Showing results by narrator "Olivia Dowd" in All Categories

We've all had sleepless nights thinking about it. You're home alone. Someone breaks in. In defending yourself, you end up killing the intruder. Now you're the one the police want. That is the situation that criminal barrister Paul Reeve arrives home to find. His wife, Alice, stands in the bedroom, clutching a bloodied letter opener in her shaking hand. 'What have you done, Alice?' 'I didn't have a choice....' We would all believe the person we love most.

Sophia, Tirzah, and Polly are best friends from boarding school who are living very different lives since leaving. The year is 1896, and Polly is teaching in an orphanage in northern England, Sophia is looking for a rich husband at the dances and parties of the London Season, and Tirzah is stuck acting as an unpaid companion to her forbidding grandmother in a remote part of Scotland. In a series of letters buzzing with the drama of being out in the world, the young women air their hopes, frustrations, and romances.

In their ramshackle Somerset home, with its lush gardens running down to the river, the Sorrells have gathered for a last-minute wedding - an occasion that is met with trepidation by each member of the family. Lucy, the bride, has begged her loved ones to attend - not telling them that she has some important news to share once they’ve gathered. Her prodigal baby sister, Margot, who left home after a devastating argument with their mother, reluctantly agrees, though their family home is the site of so much pain for her.

The Chalet des Anglais should be the ideal locale for recently widowed Oxford don Emily to begin cutting through the fog of her grief. With no electricity, running water, or access by car, the rustic chalet nestled at the foot of the snow-topped Alps should afford Emily space to heal. Joining her will be a collection of friends from the university, as well as other fellows, graduates, and undergraduates.

Written by a recognized trainer for both LinkedIn and Meta, Smart Social Media is grounded in the insights gained from hands-on consultancy work, plus hours of personal research, observations, and in-depth reviews of the platforms themselves. Both practical and informative, Smart Social Media is full of actionable insights and valuable guidance that will emphasize the importance of using social media strategically, to enhance brand awareness, boost engagement, build relationships with your customers, and keep up with ever-changing consumer behaviour.

It’s been years since Grace, Felicity, Alice, and Hannah were together. The “Wild Girls,” as they were once called, are no longer so wild. Alice is a teacher. Hannah has a new baby. Grace is a homebody. Only Felicity seems to have retained her former spark. Then Felicity invites them all on the weekend of a lifetime—a birthday bash in Botswana. It will be a chance to have fun and rekindle their once bomb-proof friendship… and finally put that one horrible night, all those years ago, behind them for good.

In the early years of its existence, the Times Literary Supplement published some of the finest writers in English: T. S. Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster among them. But one of the paper’s defining voices was Virginia Woolf, who produced a string of superb essays between the two World Wars. The weirdness of Elizabethan plays, the pleasure of revisiting favourite novels, the supreme examples of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad.

Feeling stuck at work and tired of London’s dreary weather, magazine writer Dylan Coughlan impulsively rings a radio station one day only to win a once-in-a-lifetime trip around the world. The catch? Her travel partner must be a contact randomly selected on her phone. And of course this stressful game of contact roulette lands on a number listed only as Jack the Posho, an uptight, unbearably posh guy she met on a night out and accidentally ghosted.

Thirteen-year-old Ava Bonney is unlike other children. Exceptionally bright, she has an obsessive interest in the rate at which dead animals decompose. The motorway she lives by regularly offers up roadkill, and in the dead of night Ava likes nothing better than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den so she can study it. But one day when she arrives she stumbles across the body of fellow pupil, Mickey Grant. DI Seth Delahaye is given the case, one of the most challenging of his career.

Frances—you can call her Frankie—was not a happy baby. She was born amidst chaos, to two loving but unprepared parents. On a beach. In a storm. No wonder she’s always had a temper. And you know what did nothing to quell her anger? Dying dramatically in a freak natural disaster that wiped out her whole town. As a ghost, it’s not so easy for Frankie to hide her rage, especially when suspicious visitors to her ruined home seem to have a keen and ominous interest in her.

England, 1917. Reeling from the death of her fiancé, Stella Marcham welcomes the opportunity to stay with her pregnant sister, Madeleine, at her imposing country mansion, Greyswick - but she arrives to discover a house of unease and her sister gripped by fear and suspicion. Before long, strange incidents begin to trouble Stella - sobbing in the night, little footsteps on the stairs - and as events escalate, she finds herself drawn to the tragic history of the house.

One day, NICK and BEE cross paths over a misdirected email. The connection is instant, electric, they feel like they’ve known each other forever. Nick buys a new suit, gets on a train. Bee steadies her nerves, gets a pep talk from her best friend Leila. This is it. Except it isn’t. Because as they prepare to meet under the clock at Euston station, the universe throws in a twist you’d never see coming . . .

Lexie loves her home. She feels safe and secure in it - and loved, thanks to her boyfriend, Tom. But recently, something’s not been quite right. A book out of place. A wardrobe door left open. A set of keys going missing.... Tom thinks Lexie’s going mad - but then, he’s away more often than he’s at home nowadays, so he wouldn’t understand. Because Lexie isn’t losing it. She knows there’s someone out there watching her. And, deep down, she knows there’s nothing she can do to make them stop.

An international prize of one billion has been offered to the first man to complete an interplanetary trip, and Dale Curtance, a millionaire adventurer, emerges as the British entrant. With a hand-picked crew, he blasted off from Salisbury Plain in the spaceship Gloria Mundi, destination—the planet Mars. Once free of Earth's atmosphere, they discover a stowaway—a woman. Her extraordinary story helps them prepare for the dangers they encounter on the Red Planet, and the fantastic world that exists there.

In 1998, a 16-year-old girl is found dead. She’s posed on a swing on her boarding school’s property, dressed all in white, with no known cause of death. Whispers and rumors swirl, with no answers. But there are a few who know what happened; there is one girl who will never forget. One year earlier: a new student, Violet, steps on the campus of Elm Hollow Academy, an all-girl’s boarding school on the outskirts of a sleepy coastal town. This is her fresh start, her chance to begin again in the wake of tragedy, leave her demons behind.

In today's hectic times, it's more important than ever to learn to slow down, relax, and be calm.Whether part of religious habit or just part of a daily routine, meditation can help slow today's frenzied pace and improve feelings of good health, peace, and control. In The Complete Idiot's Guide to Meditation, Joan Budilovsky and Eve Adamson explain how easy it is to enjoy the benefits of meditation, including simple stress-reduction techniques that make learning to meditate easier.

On a summer's night in 1994, 16-year-old Flora Powell vanished from her sleepy seaside town. She left no trace - only heartache for her mother and her sister, Heather. Twenty-five years later, Heather walks into a stranger's house. There, the loving wife and doting new mother kills two people in cold blood. So only one remains...Jess is sent to report on the case that shocked the hometown she left behind. But it's anything but business to her.

Jonathan Coulter planned for his death meticulously, leaving nothing to chance. His will states that his three adult children must decide between them how to dispose of his estate. If they cannot come together over their inheritance, then they risk losing it. But Liv, Noah and Chloe never agree on anything. And now, with only one weekend to overcome their rivalry, tensions begin to rise.

Mindfulness is consciously paying attention to your present experience with a receptive attitude, in order to perceive things more clearly. Mindfulness enables people to get more in touch with the truth of their lives and make more beneficial choices. When people cultivate mindfulness, they experience important physical and emotional benefits. An easy-to-understand approach to mindfulness and how it works with simple techniques for focusing on your mind, body and emotions with meditation methods to help deepen your mindfulness practice, narrated by Olivia Dowd.

Start-ups are born to fail. Around three quarters of venture capital-backed new companies never return cash to investors. Upscale is about the other 25 percent. At a time when more people than ever are starting companies in Britain - over 2,000 new businesses are launched every day - Upscale focuses on the moment founders floor the accelerator and their company goes from a bunch of friends in a co-working space to hundreds of employees often scattered around the world.