Showing results by narrator "Simon Slater" in All Categories

Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea at Margate. For reasons best known to herself, Jack’s widow, Amy, declines to join them. On the surface a simple tale of an increasingly bizarre day’s outing, this Booker Prize-winning, internationally acclaimed novel is a resonant and classic exploration of the complexity and courage of ordinary lives.

The Chemin, also known as the Camino de Santiago, is a centuries-old pilgrim route that ends in Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. Every year, thousands of walkers - some devout, many not - follow the route that wends through quaint small villages and along busy highways alike, a journey unlike any other. Zoe, an artist from California who’s still reeling from her husband’s sudden death, has impulsively decided to walk the Camino, hoping to find solace and direction. Martin, an engineer from England, is road-testing a cart of his own design…and recovering from a messy divorce.

An extraordinary reimagining of the life of one of the greatest screen comedians the world has ever known: a man who knew both adoration and humiliation; who loved and was loved in turn; who betrayed and was betrayed; who never sought to cause pain to others yet left a trail of affairs and broken marriages in his wake...and whose life was ultimately defined by one relationship of such tenderness and devotion that only death could sever it: his partnership with the man he knew as Babe. he is Stan Laurel. But he did not really exist. Stan Laurel was a fiction.

The seventeenth book in the dramatic and intriguing story about the colonisation of Australia: a country made of blood, passion, and dreams. Destinies intertwine and brutal battles ensue to secure a brighter future. During the 1860s, Australian settlers, among them Lady Kitty Broome and Adam Vincent, venture out on new, exciting adventures which will lead to a war between cultures, friends and lovers, as they fight for the future of their world.

If your children were forced to testify against you, what terrible secrets would they reveal? Moscow 1945. As Stalin and his courtiers celebrate victory over Hitler, shots ring out. On a nearby bridge, a teenage boy and girl lie dead. But this is no ordinary tragedy and these are no ordinary teenagers, but the children of Russia’s most important leaders who attend the most exclusive school in Moscow. Is it murder? A suicide pact? Or a conspiracy against the state?

In Rise Like Lions, Booker Prize winning writer Ben Okri has compiled a collection of poems that celebrate the many voices of politics, from polemics and rallying cries to lyrics and meditations. Many of these poems have resonated with readers over lifetimes and through generations, from William Blake to Marvin Gaye. In exploring the impact political poems have on ideas, vision, protest, change and truth, Okri demonstrates how the need for this strand of poetry is as great as it has ever been, and its inspiration just as powerful.

The twenty-third book in the dramatic and intriguing story about the colonisation of Australia: a country made of blood, passion, and dreams. A new century has dawned as Australia forms their country. New hopes characterise the lives of the young Australians. Some had to the Outback in search of gold and glory. Others find their fulfilment in politics and seize power in the newly-formed country. Some are even moving north to conquer new lands.

Light in the Darkness examines how mankind has always looked to the skies, mapping the journey from millennia ago when we turned our gaze to the heavens, to modern astrophysics. Heino Falcke and Jorg Romer entertainingly and compellingly chart the breakthrough research of Falcke's team, an unprecedented global community of international colleagues developing a telescope complex enough to look directly into a black hole - a hole where light vanishes, and time stops.

Set in Northfield, an understaffed military psychiatric hospital immediately before the NHS is founded, Walking Wounded is the story of a doctor and his patient: David Reece, a young journalist-to-be whose wartime experiences in Burma have come back to haunt him violently; and Daniel Carter, one of the senior psychiatrists, a man who is fighting his own battles as well as those of his patients.

The twentieth book in the dramatic and intriguing story about the colonisation of Australia: a country made of blood, passion, and dreams. Jon Fisher and Harry Ryan return to Australia. At their return, Jon Fisher learns of the problem that his family are facing with the conflict of the wealthy squatters and the so-called 'selectors'. The threat of war and internal fighting looms over the family as we near the turn of the century.

The twenty-first book in the dramatic and intriguing story about the colonisation of Australia: a country made of blood, passion, and dreams. The fires of nationalism are being kindled across the continent – especially in the hearts of the young. The children of The Seafarers and The Mariners are growing up in a young country only just coming to nationhood. Some cry for unity while others raise the spectre of race hatred and violence. It is hard to see how these young Australians could ever realise their dream of one free and mighty land.

In 1849, Hull is a city forgotten and abandoned, in the grip of a cholera outbreak that sees its poorest citizens cut down by the cartload. Into this world of flame and grief comes Mesach Stone, a former soldier lost upon his way. He's been hired as bodyguard by a Canadian academic hunting for the bones of the apostle Simon the Zealot, rumoured to lie somewhere in Lincolnshire. Stone can't see why ancient bones are of interest in a world full of them...but then a woman he briefly loved is killed.

Krakow, 1585. Summoned by the King of Poland to help save his dying niece, Edward Kelley and his master, alchemist and scholar Dr John Dee, discover a dark secret at the heart of The Countess Bathory’s malady. But perhaps the cure will prove more terrifying than the alternative...England, 2013Jackdaw Hammond lives in the shadows, a practitioner and purveyor of occult materials. But when she learns of a young woman found dead on a train, her body covered in arcane symbols, there’s no escaping the attention of police consultant Felix Guichard.

Wednesday's Child is the sixth novel in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series, following on from Past Reason Hated. When two social workers, investigating reports of child abuse, appear at Brenda Scupham's door, her fear of authority leads her to comply meekly with their requests. Even when they say that they must take her seven-year old daughter, Gemma, away for tests.... It is only when they fail to return Gemma the following day that Brenda realises something has gone terribly wrong.

Gallows View is the first novel in Peter Robinson's best-selling Inspector Banks series. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks has recently moved to the Yorkshire Dales from London to escape the stress of the metropolis. But he soon finds that life in the country is not quite as idyllic as he had imagined. A peeping Tom is frightening the women of Eastvale. Two glue-sniffing thugs are breaking into homes. An old woman may or may not have been murdered....

First of the Summer Wine is the remarkable story of three Yorkshire cricketers from the Golden Age—George Hirst, Wilfred Rhodes and Schofield Haigh—who transformed their county's fortunes, inspired a generation of cricketers and left a unique legacy on the game. Between them, Hirst, Rhodes and Haigh scored over 77,000 runs and took almost 9,000 wickets in a combined 2,500 appearances, helping Yorkshire to seven County Championship triumphs.

Despite the many films and television programmes over the decades since the end of the Second World War that portrays our allied heroes as grown-up men and women, the Battle of Britain was in the main actually fought and won by teenagers. The average age of an RAF fighter pilot was just 20 years old. Many of the men and women who designed and built their planes were even younger.

Paris, 1920. When Coco Chanel meets Igor Stravinsky, the exiled composer accepts the wealthy designer's offer to bring his family to summer at her villa. Soon she and her guest embark upon an affair which is complicated by their rigid devotion to their work, and Stravinsky's commitment to his family. The two lovers must consider the depth of their feelings, and whether, with the autumn drawing in, theirs is a relationship that can survive.

In the usually peaceful town of Eastvale, a simmering tension has now reached breaking point. An antinuclear demonstration has ended in violence, leaving one policeman stabbed to death. Fired by professional outrage, Superintendent 'Dirty Dick' Burgess descends with vengeful fury on the inhabitants of Maggie's Farm, an isolated house high on the daleside.

One foggy night, Deborah Harrison is found lying in the churchyard behind St Mary's, Eastvale. She has been strangled with the strap of her own school satchel. But Deborah was no typical 16-year-old. Her father was a powerful financier who moved in the highest echelons of industry, defence and classified information. And Deborah, it seemed, enjoyed keeping secrets of her own....