Showing results by narrator "Toby Longworth" in All Categories

I was wrong to think that there were floodlights. Nobody's got a torch lit. There's no need. She's difficult to look at. She's too bright. She's lighting the whole damn scene with her blood. Welcome to Vox. A city of perpetual night, existing under a star that burns in darkness. Light-starved citizens shoot up on Prometheus while the wealthy live in the radiance provided by three Hearts that beat light into the city. Aquila. Corvus. Cancer.

Sir Cliff Richard OBE is the biggest-selling artist of all time, selling over 250 million records around the world since he burst onto the music scene in 1958. But how has he kept his appeal all these years? In a world fuelled by drink, sex and drugs, he is perennially attractive without any of those things that keep other singers' profiles high. Now, working with the highly acclaimed biographer and journalist, Penny Junor, Cliff is going to talk freely and frankly about what it is like to be Cliff.

Broadcast live from the Club Akimbo, Bletchley, this is Britain's first public access cable radio show, presented by a group of Buckinghamshire district councillors who really should know better. Chairman of the Ways and Means committee Mr Dutton is our host as he introduces us to the items on the agenda, which include sparkling sketches, surreal escapades and musical interludes from Chilean charmer Enrico Valdez and his Orchestra with Mickey Binelli.

Fear is humanity's greatest enemy. The Cyberman can free us from it. The Cybermen.... The great civilisation we could have been...if we'd taken another path. A purer path. The Scorpius strategy is now in full operation. There will be victory in Orion.... Written and directed by Nicholas Briggs.

'I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in.' So says Angela Carter of this collection, written during a period living in Toyko. These exotic, sensuous stories represent Carter's first major achievement in the short story form. Lush imaginary forests, a murderous puppet show and an expressionistic vision of Japan: each one instantly conjures an atmosphere, dark and luminous in turn, and from the recognisably daring imagination of one of the great 20th-century stylists.

Terraforming—the megascale-engineering of a planet's surface to one more Earth-like—is now commonplace across the Solar System, and Pluto's is set to be the most ambitious transformation yet. Four billion miles from the Sun and 200 degrees below zero, what this worldlet needs is light and heat. Through captured asteroids and solar mirrors, humanity's finest scientists and engineers are set to deliver them. What nobody factored in was a saboteur—but who, and why?

What just happened, and how did we get into this mess? Since 2016, the UK has been in a crisis of its own making. This is not the fault of Brexit but of a larger problem of our politics. The status of political parties, the mainstream media, public experts and officials have all been disrupted. Along the way, there have been shocking and exhilarating events: the unforeseen 2017 election result, the horrific details of Grenfell Tower and the Windrush scandal, the sudden rise and fall of the Brexit Party.

Nick Belsey's on the run. Touching down in Mexico City, he doesn't have much in the way of funds, but he has a new continent and surely that's enough to start afresh. But it's not as easy as that. An idyllic interlude in a coastal village is interrupted when men turn up who seem to know exactly who he is. And they have some very urgent questions.

A poignant, funny and engrossing exploration of family life centred around a cataclysmic event and its aftermath, from the author of Night Waking and Signs for Lost Children. Adam is a stay-at-home dad who is also working on a history of the bombing and rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. He is a good man, and he is happy. But one day he receives a call from his daughter's school to inform him that for no apparent reason, 15-year-old Miriam has collapsed and stopped breathing.

Detective Nick Belsey needs help. Something happened last night - something with the boss' wife - and Belsey needs to get out of London and away from the debt and the drink and the deceit. Collecting his belongings back at Hampstead CID on what should be the last day of his career, Belsey sees a missing person's report. But this one's different; this is on The Bishop's Avenue, one of the most expensive streets in the city. Belsey sees a chance for a new life. But someone else got there first.

A city united in grief. A journalist ready to kill to keep his secrets. A copper capable of darker deeds than murderers. An unworldly detective fighting to save an innocent man. Newly appointed DS McAvoy is an outsider to his new force and must confront his darkest fears, while hunting a killer that nobody else believes in. In a landscape at once tender and brutal, McAvoy must tread the path between the darkness and the light, before facing an enemy who will brand him for life.

Amber Knight is hot property - pop star, film star, front-page gossip. DC Nick Belsey is less celebrated. He can't shake his habit of getting into serious trouble and his career at Hampstead CID is coming to a dishonourable end. He is currently of no fixed address - squatting in a disused police station round the corner from Amber's swanky Primrose Hill mansion. But a knock on the door from a frantic and confused woman looking for her missing son is about to lead Belsey straight into the heart of Amber's glittering life.

The human race is about to become extinct. Mankind is fighting a long and costly war with its android creations in the Orion System. The deadlock must be broken at all costs. The president of Earth must think the unthinkable.... 'There is nothing to fear'. Written and directed by Nicholas Briggs.

Perfect strangers. A perfect holiday. The perfect murder.... Three couples meet around the pool on their Florida holiday and become fast friends. But on their last night, their perfect holiday takes a tragic twist: the teenage daughter of another holidaymaker goes missing, and her body is later found floating in the mangroves. When the shocked couples return home, they remain in contact, and over the course of three increasingly fraught dinner parties they come to know one another better.

The Western Front, July 1918. Gregor Reinhardt is a young lieutenant in a stormtrooper battalion on the Western Front when one of his subordinates is accused of murdering a group of officers and then subsequently trying to take his own life. Not wanting to believe his friend could have done what he is accused of, Reinhardt begins to investigate. He starts to uncover the outline of a conspiracy at the heart of the German army, a conspiracy aimed at ending the war on the terms of those who have a vested interest in a future for Germany that resembles her past.

In the second half of the first millennium, the legends say that London disappeared for over four hundred years. We know almost nothing about what happened during that time. But if we could shine a light on the city's ruined walls, we would be in for a shock. For here the Romans are long forgotten. King Scarabold now rules what little remains of the city, together with his over-entitled daughter Giniva, her effete brother Leperdandy and their wayward, lunatic relatives—all squabbling and fighting amongst themselves for the future of their corrupted dynasty.

Far from the Wardstone, a new darkness is rising . . .Slither is a haizda mage who preys upon humans, drinking their blood to feed his dark urges. So when a local farmer dies, it’s only natural that Slither should want to feast on his lovely daughters.But then the farmer offers him a deal, and extracts from Slither a promise that will take him on a journey to the City of the Petrified Tree, to a fallen star-stone that holds great power, and straight into the path of Grimalkin, the Witch Assassin.

The poetic style and sweeping grandeur of The King of Elfland's Daughter has made it one of the most beloved fantasy novels of our time, a masterpiece that influenced some of the greatest contemporary fantasists. The heartbreaking story of a marriage between a mortal man and an elf princess is a masterful tapestry of the fairy tale following the 'happily ever after'.

London is steaming under a summer of filthy heat and sudden storms - and Detective Nick Belsey, of Hampstead CID, is trying to stay out of trouble. But then somebody sets him a riddle. How does a man walk into a dead-end alley and never come out? And then reappear - to snatch a girl, to dump a body beneath a London skyscraper, to send Belsey a package of human hair? The answer lies underground, where the secrets degenerating beneath the city's sickly glitter are about to see the light of day.

Dr Thomas Barrett and his wife Jane have a perfectly nice existence in 1950s Manchester, but dreams of a new life won’t let them rest. Leaving the security of their home and successful doctor’s practice, they set out for adventure, heading to Kalangadog Junction, a small Australian town of population fifty-nine that is so remote it’s not even on the map. Setting up Down Under isn’t quite as simple as the duo thought it would be.