Showing results by narrator "Mark Bramhall" in All Categories

In this collection on love and loss, hopes and dreams, and memory and regret, The Old Men Who Row Boats and Other Stories takes the listener on an insightful journey through Spain and Portugal. These 14 stories convey real emotion through compelling, simple language and human interaction that resonates in the authentic beauty of small moments.

In a dusty corner of a basement in a rambling Victorian house in northern New Hampshire, a door has long been sealed shut with 39 six-inch-long carriage bolts. The home's new owners are Chip and Emily Linton and their twin ten-year-old daughters. Together they hope to rebuild their lives there after Chip, an airline pilot, has to ditch his 70-seat regional jet in Lake Champlain due to double engine failure. The body count? Thirty-nine.

Natural-born healer Emma Starling once had big plans for her life, but she's lost her way. A medical school dropout, she's come back to small-town Everton, New Hampshire, to care for her father, who is dying from a mysterious brain disease. Clive Starling has been hallucinating small animals, as well as having visions of the ghost of a long-dead naturalist, Ernest Harold Baynes, once known for letting wild animals live in his house. This ghost has been giving Clive some ideas on how to spend his final days.

Cutie Grackle is used to being different—she lives alone on a mountain with her feeble-minded uncle, and when she’s not sucking pebbles to trick her stomach into feeling full, she’s chatting with a weathered garden gnome for company. But having a flock of ravens follow you is more than just different. Cutie worries the birds are connected to the curse Uncle Horace tends to mutter about. And she’s right. The ravens present her with a fortune from a cookie, and when she touches it, she’s pulled into a vision from her family’s past.

Young, free and...dead. Senior staff at Alemany Cosmetics company come home with a secret after a team-building course in a remote country house. Now they are committing suicide one by one. Soon they may all be dead. Each has received a photo from an anonymous source of three dogs hanging dead from a tree near the house. Deciphering the personalities of these high-earning executives and their power structure, Inspector Salgado has his own way of making them speak.

After Sara’s father, famous sculptor Thomas “TR” Harlow, is badly injured in a fire, she’s suddenly forced to care for a man who is more of a stranger than a parent. Once known as his muse, Sara long ago lost her father to his desire to live the celebrity life. Now TR’s abrasive and unpredictable presence in her home is reopening old wounds - and causing the rift in her already-strained marriage to deepen. As her young son begins bonding with the grandfather he never knew, Sara must decide if she can find it within herself to forgive the man who broke her heart all those years ago.

In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle - and also by herself, in her award-winning novel Alias Grace. In Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.

Here is an exceptionally engaging first novel from a commanding new voice in fiction, author of the award-winning and widely acclaimed story collection The Theory of Light and Matter.

"There," says Alice Hayward to Reverend Stephen Drew, just after her baptism, and just before going home to the husband who will kill her that evening and then shoot himself. Drew, tortured by the cryptic finality of that short utterance, feels his faith in God slipping away and is saved from despair only by a meeting with Heather Laurent, the author of wildly successful, inspirational books about angels. Heather survived a childhood that culminated in her own parents’ murder-suicide, so she identifies deeply with Alice’s daughter, Katie, offering herself as a mentor to the girl and a shoulder for Stephen....

With this highly anticipated new audiobook, the author of the best-selling Life of Pi returns to the storytelling power and luminous wisdom of his master novel. The High Mountains of Portugal is a suspenseful, mesmerising story of a great quest for meaning, told in three intersecting narratives that touch the lives of three different people and their families, and taking us on an extraordinary journey through the last century.

On Strong Beach, an awkward teen with a terrible haircut has a reversal of fortune when he finds artefacts from the future lining a seagulls’ nest. By the Hox River in Nebraska, a window fuels both family pride and deadly revenge. In a godforsaken barn in what they suspect is Kentucky, Presidents Eisenhower, John Adams, and Rutherford B. Hayes are bemused to find themselves reincarnated as horses.

Writers & Lovers established Lily King as one of our most beloved authors of contemporary fiction. Now, for the first time ever, King collects 10 of her finest short stories, opening fresh realms of discovery for avid and new listeners alike.

Evokes the master of Barcelona-set narrative, Carlos Ruiz Zafon' Independent When the death of a young witness in a case of human trafficking and voodoo provokes the normally calm Inspector Salgado to beat someone up, he is swiftly removed from the project. Instead, he is sent to investigate a teenager's fall to his death in one of Barcelona's uptown areas.

From the author of the international publishing sensation Life of Pi comes the story of a quest for a lost relic. The journey takes us from Africa in the 1600s through Portugal at the turn of the last century to contemporary North America. Showcasing Martel's trademark delight in the fundamental stories that unite us, The High Mountains of Portugal unfolds with a dazzling lightness of touch.

In January 1945, in the waning months of World War II, a small group of people begin the longest journey of their lives: an attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich, from Warsaw to the Rhine if necessary, to reach the British and American lines.

Among the group is 18-year-old Anna Emmerich, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats. There is her lover, Callum Finella, a 21-year-old Scottish prisoner of war who was brought from the stalag to her family's farm as forced labour.

After a company retreat in a remote country house, senior employees of Alemany Cosmetics return with a dark secret. They’ve each received an anonymous, menacing email of only two words: “Never forget”. What’s worse, the message is accompanied by a nightmarish photo attachment showing the bodies of dogs—hung to death from a tree—near the very same farm estate they just visited. When they begin killing themselves, one by one, the connection between the shocking photos and the suicides baffles Barcelona law enforcement and corporate think tanks alike.

Set in the bathroom of an old house just before dawn on a night in June, Centuries of June is a black comedy about a man who is attempting to tell the story of how he ended up on the floor with a hole in his head. But he keeps getting interrupted by a series of suspects - eight women lying in the bedroom just down the hall. Each woman tells a story drawn from five centuries of American myth and legend in a wild medley of styles and voices.

Reed Futrell is an engineer at a uranium-enrichment plant in heartland America. His father worked at the very same plant before him. Despite his father's death in a tragic accident at the atomic plant years ago, Reed stays on, proud to perform demanding and dangerous work for the benefit of the nation. As for the radioactive "incidents" he has endured, Reed prefers to think about other things, such as Hubble photographs of distant galaxies and Albert Einstein, his dog.

1963. In a desolate Russian penal colony, the radio broadcasts news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vasin's new posting as director of a gulag camp in the middle of the frozen tundra is far from a promotion. This is where disgraced agents, like Vasin, disappear - sent to die forgotten. And quietly. But tensions in the camp are running high and when a violent revolt breaks out, Vasin finds himself on the run. With him is a mysterious prisoner - who holds the key to the most dangerous secret in the world: who ordered Kennedy's murder.

The Tsar of Love and Techno begins in 1930s Leningrad, where a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day he receives an antique painting of a dacha inside a box of images due to be altered. The mystery behind this painting threads together the stories that follow, which take us through a century and introduce a cast of characters including a Siberian beauty queen and many others.