Showing results by narrator "Mark Bramhall" in All Categories

At the beginning of November 1942, it looked as if the Axis powers could still win the Second World War; at the end of that month, everyone realized that it was just a matter of time before they would lose. In between was El Alamein, Guadalcanal, the French North Africa landings, the Japanese retreat in New Guinea, and the Soviet encirclement of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. It may have been the most important month of the 20th century. In this riveting historical marvel, Peter Englund has reduced an epoch-making event to its basic component: the individual experience.

Following the success of his recent collections, The Cat’s Pajamas and One More for the Road, Ray Bradbury has once again pulled together a stellar group of stories sure to delight listeners of all ages. We’ll Always Have Paris is a treasure trove of Bradbury gems - eerie and strange, nostalgic and bittersweet, searching and speculative - all of which have never before been published. A brilliant addition to the master’s oeuvre, this wonderfully entertaining and imaginative collection is a joyous celebration of the lifelong work of a literary legend.

Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice. Now, in Art Is Life, Jerry Saltz draws on two decades of work to offer a real-time survey of contemporary art as a barometer of our times. Chronicling a period punctuated by dramatic turning points—from the cultural reset of 9/11 to the rolling social crises of today—Saltz traces how visionary artists have both documented and challenged the culture.

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.

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.

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.

Inspector Hector Salgado is a transplanted Argentine living in Barcelona. While working on human trafficking case, Salgado’s violent temper got the best of him and he beat a suspect within an inch of his life. Ordered on probation, he fled to Argentina to cool off for a few months. Now he’s back in Barcelona and is eager for another big case. But his boss has other plans. He assigns Salgado to a routine accidental death: A college student fell from a balcony in one of Barcelona’s ritzier neighborhoods. As Salgado begins to piece together the life and world of the victim, he realizes that his death was not all that simple....

It is the late 1990s, and world-famous author Barron Docksteder has been murdered in the small rural town of Tryon, NC. His protégé knows the police are blaming the wrong person, but how can he prove it? Is the answer in one of the celebrated writer’s numerous notebooks? Accompanied by Docksteder’s highly trained guard dog, Doc, the former café owner embarks on an adventure to the heart of Carnival and Mardi Gras in the notorious French Quarter. There, fate and Docksteder’s notes bring him to the home of Desirée, the mysterious and alluring former Queen of Carnival.

Five stories and a novella highlight Burns’s range as a storyteller and his ability to see life and all its emotions through a unique lens. This collection features his most personal and insightful stories to date. Featuring: "Redemption", "The Plight of Maximus Octavius Reinhold", "Hardwired", "Adrift at Sea", "The Final Countdown", and Grace: A Novella.

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.

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.

The treaty is so simple that the American president can hardly believe his luck. In exchange for a few million tons of grain, the Russians, gripped by famine, will withdraw all troops and missiles from Eastern Europe. What’s more, this great success comes in an election year! It’s too good to be true—and something is about to go wrong.

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.

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.

Memory of war always loomed large for Dwight Bogdanovic. After all, his immigrant grandfather volunteered to fight in World War I, and his working-class father joined up with the Canadian Army to fight the Nazis early in World War II. Yet it is only when Dwight's soldier son Bertrand is killed under mysterious circumstances in Afghanistan that he really tries to understand why men fight and die.

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.

When Henry receives a letter from an elderly taxidermist; it poses a puzzle that he cannot resist. As he is pulled into the world of this strange and calculating man, Henry becomes increasingly involved with the lives of a donkey and a howler monkey - named Beatrice and Virgil - and the epic journey they undertake together.

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.