Showing results by narrator "David Rintoul" in All Categories

The book that finally won Beryl Bainbridge a Booker prize: by popular vote the Best of Beryl. Beryl Bainbridge’s most popular novel explores the nature of love and obsession, as foster child Myrtle follows Master Georgie from the slums of 19th century Liverpool to the battlefields of the Crimea, where tragedy ensues.

London, 1941. The city is in blackout, besieged by nightly air raids from Germany. Two strangers are about to meet. Between them they may alter the course of the war. While the Blitz has united the nation, there is an enemy hiding in plain sight. A group of British citizens is gathering secret information to aid Hitler’s war machine. Jack Hoste has become entangled in this treachery, but he also has a particular mission: to locate the most dangerous Nazi agent in the country.

With his own boat, the motor yacht Sea Fox, former naval officer Philip Vivian had hoped to earn a living free from the petty restrictions of everyday life, close to the sea he loved. Now, however, his dream is threatened by financial difficulties. So when a profitable, if legally dubious, proposition is put to him by an old naval comrade in arms, Vivian is willing to listen. But what starts out as a harmless adventure soon turns into something altogether more sinister.

Anne Bronte's novel is the story of the beautiful and mysterious Helen Graham, who arrives at Wildfell Hall suddenly one day. No one knows who she is or where she has come from, and Gilbert Markham, a young farmer who has fallen in love with her, sets out to find some answers. This is an ambitious and successful work that is a real pleasure to listen to.

In his final novel, Sick Heart River, John Buchan predicted that with the outbreak of a second world war Richard Hannay and all his companions of old would be going back into action. In The Thirty-One Kings, the tale of their adventures is finally told. June 1940. As German troops pour across France, the veteran soldier and adventurer Richard Hannay is called back into service. In Paris an agent, codenamed 'Roland', has disappeared and is assumed to be in the hands of the Nazis.

Nathaniel Starbuck is a rebel, a young Yankee fighting for the South against the North in the American Civil War. It is the summer of 1861 when Nate arrives in Richmond, Virginia, suddenly to be rescued from a lynch mob by Washington Faulconer, who is raising his own Legion in the interests of the Confederacy.

Since 2015 the Pin Drop Short Story Award has discovered new and exciting talent from around the world and showcased new works from more familiar names. This anthology collects the 2017 final short-list, including the winning entry, ‘Morelia Spilota’ by Cherise Saywell - an absorbing tale of a priest, a hitchhiker and a snake together and alone in the Australian countryside; which of them should be most wary of being bitten, and by whom?

Love Over Scotland is the third in this series and revolves around the many colourful characters that come and go at No. 44 Scotland Street. McCall Smith handles the characters with his customary charm and deftness: the stalwart Tory chartered surveyor, the pushy mother and, most importantly in this novel, the Italian-speaking prodigy, Bertie.

London. Young scientist Rita Sidhu is on the brink of something beautiful. A rising star in the field of genetics, she’s involved with a massive breakthrough in heart-disease care. But tragedy threatens her bright future when she becomes a suspect in her boyfriend’s gruesome murder. DCI Terence Varcy still mourns the loss of his wife and child. But the grieving policeman never expected working the case of a medical genius’s murdered sweetheart would expose a string of vicious killings.

The Quality of Mercy opens in the spring of 1767, two years after the events of Barry Unsworth's Booker Prize-winning Sacred Hunger. It follows the fortunes of two central characters from that book: Sullivan, the Irish fiddler, and Erasmus Kemp, the son of a Liverpool slave-ship owner who hanged himself. To avenge his father's death, Erasmus Kemp has had the rebellious sailors of his father's ship, including Sullivan, brought back to London to stand trial on charges of mutiny and piracy.

Ida Joner gets on her brand-new bike and sets off to buy sweets. A good-natured, happy girl, she is looking forward to her 10th birthday. Thirty-five minutes after Ida should have come home, Helga Joner, her mother, starts to worry. She phones the shop and various friends, but no one has seen her daughter.

Late one summer evening, Wilberforce - rich, young, work-obsessed and self-contained - makes an unexpected detour on the way home from the software company he owns and unwittingly takes the first step on a journey that will change his life. His uncharacteristically impulsive act leads him to the door of Caerlyon Hall, the domain of Francis Black, a place where wine, hospitality, and affection flow freely.

A woman wakes one night to find that a strange man has walked into her bedroom. She lies there in terrified silence unable to move. The woman is an author and the man one of her prospective characters. So desperate is he to have his story told that he has resorted to breaking in to her house to make her tell it. She creates Alvar Eide, forty-two years old, single, who works in an art gallery. He lives a quiet, dutiful life, carefully designed to avoid surprise.

London chiropractor David “Stitch” Stichell is desperate to hold onto his adopted daughter. Already struggling with deteriorating health, his heart breaks when her birth father returns to take her away. But his life spirals into chaos when the other man is suddenly murdered. As his experimental cancer treatment mysteriously self-destructs, the people around Stitch start dying - leaving him as the prime suspect. Vowing to find out who’s behind the assassins on his tail, he must dodge acid-laden syringes and hails of bullets.

Paris, 1939: The pavement rumbles with the footfalls of Nazi soldiers marching along the Champs Elysees. A young writer, recently arrived from Ireland to make his mark, smokes one last cigarette with his lover before the city they know is torn apart. Soon he will put his own life and the lives of his loved ones in mortal danger by joining the Resistance....

A new patient appears on Sigmund Freud's roster. The initial session soon takes a dramatic turn when the man pulls a gun on Freud. The day before, he murdered his own father, and now he demands absolution from the Professor. While Anna contacts Karl and they both hold an emergency session right outside the therapy room in an effort to put an end to the hostage situation, Sigmund tries to use all means at his disposal to persuade the man to surrender before a disaster occurs.

Time - unlike money, opportunity or good looks - is the one resource that is allocated equally to all of us. No matter what our financial or family situation, we each get 24 hours a day. In the practical and straightforward style to which his Dragon's Den contestants are accustomed, Duncan Bannatyne explains how we can make the most of our time to get the most from our lives, and not just our working day. What do you really want to do with your life?

The year is 2070. Reclusive prodigy Memphis Garrick turned tragedy into a tech empire. Heading up the ultimate immersive experience not only brings him worldwide success, it allows him to visit the family he lost during childhood. But when a tyrant from a parallel universe hacks his virtual paradise and merges it with reality, Memphis is loaded into a battle to stop the coded spread of terror. Plunged into an archaic Tudor world, Memphis partners with an enigmatic beauty to reverse the cruel program turning their fear into fuel.

Harry Caldecote is the most charming man you'll ever meet, a convivial academic who devotes his life to others. He is on call when his alcoholic niece falls into strange hands, when his brother threatens to emulate Wordsworth, when his son's lesbian lodger is beaten up by her girlfriend. He endures misplaced seductions, swindles and aggressive dogs just to keep the peace at the King's pub in Shepherd's Hill.

Violent rebellion comes to London’s middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. When a bomb explodes at Heathrow, it looks like just another random act of violence to psychologist David Markham. But when he discovers that his ex-wife is among the victims he is compelled to further investigate the mysterious and shocking circumstances surrounding her death.