discovery leads to a host of jealousies and tensions.

Desil and a few allies must race to obtain two rare ingredients that could create a swing of power strong enough to end the burgeoning war. Hundreds have already perished in battle, and thousands more are likely to die, pitting time against Desil and his allies. But they aren't the only ones scrambling to collect these ingredients in forgotten corners of the world. One is a king desperate for more power with an entire army at his disposal. The other contender remains a mystery, though his abilities are vast.