Showing results by narrator "Mark Meadows" in All Categories

Chris Beckett's thought-provoking and wide-ranging collection of contemporary short stories is a joy to listen to, rich in detail and texture. From stories about first love, to a man who discovers a labyrinth beneath his house, to an angel left alone at the end of the universe, Beckett displays both incredible range and extraordinary subtlety as a writer. Every story is a world unto itself - each one beautifully realized and brilliantly imagined.

What makes a home? What makes a refugee? As allegedly record-breaking numbers of migrants attempt to reach Britain and public conversation becomes, often, poisonous, Island Refuge is a powerful account of what has come before and what has been learned by it. Almost every time, we see when we look back, Britain has not been an island refuge from the world, but an island refuge for the world. Not a country burdened by refugees, but instead transformed and strengthened by them.

The goats of Vigàta once grazed on the trash-strewn site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendour Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Luparello, one of the local movers and shakers, apparently deceased in flagrante at the Pasture. The coroner's verdict is death from natural causes - refreshingly unusual for Sicily.

Roger Scruton looks at the central ideas of conservatism over the centuries. He examines conservative thinking on civil society, the rule of law and the role of the state on the one hand; and freedom (including freedom of expression and association), morality, equality, property and rights on the other. He traces the origins and development of the conservative ideology in the philosophies and thoughts of, among others, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick.

Eighteen year-old Jessica's life is turned upside down when her parents are in a fatal accident. Her late father's reckless lifestyle leave her finances in turmoil and threaten to leave her homeless...until a chance meeting with a 30-year-old stranger means that her life changes forever. Finding herself an unofficial ward of a mysterious, serious man, our American heroine and her enigmatic British 'Guardian' get used to living with each other...with all of the tensions, pitfalls and excitement that entails....

Western Australia, 1928. Out on the Tolhurst farmstead, Detective Constable Hartley is working on his very first assignment, looking into reports of a mysterious prowler. Suddenly he is startled by three gunshots ringing out. Investigating the noise, he discovers the corpse of family patriarch Fred O'Donnell, shot in the chest - alone in a room that has been locked from the inside. The dead man was almost universally despised, which doesn't help Hartley narrow down his pool of potential suspects.

A practical guide to office politics, including step-by-step advice on how to navigate difficult situations, work out who is doing what and why, and keep cool under pressure. All workplaces are affected by the intrigues of office politics. Survive Office Politics is full of practical advice on how to cope with difficult situations and people and get on with your job.

Thomas More's Utopia stands out as one of the most striking political works ever written. Composed specifically as a response to Henry VIII's break with Rome, the book meditates on the perfect society while indirectly critiquing the political and social ills of Tudor England. Containing thoughts on religious pluralism, a welfare state, and women's rights, More's book was well ahead of its time, already hinting at later theories on communism and capitalism centuries before Marx, Engels, and Smith.

Florence. Spring, 1537. When Cesare Aldo investigates a report of intruders at a convent in the Renaissance city’s northern quarter, he enters a community divided by bitter rivalries and harbouring dark secrets. His case becomes far more complicated when a naked man’s body is found deep inside the convent, stabbed more than two dozen times. Unthinkable as it seems, all the evidence suggests one of the nuns must be the killer. Meanwhile, Constable Carlo Strocchi finds human remains pulled from the Arno that belong to an officer of the law missing since winter.

Why can’t you light a candle in a spaceship? What books are bad for you? Is nature natural? Every year Oxford and Cambridge’s learned professors pose such curious conundrums to potential students to separate the wheat from the chaff, and the clever from the both of them. Do You Think You’re Clever? provides dazzling answers to 60 of these infamously perplexing problems... How would you measure up against Oxbridge’s sharpest minds?

I heard the rustle again, too close and too real to ignore. I clutched the flashlight, stuck my head out of the mosquito net...and found myself face-to-face with a jaguar. Four travelers meet in Bolivia and set off into the Amazon rainforest on an expedition to find a hidden tribe and explore places tourists only dream of seeing. But what begins as the adventure of a lifetime quickly becomes a struggle for survival when they get lost in the wilds of the jungle. The group splits up after disagreements, and Yossi and his friend try to find their own way back without a guide.

Oslo, 1938. War is in the air and Europe is in turmoil. Hitler’s Germany has occupied Austria and is threatening Czechoslovakia; there’s a civil war in Spain and Mussolini reigns in Italy. When a woman turns up at the office of police-turned-private investigator Ludvig Paaske, he and his assistant – his one-time nemesis and former drug-smuggler Jack Rivers – begin a seemingly straightforward investigation into marital infidelity.

Inspector Montalbano rises one morning to find the carcass of a horse on the beach in front of his seaside home. But no sooner do his men arrive than the body has mysteriously vanished, leaving only a track in the sand. Before long Rachele, a beguiling equestrian champion, turns up at police headquarters to report her horse missing. The horse had been stabled at the grounds of a certain Saverio Lo Duca, one of the richest men in Sicily. Lo Duca has lost one of his own horses, too. Montalbano, his curiosity piqued, investigates....

August, 1856. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens are spending the summer at Knebworth House, the magnificent Hertfordshire home of fellow writer Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, where they are putting on a charity performance of one of Lord Edward's most successful plays, The Lady of Lyons. But the dress rehearsal is disrupted by the discovery of a body lying in the center of the stage, shot to death.

Both Sides is Nicklas Bendtner's shockingly honest memoir of both the bright and dark sides of his personality and the football industry and what really happens when you give a troubled, overconfident teen millions to spend. It's about growing up in a working class neighbourhood and never denying your roots while living a dramatically changed life. It's about fighting to reach the top in the worlds' toughest league but having no respect for hierarchy. It's about friendship, rivalry, loneliness, failing father figures and the constant quest for an adrenaline kick

When an elderly man is stabbed to death in an elevator and a crewman on an Italian fishing trawler is machine gunned by a Tunisian patrol boat off Sicily's coast, only Inspector Montalbano suspects a link between the two incidents. His investigation leads to the beautiful Karima, an impoverished housecleaner and sometime prostitute, whose young son steals other school children's midmorning snacks. But Karima disappears, and the young snack thief's life - as well as Montalbano's - is endangered.

In the tunnels deep under London, the Earth Elementals are dying. Hunted by something they know only as the Rotman, the Elementals have no-one trustworthy they can turn to. Enter Don Drake, diabolist and semi-reformed hitman, and an almost-fallen angel called Trixie. When the matriarch tells Don that Rotman is actually the Archdemon Bianakith, he knows this is going to be a tough job. Bianakith is the foretold spirit of disease and decay whose aura corrupts everything it comes near.

March, 1859. After the “Great Stink” of the previous summer when Parliament was overwhelmed by the stench of sewage from the River Thames, and with cholera running rife throughout the city, Charles Dickens has a new enthusiasm. Having formed a firm friendship with Joseph Bazalgette, he is assisting the ambitious young engineer in his efforts to find a solution to London's pollution problem.

Lake Como, 1945. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce's death remain shrouded in confusion and controversy. Milan, 1992. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he can't refuse to ghostwrite a memoir. His subject: a fledgling newspaper financed by a powerful media magnate.

An eclectic mix of exciting stories every surfer will love. This eclectic mix has something for everyone, from classic tales of monster waves and epic battles to stories of when life among the breakers goes wrong. There are accounts of death and disaster, as well as bravery and triumph. The bizarre and the extreme rub shoulders with perfect breaks and beautiful beaches. Be thrilled by legendary surfers like Laird Hamilton and Shane Dorian as well as learning about local heroes who never made the headlines.