Showing results by narrator "Graeme Malcolm" in All Categories

Essayist. Preservationist. Mountain man. Inventor. John Muir may be California’s best-known icon. A literary naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club and Yosemite National Park, Muir left his legacy on the landscape and on paper. But the celebrity of John Muir does not tell the whole story. In Essential Muir, for the first time, Muir's selected writings include those that show his ecological vision without ignoring his racism, providing a more complete portrait of the man.

"A seductive and lyrical novel that probes the brutalities and compromises of colonization, even as it celebrates the elusive powers of music and the imagination," says The New York Times about Daniel Mason's extraordinary debut novel. The Piano Tuner is a hypnotic tale of myth, romance, and self-discovery: the unforgettable story of a British piano tuner sent deep into Burma in the 19th century.

In the autumn of 1558, church bells across England ring out the joyous news that Elizabeth I is the new queen. But one woman hears the tidings with utter dread. Amy Dudley, wife of Sir Robert, knows that the peal of bells she hears will summon her husband once more to power, intrigue, and a passionate love affair with the young queen.

You're 14 and find yourself on your own. Your father, who has developed the world's cutting edge research on virtual electronic game-playing, has been missing for weeks. And suddenly you're being hunted by men with guns, your picture is on the news, and, worst of all, something seemingly impossible is chasing you - a savage, man-eating dinosaur. How can that be? Why is everyone trying to capture you? And what is your strange connection with this 21st-century prehistoric monster?

In 2010 Clive James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Deciding that "if you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do", James moved his library to his house in Cambridge, where he would "live, read, and perhaps even write". James is the award-winning author of dozens of works of literary criticism, poetry, and history, and this volume contains his reflections on what may well be his last reading list.

Vicar Obadiah Demurral isn't satisfied running the affairs of his village, now he wants to control the world. And if his plan works, he will obtain a weapon so powerful, even God and his angels will fall down at his feet. Demurral will stop at nothing, and as a shadowmancer (a sorcerer who speaks to the dead), he even commands restless souls to do his bidding.

One winter's night in 1976, over 20 million people in Britain watched John Curry skate to Olympic glory on an ice rink in Austria. Many millions more watched around the world. Overnight he became one of the most famous men on the planet. He was awarded the OBE. He was chosen as BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Curry had changed ice skating from marginal sport to high art. And yet the man was - and would always remain - an absolute mystery to a world that had been dazzled by his gift.

When last the vampire Lestat was seen, he was rising from the dead in present-day New Orleans to walk again among Anne Rice's unforgettable undead. Now Lestat lives again but in a twilight world of music and memory. His charismatic friend Louis de Pointe du Lac is tortured by the memory of the child vampire, Claudia, whom he loved and lost. He calls on Merrick, a young and gorgeous mixed-race by-blow of the rich New Orleans Mayfair clan. To save Louis' sanity, Merrick must use her black witchcraft to call up the ghost of Claudia - however dangerous this may be.

Based on real events, The Quickening Maze won over UK critics and readers alike with its rapturous prose and vivid exploration of poetry and madness. In 1837, after years of struggling with alcoholism and depression, the great nature poet John Clare finds himself in High Beach—a mental institution located in Epping Forest on the outskirts of London.

In this follow-up to the international phenomenon The Courage to Be Disliked, discover how to reconnect with your true self, experience true happiness, and live the life you want. What if one simple choice could unlock your destiny? Already a major Japanese best seller, this eye-opening and accessible follow-up to the "compelling" (Marc Andreessen) international phenomenon, The Courage to Be Disliked, shares the powerful teachings of Alfred Adler, one of the giants of 19th-century psychology, through another illuminating dialogue between the philosopher and the young man.

Pets have never been more popular. Over half of American households share their home with either a cat or a dog, and many contain both. This is a huge change from only a century ago, when the majority of domestic cats and dogs were working animals, keeping rodents at bay, guarding property, herding sheep. Nowadays, most are valued solely for the companionship they provide. As mankind becomes progressively more urban and detached from nature, we seem to be clinging to the animals that served us well in the past.

Milan Kundera's brilliant new collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and ideas that characterizes his bestselling novels, the internationally acclaimed author revisits the artists whose works help us better understand what it means to be human. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter combines many of the author's signature themes with personal reflections and stories.

Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In Testaments Betrayed, he proves himself a brilliant defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due to a work of art and its creator's wishes. The betrayal of both - often by their most passionate proponents - is the principal theme of this extraordinary work. Listeners will be particularly intrigued by Kundera's impassioned attack on society's shifting moral judgments and persecutions of art and artists.

On the world's first commodities exchange, fortunes are won and lost in an instant. Miguel Lienzo, a sharp-witted trader in the city's close-knit community of Portuguese Jews, knows this only too well. Once among the city's most envied merchants, Miguel has lost everything in a sudden shift in the sugar markets. Now, impoverished and humiliated, living on the charity of his petty younger brother, Miguel must find a way to restore his wealth and reputation.

Mrs. Isobel Rodgers is an investigator's perfect client: beautiful, wealthy, and offering a straightforward assignment. Mrs. Rodgers suspects her husband of an affair, and it's up to the investigator to determine the object of Mr. Rodgers' affections. For someone with brilliant deductive powers, this should be an open-and-shut case - but Mrs. Rodgers may know more than she's letting on.

The Freedom Years is an upbeat and humorous look at some of the challenges and opportunities presented as you move from work to retirement. Most people don’t give much thought to how they’ll adjust and don’t have a clue what’s going to hit them, but this witty and inspirational guide is all you need to convince you that the best is yet to come.

The climb that went wrong: fighting blinding snowstorms and horrific avalanches; days spent tentbound running low on food, water and oxygen; surviving broken bones and shattered spirits. With writing from Greg Child, David Roberts, Stephen Venables, Alfred Lansing and others, Epic is a collection of the most memorable accounts of legend-making expeditions to the world’s most famous peaks, often in the worst possible conditions!

A scroll is discovered, buried among the ancient papyri of the Dead Sea. Father Leo Newman, a priest from Rome, discovers that the text appears to be a fifth gospel. If the scroll is authentic - and if the radical, incendiary story it tells is true - all of Christianity itself will be open to a complete reinterpretation...

Love and Fatigue in America records an Englishman’s decade-long journey through his newly adopted country in the company of a mystifying illness and a charismatic dog. When he receives an unexpected invitation from an unfamiliar American university, he embraces it as a triumphant new beginning. Instead, on arrival, he is stricken with a persistent inability to stand up or think straight, and things quickly go wrong. Diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome he moves from state to state, woman to woman, and eccentric doctor to eccentric doctor.

Our guide to the life of the Bard is an actor called Pickleherring, who asserts that as a boy he was an original member of Shakespeare's acting troupe. In an attic above a brothel in Restoration London - a half century after Shakespeare has departed the stage - Pickleherring, now an old man, sits down to write the full story of his former friend, mentor, and master. Fond, faithful Pickleherring has forgotten nothing over the years, and using sources both firsthand and far-fetched he means to set the record straight.