Showing results by narrator "Greg Wagland" in All Categories

Martin Gilmour is an outsider. When he wins a scholarship to Burtonbury School, he doesn't wear the right clothes or speak with the right kind of accent. But then he meets the dazzling, popular and wealthy Ben Fitzmaurice and gains admission to an exclusive world. Soon Martin is enjoying tennis parties and Easter egg hunts at the Fitzmaurice family's estate, as Ben becomes the brother he never had.

A Christmas Carol is a work of power and beauty. It has delighted and enthralled readers since it was first published in 1843. Perhaps Charles Dickens’ best-loved work, the story follows the trials and tribulations of Ebenezer Scrooge, man of business and notorious skinflint even by the City’s stringent standards, who is taken on a journey of self-discovery by his late business partner, the spirit Jacob Marley, with the help of three supernatural apparitions: the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Yet to Come.

A recurrent dream you have goes on for years and years. Well, actually, it’s not a dream, it is, most assuredly a nightmare. Every night in sleep, you encounter the same people, you hold the same conversations, you witness the same disturbing sights and invariably you wake up in a muck sweat, screaming, believing yourself to be in the room in the tower. But it’s just a nightmare, nothing to it, nothing remotely tangible, until… This is the premise of E. F. Benson’s celebrated ghost story, ‘

Darkus Knightley is used to expecting the unexpected. An extraordinary solver of crimes, with immense powers of deduction, and regularly found bedecked in tweed, Darkus is anything but the average 13-year-old. But he is the person to call when strange goings-on are afoot! Despite trying to leave his detective ways behind to lead a normal teenage life, when his father's loyal housekeeper, Bogna, goes missing, Darkus must return to the family fold and follow the clues to America and the bright lights of Las Vegas.

When theatregoers are treated to the gruesome spectacle of an actor’s lifeless body hanging on the stage, DI Stewart Gardener is immediately called in to investigate. Is the killer still in the audience? A lockdown is set in motion, but it is soon apparent that the murderer is able to come and go unnoticed. How do they do it? Is the killer a theatre worker or an actor? And what kind of grudge do they have to bear?

It is the 21st century, and on Mars a dedicated group of pioneers - among them some of Earth's finest brains - struggle to change the face of the planet. Science fiction writer Martin Gibson finally gets a chance to visit the research colony on the Red Planet. It's a dream come true - until he discovers the difficulties and perils of survival on another world...and the very real terror it holds.

The murder of professional astrologer Andrew Gorman seems a straightforward case for DCI Kenny Murrain – a tragic death resulting from an interrupted burglary. But when Gareth Clayburn, assistant to stage medium Justin Bannerman, is found dead in identical circumstances, Murrain begins to suspect the murders are linked. Meanwhile, Geoff Nolan, television personality and professor of psychology, is developing a new series exploring the psychology of the paranormal. Starting with Bannerman's work as a supposed spiritualist.

The Man Who Went Too Far: A Ghost Story by E. F. Benson opens one summer’s day in a beautiful, sequestered garden on the edge of the New Forest. A forty-something artist visits a friend to recuperate from a debilitating illness but is staggered to discover him looking remarkably young and oddly vibrant. He listens as this ‘boy’ explains his new found philosophy, expands on the delight he takes in the natural world all around him and describes the strangely haunting music he has begun to hear in the woods and among the reeds.

Paradise Lost Book IX by John Milton is read by Greg Wagland for Magpie Audio. Satan having come past the Earth, with meditated guile returns as a mist by Night into Paradise, enters into the Serpent sleeping. Adam and Eve in the Morning go forth to their labours, which Eve proposes to divide in several places, each labouring apart: Adam consents not, alleging the danger, lest that Enemy, of whom they were forewarned, should attempt her found alone....

From the best-selling author of true military classics Zero Six Bravo, The Nazi Hunters and Churchill's Secret Warriors. In the Spring of 1940, as Britain reeled from defeats on all fronts and America seemed frozen in isolation, one fear united the British and American leaders like no other: the Nazis had stolen a march on the Allies towards building the atomic bomb. So began the hunt for Hitler's nuclear weapons - nothing else came close in terms of priorities.

While staying at a friend’s house in an apparently humdrum London suburb, the sceptical Hugh Grainger sees and then converses with an unsettling stranger from his bedroom window in the very dead of night. But what could be the meaning of this curious visitation? ‘Hold very tight, please!’ E. F. Benson is well known for his Mapp and Lucia novels but his ghost and supernatural stories are marvellous jewels, combining elegant writing and moments of blood-curdling horror. Here Greg Wagland narrates one of the best of them, for Magpie Audio.

In a series of revolts starting in 1820, four military officers rode forth on horseback from obscure European towns to bring political freedom and a constitution to Spain, Naples, and Russia; and national independence to the Greeks. The men who launched these exploits from Andalusia to the snowy fields of Ukraine - Colonel Rafael del Riego, General Guglielmo Pepe, General Alexandros Ypsilanti, and Colonel Sergei Muraviev-Apostol - all hoped to overturn the old order.

Computer technology has improved exponentially over the last 50 years. But the headroom for bigger and better electronic solutions is running out. Our best hope is to engage the power of quantum physics. Brian Clegg explains algorithms and their quantum counterparts, explores the physical building blocks and quantum weirdness necessary to make a quantum computer and uncovers the capabilities of the current generation of machines.

Selected Poems by Edward Thomas (1878-1917) is read by Greg Wagland for Magpie Audio. The selection is as follows: 'March", "Old ManTears", "But These Things Also", "Melancholy", "The Glory", "Words", "Aspens", "This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong", "Rain", "No One So Much As You", "The Sun Used to Shine", "As the Team’s Head-Brass", "Gone, Gone Again", and "Lights Out The Lane".

Atticus Perennis, Roman prefect and hero of the seas, is stranded in Carthage. His Roman masters have all but abandoned him, and at his feet gape the jaws of an angry mercenary army. For while the senators and consuls of Rome bicker and debate, the mercenaries around Utica are running out of patience and strain at the leash, on the verge of war. And then, when a councillor is sent as a message to Atticus and his comrades, all but dead and hideously disfigured, the leash finally breaks....

It’s 1944 and Germany is facing its final defeat. 5,000 miles across the Allied dominated Atlantic, 22 men and five nuns aboard the Barquentine Deutschland are battling home to Kiel. Among them are a U-boat ace captured in a raid on Falmouth. A female American doctor caught in the nightmare of flying bombs. A gunboat commander who’s fought from the Solomons to the Channel and a rear admiral desperate to get some of the action. Allies and enemies, men and women, the hunters and the haunted all drawn into the eye of the storm.

Time is running out for the passengers and crew of the tourist cruiser Selene, incarcerated in a sea of choking lunar dust. On the surface her rescuers find their resources stretched to the limit by the mercilessly unpredictable conditions of a totally alien environment.

In 1970, Harold Stamp, a retarded 20-year-old, was convicted on disputed evidence and a retracted confession of brutally murdering his grandmother. Less than three years later he is dead, driven to suicide by isolation and despair. Thirty years on, Jonathan Hughes, an anthropologist specialising in social stereotyping, comes across the case by accident. He finds alarming disparities in the evidence and has little doubt that Stamp's conviction was a terrible miscarriage of justice. But how far is Hughes prepared to go in the search for justice?

Darkus Knightley, tweed-wearing, mega-brained, thoroughly logical 13-year-old investigator of the weird, was just getting used to having his dad back in his life. Then Alan Knightley went off-radar, again, leaving Darkus with a traumatised ex-bomb-disposal dog as his only partner in crime-solving. Now things are getting even stranger. Family pets are being savaged by a beast at a top London beauty spot. Policemen have been tracked and attacked by a particularly aggressive canine.

M. R. James wrote, arguably, the finest supernatural tales in English literature, and this collection contains the best of them, including ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’, ‘Lost Hearts’, ‘Casting the Runes’, and ‘Count Magnus’. James was something of an actor and gifted storyteller and read his tales aloud to select gatherings on many a Christmas Eve. His intention, he said, was to implant in his listener the idea that, ‘if I am not careful, something of this kind might happen to me!’