Showing results by narrator "Gerry O'Brien" in All Categories

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of The Blue Guitar by John Banville, read by Gerry O'Brien. Adultery is always put in terms of thieving, but we were happy together, simply happy. Oliver Orme is a painter who has abandoned his art. His days are now haunted by loss: loss of desire, of artistic vision, of the people he has loved. And only now does he realize that those around him understand him more than he does himself.

"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. A Künstlerroman in a modernist style, it traces the intellectual and religious philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe.

February 1922. Hollywood is young but already mired in scandal. When a leading movie director is murdered, Irish American investigator Tom Collins is called in by studio boss Mack Sennett, whose troubled star, Mabel Normand, is rumoured to be involved. But Normand has gone missing. And, as Collins discovers, there's a growing list of suspects. His quest leads him through the brutal heart of Prohibition-era Los Angeles, from speakeasies and dope dens to the studios and salons of Hollywood's fabulously wealthy movie elite, and to a secret so explosive it must be kept silent at any cost....

This classic early-19th-century science-fiction masterpiece serves as both a wonderful period presentation of the time as well as cautionary tale. Called by many a "chilling novel account of a Martian invasion of London in the 19th century - a science-fiction classic for all time".

In Georgian London Irish-born Peter Woulfe is a young downtrodden apprentice chemist with a secret interest in alchemy. When he is tasked with caring for a mysterious illustrated book - the Mutus Liber - he loses it to a light-fingered young prostitute called Sukie. Soon, a group of dangerous men are in pursuit of Peter, urgently seeking the book's return, and too late he realises its extraordinary value.

There's a nasty flu going round. An epidemic, they call it. The posters say to cover your mouth when you sneeze, and throw away the tissue. But such simple measures won't stop this flu. Because when you catch this flu, armed police come and lock you in your house to die alone. When you catch this flu, it kills you in days. And two hours after it's killed you, your eyelids snap open again.... Flu is a pacey, terrifying, frighteningly real zombie horror story.

For Sam Hamilton and Robert Scott, the world has changed greatly since their childhood. Now in their fifties, with families of their own, they are grateful to have work at a time when unemployment is rife. But they have little joy in their wives, and even less support when they are faced with the unhappiness of a son or daughter. Set in the Ulster of the 1930s, For Many a Long Day continues the story of the Hamiltons and their friends.

Ireland is no longer the land of saints and scholars. Now, in an era of prosperity, the sexual scandals surrounding the church have caused its people to lose faith in the one institution that seemed invulnerable. But the decapitation of Father Joyce in a Galway church brings a gasp to the most hardened cynics. Not to Jack Taylor. Emotionally bruised, battered, and still struggling with the demon drink, he’s back in town, trying to get his life on course after the traumatic trauma of personal loss.

Someone is scraping the scum off the streets of Galway, and they want Jack Taylor to get involved. A drug pusher, a rapist, a loan shark: all targeted in what look like vigilante attacks. And the killer is writing to Jack, signing their name: C-33. Jack has had enough. He doesn’t need the money, and doesn’t want to get involved. But when his friend Stewart gets drawn in, it seems he isn’t been given a choice.

Francis Foley is a proud, stubborn man, and cannot stand to be beholden to anyone. Quick to anger and slow to forgiveness, it is his temper that, one day, costs his sons their home -- and their mother. This will not be the last of their losses however: as the four boys and their father embark on an odyssey to find untenanted land they can call their own, their already diminished family is divided still further.

Gincy, autumn 1916: The 9th Battalion, The Royal Dublin Fusiliers, known rather ominously as The Lambs, go over the top. In 1914, Kevin Flynn had hardly given the war a thought; everyone said it would be over by Christmas. Instead, desperate to impress a girl called Mary, Flynn and his friends begin a journey that leads inexorably to the shattered ruins of Ginchy and suffering beyond imagination.

Some people help the less fortunate. Others kill them.

Evil has many guises. Jack Taylor has encountered most of them but nothing before has ever truly terrified him until a group called Headstone rears its ugly head. An elderly priest is viciously beaten until nearly dead. A special-needs boy is brutally attacked. A series of seemingly random, insane, violent events even has the Guards shaken. This coterie of evil intends to act as a death knell to every aspect of Jack's life as an act of appalling violence alerts him to the horror enveloping Galway.

Many of us are seeking that special something that will transform our lives. Fin, an Irishman living in Cairo, is no exception. Sacked from his mediocre job on a mediocre newspaper, he sets off on the hunt for an elusive story that might just save him. With little more than a rumpled linen suit to his name, he searches for Farouk, the mercurial storyteller who alone knows what Fin wants to hear, but who has managed to get himself kidnapped.

The inspiration behind Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic pirate tale Treasure Island, this is the long lost and almost forgotten true story of how two murderous pirates ended their days swinging in a gibbet on a small island off the coast of Dublin. From the busy streets of London to the exotic island of Tenerife via the vile slave markets on the western coast of Africa it tells of how a band of pirates murdered all those aboard a ship, stealing a treasure that was being secretly transported back to England and how they nearly got away with it....

Five years ago, three-year-old Dillon disappeared. For his father Harry - who left him alone for ten crucial minutes - it was an unforgivable lapse. Yet Dillon's mother Robyn has never blamed her husband: Her own secret guilt is burden enough. Now they're trying to move on, returning home to Dublin to make a fresh start. But their lives are turned upside down the day Harry sees an eight-year-old boy in the crowd. A boy Harry is convinced is Dillon. But the boy vanishes before he can do anything about it.

Once, Redmond Hatch was in heaven, married to the lovely Catherine and father to enchanting daughter Immy. But then he took them both to Winterwood. And it would never be the same again...

Bolivar and Hector go to sea before a catastrophic storm. Needing cash, Bolivar convinces his boss to let him fish despite the weather. His fishing partner is nowhere to be found, so he brings Hector, a sullen and inexperienced teenager. The storm arrives, and though the two men survive, they’ve been blown hundreds of miles out in the Pacific Ocean with little hope for rescue. Coming to terms with their new reality, they are forced to accept their separation from the modern world, their sudden and inescapable intimacy, and the possibilities and limits of faith, hope, and survival.

On an island off the west coast of Ireland, the Moone family gather, only to be shattered by tragedy. Murtagh Moone is a potter and devoted husband to Maeve, an actor struggling with her most challenging role yet as mother to their four children. Now Murtagh must hold his family close as we bear witness to their story before that night.

The classic Oscar Wilde story brought to life. "The Picture of Dorian Gray" begins on a beautiful summer day in Victorian era England, where Lord Henry Wotton, an opinionated man, is observing the sensitive artist Basil Hallward painting the portrait of Dorian Gray, a handsome young man who is Basil's ultimate muse.

Under the Sunset was Bram Stoker's first collection of short stories. It is a collection of eight stories for children with 33 illustrations by W. Fitzgerald and W. V. Cockburn. It was first published in the UK in November 1881 by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, London.