Showing results by narrator "TIm Campbell" in All Categories

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a listener as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success.

Heard about the lizard that shoots blood from its eyes? Or the ancient Romans who used pee as mouthwash? Did you know that going on a roller coaster can cure kidney stones? In this compendium of obscure facts listeners will be treated to baffling knowledge they would never learn at school. Broken into chapters including geography, space, and history, a team of experts has scoured the world to find the silliest and most pointless facts that it has to offer.

Spain 1057: During a thunderous battle, the first King of Aragon wrestles Alexander the Great's priceless Egyptian weapon from the Moors, but finds it holds a terrifying and mysterious power. A thousand years later, gunshots and the sound of breaking glass rip through the silence. Maddy Marshall and her twin brother Will Argones, an engineer, quickly run toward the sound. Horrified, they discover a sniper's bullet has found its human target. Before the pool of blood on the living room floor is dry, the twins are sent on an arcane quest to recover Alexander's ancient weapon.

London, June 1835: In the interest of being a good neighbor, Charles checks in on Miss Haverstock, the elderly spinster who resides in the flat above his. But as the young journalist and his fiancee Kate ascend the stairs, they are assaulted by the unmistakable smell of death. Upon entering the woman's quarters, they find her decomposing corpse propped up, adorned in a faded gown that looks like it could have been her wedding dress, had she been married. A murderer has set the stage. But to what purpose?

It's December 1799, and Sam and Catherine are expecting, but their unborn babe is in grave danger, and Catherine might not live through the child's birth. Sam is desperate to find a way to save them both. Sam's courageous heart is sorely tested. He frantically searches for a solution to the impending crisis as their winter in the beautiful Kentucky wilderness grows even more troubled. Heavily armed, cold-blooded men arrive to buy Wyllie Mountain in Sam's home state of New Hampshire. The land is sentimental to Sam, and he refuses to sell.

Aidan MacKeefe guards the true Stone of Destiny, using it as his pillow, keeping Scotland's secret safe that the English have stolen a fake coronation stone. And when he dreams of a Scottish angel and she appears in his life, he is determined to protect her, and believes she is his destiny.

When Lady Isabella Trevarre first laid eyes on Gabriel St. Briac, she announced to her best friend: "That is the man I will marry!" Now a woman grown, Izzie has traded her girlish dreams for the independent life of an artist, but she never quite forgot the dazzling Frenchman who captivated her young heart. When he appears again in Cornwall, the seeds of desire grow between them.

In 1789, on the eve of the first presidential inauguration, charismatic Lion Hampshire aspires to a seat in the first Congress. In an effort to improve his rakish reputation, he agrees to an arranged marriage with Virginia-bred Priscilla Wade. However, his fiancée's headstrong lady's maid, Meagan, is not who she seems to be and Lion's carefully crafted future may be undone by his passion for the wrong woman.

Professor Johan Eschbach had hoped for a quiet life in retirement from the intelligence service, teaching environmental science and living with his new wife, but an unusual invitation from the Mormon nation of Deseret inexorably drags him back into the spy business, though he isn't quite sure why or for whom. It quickly becomes apparent that he is being used as a pawn in a deadly game of international maneuverings that are leading the world closer to war.

Having found the ancient ruins of a lost Ainshardian city with a direct teleportation shrine hidden in the mountains nearby, Lev decides the best course of action is to organize a settler party and escape before hivelings seep through the cavern’s upper cracks and hunt them down.

Five years ago, Kellam left to study magic at the big city university. He promised he'd write every day. He never did. But Farryn isn't about to sit around crying her eyes out over the stupid boy who was once her best friend. She's got burgeoning magic of her own, and she's eager to learn how to use it. Surely a witch like Mother Ulla will be the perfect teacher, right? Wrong. Mother Ulla is delighted to have an apprentice around to scrub floors, weed the garden, make meals, and wash her many strange witchly implements. But this apprenticeship is not what Farryn had in mind.

1333 A.D. - The lovely and educated Lady Aubrielle Grace di Witney is what is kindly termed an unmanageable woman. Her uncle, the Earl of Wrexham, has been awarded custody of his niece because her mother can no longer handle the head-strong beauty. Like a coward, the earl abdicates his duties to his most powerful knight, Sir Kenneth St. Hever with the instructions to transform her into a submissive lady. Aubrielle and Kenneth are at odds from the onset; Kenneth expects obedience and Aubrielle is less than compliant.

A group of 27 scientists and explorers are stranded in Antarctica. Residing in a station known as Shackleton, they are studying the seismic activity of the region. An eruption of the nearby volcano, Mount Erebus, soon sends quakes throughout the continent with devastating results. All radio communication has been disabled by the breakdown of the magnetic field. Evacuation is unlikely. No one knows whether they survived the icequake, and their station is now moving two kilometres north each day with the strong aftershocks.

From its terrifying start in the night skies of Afghanistan to its stunning end in the Paris terrorist attacks, Assassins is, in novelized form, the story of the last thirty years of war between Islam and the West. Based on the author's experiences in the Middle East, Assassins lives this unending conflict from the viewpoints of an American commando, a French woman doctor, an Afghani warlord, a Russian major, and a British woman journalist.

For the six lucky scientists selected by the Destination Mars! corporation, a one-way ticket to Mars - in exchange for a lifetime of research - was an absolute no-brainer. The incredible opportunity was clearly worth even the most absurdly tedious screening process. Perhaps worth following the strange protocols in a nonsensical handbook written by an eccentric billionaire. Possibly even worth their constant surveillance, the video of which is carefully edited into a ratings-bonanza back on Earth. But it turns out that after a while, even scientists can get bored of science.

Scorpia Kaiser has always stood in Corvus's shadow until the day her older brother abandons their family to participate in a profitless war. However, becoming the heir to her mother's smuggling operation is not an easy transition for the always rebellious, usually reckless, and occasionally drunk pilot of the Fortuna, an aging cargo ship and the only home Scorpia has ever known. But when a deal turns deadly and Corvus returns from the war, Scorpia's plans to take over the family business are interrupted, and the Kaiser siblings are forced to make a choice....

When a corpse turns up at his favorite tavern, Crispin Guest-disgraced knight turned detective - begins an inquiry, but the dead man turns out to be a Templar knight, an order thought to be extinct for 75 years, charged with protecting a certain religious relic which is now missing. Before he can begin to investigate, Crispin is abducted by shadowy men who are said to be minions of the French anti-pope.

Twelve-year-old Spade is a grave thief. With his father and brother, he digs up the recently deceased to steal jewels, the main form of trade in Wyndhail. Digging graves works for Spade - alone in the graveyard at night, no one notices his limp or calls him names. He’s headed for a lifetime of theft when his father comes up with the audacious plan to rob a grave in the Wyndhail castle cemetery. Spade and his brother get caught in a royal trap, and Spade must find the master of the Woegan: a deadly creature that is stalking the castle by night.

In The Mountain, Paul Yoon displays his subtle, ethereal, and strikingly observant style with six thematically linked stories, taking place across several continents and time periods and populated with characters who are connected by their traumatic pasts, newly vagrant lives, and quests for solace in their futures. Though they exist in their own distinct worlds (from a sanatorium in the Hudson Valley to an inn in the Russian far east), they are united by the struggle to reconcile their traumatic pasts in the wake of violence, big and small, spiritual and corporeal.

Dashing French pirate Jean-Philippe Beauvisage revels in a life of complete freedom...until the night at a ball in Georgian London, when a Russian beauty quietly steals his heart. Heartbroken Antonia Varyshkova, who has lost her parents and her home in a St. Petersburg fire, stops in London en route to a new life with her brother in America. When her arrogant ship's captain, Tobias Ormond, insists that she attend a ball with him, Antonia reluctantly agrees.