Showing results by narrator "Toby Longworth." in All Categories

Drawn into 'the nexus of the primeval cauldron of Space-Time', the Doctor and Peri are somewhat surprised to find themselves at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Is it really just chance that has brought them to the funfair? Or is their arrival somehow connected with the sinister presence of a rather familiar Chinese Mandarin?

Simone is one of the Glitterati, the elite living lives of luxury and leisure. Slave to the ever-changing tides—and brutal judgements—of fashion, he is immaculate. To be anything else is to be unfashionable, and no one wants to be unfashionable, or even worse, ugly. When Simone accidentally starts a new fashion with a nosebleed at a party, another Glitterati takes the credit. Soon their rivalry threatens to raze their opulent utopia to the ground, as no one knows how to be vicious like the beautiful ones.

Years after the appearance in the solar system of the immense, deserted spaceship, Rama, a second craft arrived, destined to become home for a group of human colonists. But now the colony has become a brutal dictatorship, terrorizing its own inhabitants Nicole Wakefield, condemned to death for treason, has escaped to New York. There she is reunited with her husband, but pursuit is not far behind and they are forced to flee to the subterranean corridors of New York inhabited by the menacing octospiders.

In 1922, Major Herbert Armstrong, a Hay-on-Wye solicitor, was found guilty of, and executed for, poisoning his wife, Katharine, with arsenic. Armstrong's case has all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, from a plot by Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers (indeed some aspects of his story appear in Sayers' Unnatural Death). It is a near-perfect whodunnit.

In the winter of 1959, private eye John Nyquist arrives in the village of Hoxley-on-the-Hale with only a package of cryptic photographs, and the frail hope of finding an answer to a question he's been asking since his childhood. But the villagers offer little help, as each day brings a twisted new rule in the name of a different Saint that they, and Nyquist, must follow. And there are whispers of the return of the Tolly Man, an avatar of chaos in a terrible mask....

I was wrong to think that there were floodlights. Nobody's got a torch lit. There's no need. She's difficult to look at. She's too bright. She's lighting the whole damn scene with her blood. Welcome to Vox. A city of perpetual night, existing under a star that burns in darkness. Light-starved citizens shoot up on Prometheus while the wealthy live in the radiance provided by three Hearts that beat light into the city. Aquila. Corvus. Cancer.

A city united in grief. A journalist ready to kill to keep his secrets. A copper capable of darker deeds than murderers. An unworldly detective fighting to save an innocent man. Newly appointed DS McAvoy is an outsider to his new force and must confront his darkest fears, while hunting a killer that nobody else believes in. In a landscape at once tender and brutal, McAvoy must tread the path between the darkness and the light, before facing an enemy who will brand him for life.

Skulking through customs with a suitcase full of truffles, toads singing the Marseillaise, taking pastis lessons and finding gold at the bottom of the garden, you might think there is little time left for pleasures of the table. Toujours Provence proves that while you might not be able to get away from it all, you can have fun trying.

1922 was a year of great turbulence and upheaval. Its events reverberated throughout the rest of the 20th century and still affect us today, 100 years later. Empires fell. The Ottoman Empire collapsed after more than six centuries. The British Empire had reached its greatest extent, but its heyday was over. The Irish Free State was declared, and demands for independence in India grew. New nations and new politics came into existence. The Soviet Union was officially created, and Mussolini's Italy became the first Fascist state.

A shuttle returns to the Solar System bearing the sole survivor of a traitor attack - however, delirious and so close to death, his tale remains untold. Ison of the Knights Errant, formerly a Librarian of his Legion, delves into the mind of the warrior, and the truth of it will chill him to the core....

What just happened, and how did we get into this mess? Since 2016, the UK has been in a crisis of its own making. This is not the fault of Brexit but of a larger problem of our politics. The status of political parties, the mainstream media, public experts and officials have all been disrupted. Along the way, there have been shocking and exhilarating events: the unforeseen 2017 election result, the horrific details of Grenfell Tower and the Windrush scandal, the sudden rise and fall of the Brexit Party.

The human race is about to become extinct. Mankind is fighting a long and costly war with its android creations in the Orion System. The deadlock must be broken at all costs. The president of Earth must think the unthinkable.... 'There is nothing to fear'. Written and directed by Nicholas Briggs.

Lucinda is a nice, middle-class girl fresh out of university, determined to 'repay her debt to society'. But when she signs up as a volunteer 'mentoring' ex-cons, it is not long before she is seduced by the darker side of life.

When Vale Moonwing is summoned to the Black Tower, she must prepare herself for a confrontation with the dread warlord Balthus Dire.

Militant Modernism is a defense against modernism's many detractors. It looks at design, film, and architecture - especially, architecture - and pursues the notion of an evolved modernism that simply refuses to stop being necessary. Owen Hatherley gives us new ways to look at what we thought was familiar - Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, even Vladimir Mayakovsky.

In Venice, magic is not unusual. Merle is apprenticed to a magic mirror maker, and Serafin, a boy who was once a master thief, works for a weaver of magic cloth. Merle and Serafin are used to the mermaids who live in the canals of the city, beautiful creatures with hideous mouths that split their faces from ear to ear, and to the guards who patrol the streets on living stone lions.

Max Walker is the golden boy. He's attractive, intelligent, athletic. He's even nice to his little brother. Max is going to pass his exams with flying colours; he’s going to make his parents proud.

Merle, carrying the mysterious Flowing Queen within her, and Vermithrax, the winged stone lion, are flying into Hell. They are looking for help in freeing Venice from the invading Egyptian pharaoh and his mummy warriors. But some truly nightmarish surprises await them as they travel to the center of Hell and encounter its sinister ruler: Lord Light.

Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranean that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams? These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day.

The poetic style and sweeping grandeur of The King of Elfland's Daughter has made it one of the most beloved fantasy novels of our time, a masterpiece that influenced some of the greatest contemporary fantasists. The heartbreaking story of a marriage between a mortal man and an elf princess is a masterful tapestry of the fairy tale following the 'happily ever after'.