Showing results by narrator "Simon Vance" in All Categories

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.

When a postwar search for London lodgings introduces ailing doctor John H. Watson to quirky chemist Sherlock Holmes, their collaboration in the art of observation and deduction begins. Congenial flatmates and even better colleagues, the pair is quickly drawn into a case of murder and revenge that has Scotland Yard at their wits’ end.

Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children, and was often ill and in pain.

Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is a rich wastrel who seduces her and makes her life miserable. When Tess meets Angel Clare, she is offered true love and happiness, but her past catches up with her and she faces an agonizing moral choice.

A week before Christmas, a young photographer discovers a plastic-wrapped corpse amid the sand dunes north of Cape Town. The only thing found on the corpse is a dead iPhone, but it doesn't take long for the police to identify the body as that of Ernst Richter - the tech whiz behind MyAlibi, an Internet service that provides unfaithful partners with sophisticated cover stories to hide affairs.

Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years.

This charge from Acts 20:28 only is the beginning of a solemn and overarching task to be personally involved and disciple all of your congregants. Richard Baxter's plea for shepherding his flock continues with a charge to pastors to verify their own spiritual walk and then walks them through various disciplines, strategies and goals to guide and instruct their congregation.

A time-space chiller-thriller in the Lovecraft Tradition. This is the second novel in Brian Lumley's Cthulhu Mythos series.

Can You Forgive Her? is the first of the six Palliser novels. Here Trollope examines parliamentary election and marriage, politics and privacy. As he dissects the Victorian upper class, issues and people shed their pretenses under his patient, ironic probe.

After escaping the horrors of Arkum Zul, Kael and his companions survive a terror-filled night on the ocean only to find themselves shipwrecked and stranded in the Wildlands. With forest tribals on the warpath and old enemies roaming the forest, Kael struggles to come to terms with what he is slowly becoming - a killer. A DeathWizard. In the fight against the evil that threatens to consume him, Kael learns that the Dwarven Mountains far to the north may hide an ancient monolith that holds the answer to the corruption that flows in his veins.

It is September 1940 - a year into the war - and as German bombs fall on Britain, fears grow of an impending invasion. Enemy fighter planes blacken the sky around the Epping Forest home of Susan Shepherd and her grandfather, Bertie. After losing her parents to influenza as a child, Susan found comfort in raising homing pigeons with Bertie. All her birds are extraordinary to Susan - loyal, intelligent, beautiful - but none more so than Duchess, who shares a special bond with Susan and an unusual curiosity about the human world.

The predecessor to Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk, T. H. White's nature-writing classic, The Goshawk, asks the age-old question: What is it that binds human beings to other animals? White, author of The Once and Future King and Mistress Masham's Repose, was a young writer who found himself rifling through old handbooks of falconry.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room is Gaston Leroux's masterpiece, and it turned out to be his most successful book during his lifetime. It is one of the classics of early twentieth century detective fiction.

Imperious American widow Beatrice Chavender is visiting her sister's country home near London when a most unfortunate thing happens: She takes a bite of inferior ham while having her breakfast. Soon everyone around her is suffering the consequences - her sister, her brother-in-law, the butler, poor Sally, Sally's fiancé, and even Mrs. Chavender's ex-fiancé, "Ham King" J. B. Duff.

DeathWizards have been the scourge of Talohna for over 5000 years; they are executed at birth or hunted to the death. There are no exceptions. Pulled by magic and blood sacrifice into a world he can't possibly begin to understand, Kael Symes soon finds himself the focus of a Talohna-wide manhunt. Desperate and trying to stay ahead of ArchWizard Giddeon Zirakus's execution squad, Kael soon discovers that Talohna's ArchWizard may be the least of his worries.

Two hundred years ago a loyalist family fled to England to escape the American War of Independence and seemingly vanished into thin air. American genealogist Jefferson Tayte is hired to find out what happened, but it soon becomes apparent that a calculated killer is out to stop him.

Paris, November 1945: John Russell is walking home along the banks of the Seine on a cold and misty evening when Soviet agent Yevgeny Shchepkin falls into step alongside him. Shchepkin tells Russell that the American intelligence will soon be asking him to undertake some low grade espionage on their behalf - assessing the strains between different sections of the German Communist Party - and that Shchepkin's own bosses in Moscow want him to accept the task and pass his findings on to them.

Fifty years after the Cuban revolution, the legendary wealth of the sugar magnate Julio Lobo remains emblematic of a certain way of life that came to an abrupt end when Fidel Castro marched into Havana. Known in his day as the King of Sugar, Lobo was for decades the most powerful force in the world sugar market, controlling vast swaths of the island's sugar interests.

George Uffenham, the eccentric sixth viscount of Uffenham, has just converted the family fortune into diamonds - and stashed them away in a secret hiding place. But as luck would have it, an unfortunate car accident soon thereafter causes him to forget the jewels' location. In order to recover the gems, he must let out his estate, Shipley Hall, to big-game hunter Clarissa Cork and return posing as the butler, Cakebread.

Gavin Guile is dying. He'd thought he had five years left—now he has less than one. With 50,000 refugees, a bastard son, and an ex-fiancée who may have learned his darkest secret, Gavin has problems on every side. All magic in the world is running wild and threatens to destroy the Seven Satrapies. Worst of all, the old gods are being reborn, and their army of color wights is unstoppable.