Showing results by narrator "Peter Noble" in All Categories

Antoine is 12 years old. His parents are divorced, and he lives with his mother in Beauval, a small backwater town surrounded by forests, where everyone knows everyone's business and nothing much ever happens. But in the last days of 1999, a series of events unfolds, culminating in the shocking vanishing without trace of a young child. The adults of the town are at a loss to explain the disappearance, but for Antoine, it all begins with the violent death of his neighbour's dog.

It is 1919. On a summer’s night in Normandy, a new-born baby is left in a basket outside the home of Albert and Jeanne Arnaud. The childless couple take the foundling in, name him Jean, and decide to raise him as their own, though his parentage remains a mystery. Though Jean’s life is never dull, he grows up knowing little of what lies beyond his local area. Until the day he sets off on his bicycle to discover the world, and encounters a Europe on the threshold of interesting times...

In a remote city, a renowned performance artist commits suicide on video; from a long-abandoned space station comes impossible footage of a dead body; and in an isolated outpost, a secretive cult believes they are communing with the ancient alien Masters. How are they connected? Inspector Keon is trying to investigate, but once again his life has been flipped upside down. His wife, Alysha, is alive. His long search is over. Or so he thinks.

Brussels. A panorama of tragic heroes, manipulative losers, involuntary accomplices. In his new novel, Robert Menasse spans a narrative arc between the times, the nations, the inevitable and the irony of fate, between petty bureaucracy and big emotions. As the 50th anniversary of the European Commission approaches, the Directorate-General for Culture is tasked with planning and organising a fitting celebration. The project will serve the wider purpose of revamping the commission's image at a time of waning public support....

In the fiery environment of an election season, with tensions stoked by an unrelenting heat wave, Danny Walker goes about the business of being a carefree boy. But when a horrific act of violence is visited on his family, his sense of innocence is shattered and his grip on reality slowly begins to fracture. In lean, lyrical prose - reminiscent of the work of J. M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy - Zimbabwean writer Ian Holding delivers a mesmerising coming-of-age tale of guilt and responsibility set within the fault lines of modern Africa.

It's a few days before Christmas in Versailles. Olivier has come to bury his mother, but the impending holidays and icy conditions have delayed the funeral. While trapped in limbo at his mother's flat, a chance encounter brings Olivier back in touch with childhood friend Jeanne and her blind brother, Rodolphe. Rodolphe suggests they have dinner together, along with a homeless man he's taken in. As the wine flows, dark secrets are spilled, and there's more than just hangovers to deal with the next morning...

Certain Signs That You Are Dead is the fourth psychological thriller in Torkil Damhaug's Oslo Crime Files, a tense and dark quartet for fans of Camilla Lackberg and Jo Nesbo. Every killer leaves a trace. In Akershus University Hospital, a patient disappears into thin air. That evening, his body is found in a basement box-room, his throat cut. When retired forensic pathologist Jennifer Plåterud is called in to examine the dead man, she has no idea just how closely she is involved in the murder herself.

Suspended from his job, criminal investigator Thomas "Ravn" Ravnsholdt lives a lonely, dissolute existence—until he crosses paths with a woman desperate for help locating her missing brother. Driven to embezzlement, the man has vanished without a trace on a visit to Berlin. Ravn's investigation takes a chilling turn when he uncovers a pattern of similar disappearances involving single men in the German capital. As the pieces of this puzzle start to fall into place, Ravn finds himself entangled in a web of darkness and deception that dates back to the era of the Stasi.

Delroy Grant—dubbed the Night Stalker—was one of the nation's most wanted men, a shocking sex predator. During his 17-year reign of fear, he established a clear MO. Target an elderly woman, living alone. Night Stalker is the chilling true story of one of the most testing manhunts the Metropolitan Police have ever undertaken. It is a glimpse into the heart of darkness—and into the mind and work of the brilliant detective who brought one of London's most feared monsters to justice.

What if Isaac Newton had never lived? Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley, whose place in history has been overshadowed by the giant figure of Newton, were pioneering scientists within their own right and instrumental in establishing the Royal Society. Whilst Newton is widely regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time and the father of the English scientific revolution, John and Mary Gribbin uncover the fascinating story of Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley....

After victory in World War II, Britain was a relieved but also a profoundly traumatized country. Simon Winder, born into this nation of uncertain identity, fell in love (as many before and since) with the man created as the antidote, a quintessentially British figure of great cultural significance: James Bond. Written with passion, wit and a great deal of personal insight and affection, this book is his wildly amusing attempt to get to grips with Bond’s legacy and the difficult decades in which it really mattered.

Access to water has played a pivotal role in the Israel-Palestine dispute. Israel has diverted the River Jordan via pipes and canals to build a successful modern state. But this has been at the expense of the region's cohabitants. Gaza is now so water-stressed that the United Nations has warned it could soon become uninhabitable; its traditional water source has been ruined by years of over-extraction and mismanagement, the effects exacerbated by years of crippling blockade.

A fine collection of essays representing C. S. Lewis at his best and most brilliant. As ever, Lewis' clear and eloquent mind give plenty of food for thought, especially as he aims his intellectual ammunition at the modern myths still so prevalent in our postmodern culture and encourages a robust defence of the Christian Gospel.

It's 1919. The Derbyshire village of Wenfield is still coming to terms with the loss of so many of its sons when the brutal murder of a young girl shatters its hard-won tranquility. Myrtle Bligh is found stabbed, her mouth slit to accommodate a dead dove. During the war Myrtle volunteered as a nurse, working at the nearby big house, Tarnhey Court. When two more women are found murdered, Inspector Albert Lincoln is sent up from London.

Don Giovanni is a passionate lover of life and women. One night, the Commendatore of Calatrava catches him kissing his daughter, and challenges him to a duel. Don Giovanni wins the duel, which of course means that the Commendatore is slain and so begins the end for Don Giovanni.

At the end of the 18th century, a giant strides the Cape Colony frontier. Coenraad de Buys is a legend, a polygamist, a swindler and a big talker; a rebel who fights with Xhosa chieftains against the Boers and British; the fierce patriarch of a sprawling mixed-race family with a veritable tribe of followers; a savage enemy and a loyal ally. Like the wild dogs who are always at his heels, he roams the shifting landscape of southern Africa, hungry and spoiling for a fight. This is his story; the story of his country, and of our blood-soaked history.

A global thriller presenting an apocalyptic vision of a world on the brink of despair and destruction. What would you do if the world was brought to a standstill? If you heard deafening static followed by the words 'my children. Do not be afraid'? Would you turn to God? Subscribe to the conspiracy theories? Or put your faith in science and a rational explanation? The lives of all 26 people in this account are affected by the message. Most because they heard it. Some because they didn't.

An assassin’s bullet. A deadly conspiracy. But who is calling the shots? When an attempted assassination sparks a chain reaction of explosive events across London, Britain’s elite security forces seem powerless to stop the chaos threatening to overwhelm the government. As the dark and deadly conspiracy unfolds, three strangers find their fates entwined: Joe Dempsey, a deadly military intelligence officer; Sarah Truman, a CNN reporter determined to get her headline; and Michael Devlin, a Belfast-born criminal barrister with a secret past.

September 1914. The First World War has broken out on the Western Front. Thousands of miles away on the Rhodesian border, Simon Fonthill is preparing for battle alongside his companion, 352 Jenkins and tracker Mzingeli. The trio come under constant fire from enemy forces. At the bequest of Admiral Herbert King-Hall, they undertake their most dangerous mission yet: sinking the Königsberg, a German cruiser ship hidden deep in the Rufiji Delta.

South Africa, 1987. Apartheid. When Leon, a white 19-year-old prison guard working on death row, commits an inexplicable act of violence, killing seven black men in a hail of bullets, the outcome of the trial - and the court's sentence - seems a foregone conclusion. Hotshot lawyer John Weber reluctantly takes on the seemingly unwinnable case. A passionate opponent of the death penalty, John discovers that young Leon worked on death row in the nation's most notorious prison, under traumatic conditions....