Showing results by narrator "David Thorpe" in All Categories

Makana, a former police inspector who fled from Sudan to Cairo, lives on a rickety Nile houseboat. When the notorious and powerful Saad Hanafi hires him to track down a missing person, Makana is in no position to refuse him. Hanafi is the owner of Cairo’s star-studded football team; his most valuable player has just vanished and Adil Romario’s disappearance threatens to bring down not only Hanafi’s private empire but the entire country. But why should the city’s most powerful man hire its lowliest private detective?

Johnny Seymour has seen too much war and seeks solace photographing East African wildlife. But when isolated white families are slaughtered by Mau Mau gangs, the British respond brutally, and Johnny is reluctantly pulled into the horror. After his African driver, Macharia, disappears, Johnny is forced to confront shocking truths about his own country and ask how far he'll go to help a friend.

It is deep midwinter. Six ambitious vice presidents of Labouchere Associates are gathered together at an isolated mountain lodge in New Hampshire’s White Mountains for a weekend of corporate mind games. By Monday, one of them will become a partner and earn at least a million a year. And one of them will be dead.

A group of telegraphists are on the edge of their seats awaiting news of the prime minister who is dying. But a storm causes a power cut, and one of the men, Old Shayler, recalls a stormy night 15 years ago, where a man was killed, and not by the lightning....

Fleetwood Mac have had a chart-topping career that spans over fifty years and includes some of the biggest-selling albums and greatest hits of the 20th and 21st centuries. But the band's story is one of enormous triumph and also unimaginable tragedy. There has never been a band in the history of music riven with as much romantic drama, sexual tension and incredible highs and lows as Fleetwood Mac.

As Hitler's bombs threatened London during World War II, eight-year-old David Merron was removed from his family and close-knit Jewish community in the East End and evacuated to the safety of the English countryside. Placed into the car of strangers, life was sometimes unpredictable and lonely. But, with time, the rural world became an exciting adventure playground in which he flourished.

In concise, immediate prose, Italian physicist and novelist Paolo Giordano explains how disease spreads in our interconnected world: why it matters, how it impacts us, how we must react. Writing from his home in Rome as Italy implements the largest peace-time lockdown ever recorded in a democratic country, Giordano expands his focus to other forms of contagion linked to this epidemic - fake news, the environmental crisis, nationalism and xenophobia, our lack of imagination in promoting a new kind of global community.

In 2016, six students and a dog on a barge trip entered Standedge Tunnel, the longest canal tunnel in England. Six students went in, and two and a half hours later, the boat reappeared on the other side with only one of the students, unconscious, and the dog. The case of the Standedge Six was largely kept from the national media. The police investigation concluded that the only remaining student, Matthew, killed his friends, hid the bodies on the boat and returned later to move them to an undisclosed location. Matthew is in prison...but he maintains he is innocent.

When council officer Chris Buckley is approached by an odd old man demanding help in healing a decades-old family rift, he sends the stranger away. But then the old man is murdered, and the police arrive on the Chris's doorstep asking questions to which he has no answers. As Chris begins to look into the circumstances of the murder, he uncovers a deadly secret in the silt and mud of the local canals that he'll realise was better kept buried.

In spring 2018, England cricket had a performance problem. The Test team hadn’t won a Test match overseas for nearly two years. Recently crushed in the Ashes, England teams were world ranked 5th, 4th and 2nd across the three formats. The England and Wales Cricket Board approached Ed Smith, asking him to bring in a whole new philosophy. Over the next three years, England’s teams won 7 out of 10 completed matches—better than England had ever performed in the board’s history. Making Decisions shares Ed’s approach to finding success.

An Englishman in Bombay strikes up a friendship with postcard-seller Baburao Munshi, after allowing him credit to sell a selection of books from his office. As Baburao’s bookselling success grows, so does the two men’s friendship. Yet when Baburao’s son is old enough to be involved in the business, so begins a war of attrition between father and son.

The Victorian era saw orchids become one of the most expensive and collectable plants, and this short story follows orchid collector Wedderburn, who gets more than he bargained for with his latest floral specimen.

Evan Cadwallader comes across the almost dead body of a young woman while panning for gold at his inherited claim in the foothills of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. Having carried her back to his cottage, he nurses her back to health, gradually piecing together the story of her life. Evan is torn between his growing feelings for Addie and the pull of his claim, but as the gold begins to flow, they draw ever closer to each other. Then one day when Evan returns to the cottage, he finds it ransacked and Addie gone.

Causing chaos wherever they sail, the robotic Steampunk Pirates are roaming the high seas, hunting for gold! But the evil Iron Duke has other ideas. He's determined to capture the pirates in return for a handsome reward from the king. Can the mechanical marauders stay one wave ahead of their enemy?

Though it remains by far the world's most famous mountain, in recent years, Everest's reputation has changed radically, with long queues of climbers on the Lhotse Face, lurid tales of frozen corpses and piles of high altitude trash. It wasn't always like this though. Once Everest was remote and inaccessible, a mysterious place, where only the bravest and most heroic dared to tread. The first attempt on Everest in 1922 by George Leigh Mallory and a British team is an extraordinary story full of controversy, drama and incident, populated by a set of larger-than-life characters.

Darkness falls. The undead rise to feast on the succulent blood of the living. For years vampires have fascinated great writers of the occult such as De Maupassant, Count Stenbock, E. Nesbit, and E.F. Benson. This is The Story Circle's collection of some of their spine-chilling tales told by award-winning actors.

Newly appointed as land agent to the youthful Lord Croft, Matthew Rowsley finds plenty to keep him busy as he attends to his lordship's neglected country estate. But he's distracted from his tasks by the disappearance of a young housemaid. Has Maggie really eloped with a young man, as her mother attests - or is the truth rather more sinister? What's been going on behind the scenes at the grand country estate and where has his lordship disappeared to?

1861, Victorian England. When Matthew and Harriet Rowsley are invited to a party at Clunston Park by Matthew's cousin, Colonel Barrington Rowsley, Harriet is nervous - surely the aristocratic guests will snub her? Her fears are realised on their first evening when the only person who deigns to speak to her is the spiteful Grafin Weiser and confirmed when she commits a faux pas at the cricket match the following day. Grafin Weiser is then found murdered and the finger is quickly pointed at Clara, an eleven-year-old maid, as the culprit.

Hester Ward is blessed with youth, health, beauty, a husband and two adorable children, but she is being tormented by a face in her dreams. It is hoped that a holiday by the coast will relieve her, but the face eventually manifests itself.

The hero of Charlotte Brontë's first novel escapes a dreary clerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher in Belgium. There, however, his entanglement with the sensuous but manipulative Zoraide Reuter complicates his affections for a penniless girl who is both teacher and pupil in Reuter's school.