Showing results by narrator "Peter Noble" in All Categories

For Commandant Verhoeven, life is beautiful: He is happily married, expecting his first child with the lovely Irene. But his blissful existence is punctured by a murder of unprecedented savagery. Worse still, the press seem to have it in for him - his every move is headline news. When he discovers that the killer has killed before - that each murder is a homage to a classic crime novel - the fourth estate are quick to coin a nickname: The Novelist. With both men in the public eye, the case develops into a personal duel, each hell-bent on outsmarting the other.

When James Canton walked into Suffolk’s Lindsey Chapel, it was the beginning of what would become a new journey in his life—hours away from the bustling city of London and distant from the years in his early twenties when he traveled from Egypt to Argentina. Standing inside the quaint chapel, Canton realized that his past cosmopolitan desires had been replaced by an intense yearning to understand the history of the place he called home, a burning curiosity about the past and the spiritual ways and beliefs of the people who came before us.

Using forbidden Marrangha magic and the three stolen vapours, the evil sorcerer Zharradan Marr has created a creature....but for what purpose?

Young, bright and sexy, Carla Vitale has been handpicked to run Supertech, Africa’s leading independent engineering firm. Then one Friday afternoon in Cape Town, her dream is shattered. Her boss and mentor, Nial Townley, disappears, his luxury vehicle is found in a crevice at the bottom of Chapman’s Peak and $USD 20m is missing from the Supertech’s overseas accounts. Three months later and the police are no closer to solving the riddle. No job, no car, no phone, Carla turns to the one person she believes can help: software hacker turned day-trader, Daniel Le Fleur.

'Decline of the English Murder' analyses the kinds of murders depicted in popular media during Orwell's life and why society of the time was obsessed with these grizzly crimes. Tribune published it on 15th February 1946, and Secker and Warburg republished it after his death in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays in 1952.

The Stoicism Collection is a collection of 5 essential pieces of stoic philosophy, alongside a biography of Marcus Aurelius, read by an esteemed cast of award-winning narrators. Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy that flourished in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. The Stoics believed that the practice of virtue is enough to achieve eudaimonia: a well-lived life.

For many of us, what lies beyond conventional portrayals of mental illness is often shrouded in mystery, misconception and fear. Dr Sean Baumann spent decades as a Psychiatrist at Valkenberg Hospital and, through his personal engagement with patients’ various forms of psychosis, he describes the lived experiences of those who suffer from schizophrenia, depression, bipolar and other disorders. The stories told are authentic, mysterious and compelling, representing both vivid expressions of minds in turmoil and the struggle to give form and meaning to distress.

They say I'm a murderer. Six years ago, Kate Reynolds was found holding the body of her best friend, covered in blood, and clutching the knife that killed her. I plead guilty. Kate has been in prison ever since, but now her sentence is up. She is being released. But the truth is, I didn't do it. There's only one person who can help: Private Investigator Madison Attallee, the first officer on the scene all those years ago. But there's someone out there who doesn't want Kate digging up the past.

This collection of Culture Smart guidebooks introduces listeners to China, Japan, and India. Each guidebook includes concise chapters on the local customs, traditions, and values of the country's inhabitants and, crucially, the key historical and cultural events that have shaped them. There are sections on social and business etiquette, tips on communication, both verbal and non-verbal, and advice on how to be a good guest.

For centuries much of Europe was in the hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off – through luck, guile and sheer mulishness – any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the Danube they ruled most of Central Europe and Germany and interfered everywhere – indeed the history of Europe hardly makes sense without them.

What is language? Why do we have it? Where does it come from? Why does that matter? Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways.

Gabriel is a stranger in a small Breton town. Nobody knows where he came from or why he's here. Yet his small acts of kindness, and exceptional cooking, quickly earn him acceptance from the locals. His new friends grow fond of Gabriel, who seems as reserved and benign as the toy panda he wins at the funfair. But unlike Gabriel, the fluffy toy is not haunted by his past….

Jean Garnier lives on the fringes - a lonely nobody who has lost everything dear to him. His girlfriend was killed in an unexplained accident, his mother has just been sent to prison - he has even lost his job after the sudden death of his boss. In one last, desperate cry for help, Jean sets up seven lethal bombs, hidden all over Paris and timed so that one will explode every 24 hours. After the first detonation, Jean gives himself up to the police. He has one simple demand: his mother must be released, or the daily explosions will continue.

One of the most popular books ever to come from the pen of C. S. Lewis was written in the name of Screwtape, a senior devil experienced in the art of luring his 'patients' on earth to their own damnation in service of 'our father below' - and training others to do the same. Screwtape's correspondence with his nephew, an apprentice devil, came into Lewis' hands, he said, by a route he would not disclose, and many a listener has finished the collection longing for more of the insights they gained from its wisdom.

On April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker as the Red Army closed in on Berlin. Within four days the Soviets had recovered his body. But the truth about what the Russian secret services found was hidden from history, when, three months later, Stalin officially declared to Truman and Churchill that Hitler was still alive and had escaped abroad. Reckless rumors about what really happened to Hitler began to spread like wildfire and, even today, they have not been put to rest. Until now.

In April 1945, as Hitler’s Third Reich was unravelling, George Orwell published 'Anti-Semitism in Britain'. The short essay sketches the contours of British anti-Semitism, an essentially non-virulent, though a tenaciously pervasive, societal attitude that ran deep and cut across class and ideological differences.

In Neal Asher's Hilldiggers, during a war between two planets in the same solar system - each occupied by adapted humans - what is thought to be a cosmic superstring is discovered. After being cut, this object collapses into four cylindrical pieces, each about the size of a tube train. Each is densely packed with either alien technology or some kind of life. They are placed for safety in three ozark cylinders of a massively secure space station.

A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his 30s, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father - a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him.

In an unkind alternate past, somewhere between the Stone Age and a Metal Age, Tell and his sister Wren live in a small mountain village that makes its living off black glass mines and runs on brutal laws. When their father is blinded in a mining accident, the law dictates he has thirty days to regain his sight and be capable of working at the same level as before or be put to death. Faced with this dire future, Tell and Wren make the forbidden treacherous journey to the legendary city of Halfway, halfway down the mountain, to trade their father’s haul of the valuable black glass.

This collection of Culture Smart guidebooks introduces listeners to Italy, Germany, and Spain. Each guidebook includes concise chapters on the local customs, traditions, and values of the country's inhabitants and, crucially, the key historical and cultural events that have shaped them. There are sections on social and business etiquette, tips on communication, both verbal and non-verbal, and advice on how to be a good guest.