Showing results by narrator "Matthew Lloyd Davies" in All Categories

A collection of strange, wonderful, sad, romantic, and weird tales about what happens when the underdog bites back. The latest book from the "master of wit and satire" - a collection of surreal, subversive, and satirical tales.

Grace Flynn has found the sword she has been longing for, the fabled blade of "Tristam". She has just one problem - it is locked away in the Tower of London. With the aid of the scoundrel Nereus Neptune she must enter a most heavily guarded place to reach her goal. Hopefully she fares better than the infamous Colonel Blood, who failed to rob the tower in 1671.

From Andy Anderson, founder & CEO of Ultimate You - the innovative fitness, nutrition, and coaching franchise that is transforming lives and minds Down Under - comes a clear, actionable, step-by-step process that will help anyone make dramatic changes in life and health. Anderson himself is a true embodiment of transformation: After years of excessive drinking and wallowing in self-doubt, he found the strength to dramatically improve his health, defeat depression, become a professional athlete, and build a seven-figure business with over sixty staff members and thousands of clients.

Professor Moriarty recounts his first encounter with Sherlock Holmes during the Adventure of the Red-Headed League. You didn't know Moriarty was involved? Neither did Holmes! This short story won Honorable Mention in an international short story competition and was later published in the Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine.

Meet the hapless Jeremy: a man in his late 50s, he scrapes together a living in Paris by writing soft-core pornography under the saucy guise of "Nathalie Cray". When his all-but-estranged sister tells him their father is on his deathbed, Jeremy reluctantly travels back to his parental home in the depths of the English countryside. Confronted with a life that he had always been eager to escape, his return marks the start of an emotionally fraught journey into the family's checkered past.

When Andrew - a second-hand-book dealer - comes across a pile of photographs from police archives, he decides to exhibit them. But then the gallery is raided the day before the opening, and the photos seized with surprising violence. It soon becomes clear that someone, somewhere, wants to keep the images hidden. Who? Why? And who - in a world where kidnap, subterfuge and even murder are the norm, and where no one is safe or above suspicion - can Andrew turn to for help?

It began with a handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin and it ended with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Punk rock was a life-changing discovery: in an authoritarian state where the future was preordained, punk, with its rejection of society and DIY approach to building a new one, planted the seeds for revolution.

The long hidden heart of the Twisted Curse had been found, concealed in a realm that no angel can enter, where magic runs wild and time is just another direction. The Twisted Curse is the key to ending the Eternity War and it can only be broken by someone willing to traverse the depths of Faerie. Unfortunately, Mitch has other things on his mind.

Life doesn't pick winners and losers. That's for the corporations to decide. And they picked Liam Argyle for a carefree life of fame and fortune as host of the world's most popular reality show competition. After two seasons of parading about the world's biggest victims on The Grass Is Greener, he's been forced to put a happy face on one tragedy too many - and he won't turn a blind eye to the horrors of the corporate dystopian world of the 2070s any longer. Now, Liam is out to destroy the very people who made him a star.

Since childhood you've had all of the resources that you need to create the life that you want, and over time you've simply lost touch with them. Now is the time to find them again. With expert guidance from broadcaster and entrepreneur Ed James and behavior and relationship experts Mark and Nicky Taylor, you'll rediscover your sense of purpose, reconnect with what is important to you, and find out how to unlearn unhelpful habits and behaviors.

Companies that are thriving, not just surviving, are much more than a set of ruthlessly efficient and mechanistic processes. They are a social system operated by people for people. The quality of relationships, both inside and outside the organization, is a far more important driver of sustainable success or failure than the quality of its control systems. The head is important, but it is the heart that matters most.

Five young, western women buy souvenirs of their delightful trek…and unknowingly smuggle heroin into Singapore. They are immediately detained and arrested by authorities upon their entrance into the country. There appears to be no escape for the tissue trail women until medical researcher and wild country photographer Edward Thurston takes video footage of a high altitude salt caravan near the tissue trail and is inexplicably detained and interrogated.

Mo, the wealthy dictator of a volatile Middle Eastern country, enlists a ghostwriter to tell his story to the world and enshrine him in history as a glorious ruler. Inside Mo's besieged palace, the ghost forms an unlikely friendship with a wise and seemingly innocent Italian gardener who slowly reveals that the regime isn't all it appears to be. As a violent rebellion threatens all their lives, the ghost struggles to cope with a personal secret too painful to bear.

A vicar is disbelieving when two teenagers in his parish claim to have been given a message by the archangel Gabriel, but gradually changes his mind and decides he must do something about it.

A man who married young, and so never had the chance to sow his wild oats, suddenly breaks out when in his mid-30s - and becomes convinced he has stumbled on the secret of happiness.

Ten short stories by author Christopher J F Gibson. The author has here put together a kaleidoscope that often takes a wry look at ourselves.... Of course there are some stories that feature cats.

London, 1666. Orphaned by the Great Plague, Sam is soon starving on the streets - and desperate enough to steal. He's quickly recruited as one of sinister Uncle Jack's children, and taught to steal. If he gets caught by the law, the punishment will be death - and if he crosses Uncle Jack, it could be just as bad. Still, it's a living for Sam and his fellow thief Catherine - until the long, hot London summer means a blaze at the Pudding Lane bakery runs out of control.

Twelve little oddities - an assortment of the bizarre, unexpected, charming, unsettling, and downright peculiar. Into darkness or light, there are many ways to escape.

Young Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley are very different in temperament when they meet in the gloomy confines of Professor Drabb’s Academy for Boys, but they form a bond that will endure for the rest of their lives. As years go by, with Marley’s genius for deception and Scrooge’s brilliance with numbers, they build a shipping empire of dubious legality and pitiless commitment to the slave trade, concealing their true investments under the noses of the London authorities.

In 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron: 100 nested tales told by a group of young men and women passing the time at a villa outside Florence while waiting out the gruesome Black Death, a plague that killed more than 25 million people. Some of the stories are silly, some are bawdy, some are like fables. In March of 2020, the editors of The New York Times Magazine created The Decameron Project, an anthology with a simple, time-spanning goal: to gather a collection of stories written as our current pandemic first swept the globe.