Showing results by narrator "Richard Turner" in All Categories

A novel that leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated by only a door. Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China.

Join Professor John Lloyd and curators Jimmy Carr, Humphrey Ker, Phill Jupitus and Sarah Millican as they plunge down the badger hole of ignorance in a search for the universe's most mind-boggling oddnesses. The Museum of Curiosity is BBC Radio 4's monumental comedy edifice and the only one with gargoyles in the foyer. It allows nothing inside that doesn't make you scratch your head, stroke your chin or, at the very least, go 'hmm'.

A spine-chilling new thriller that pits renowned criminalist Lincoln Rhyme against the ultimate opponent - Amelia Sachs, his own brilliant protege. A quadriplegic since a beam crushed his spinal cord years ago, Rhyme is desperate to improve his condition and goes to North Carolina for high-risk experimental surgery. In a twenty-four hour period, the sleepy Southern outpost of Tanner's Corner has seen a local teen murdered and two young women abducted. And Ryhme and Sachs are the best chance to find the girls alive.

Is Christianity a fairy tale for the infantile? Or worse, a cruel fantasy? Such questions reflect the skepticism of outsiders and the doubts of insiders. The answer isn’t a louder faith to shout them down, but a humbler faith that points to a bigger God. Samuel Wells illustrates this through his engagement with 10 difficult questions about Christianity. In each case, he portrays the traditional position and the skepticism of the modern age as two rival stories, transcending both to offer a revitalized story that better renders the radical and vulnerable nature of authentic faith.

Sophie Winstead is utterly perfect, from the top of her tousled honey-brown ringlets to the tips of her dainty pink toes. Indeed, any man in London Society would want her. The problem for Sophie lay in what they wanted from her. For Sophie is the orphaned daughter of one Constance Winstead, the Widow Winstead, mistress of many men during her abbreviated lifetime. Woo her, win her, yes. Marry her? Don’t be ridiculous!

An adventurous, voyaging novel in which time occupies space uniquely, The Book of Records holds a mirror to the idea of fate in history, interrogates questions of legacy, explores how the political factors of a collective moment may determine an individual's future, and beautifully shows the infinite joys of art and intellectual endeavour. This is the great novelist Madeleine Thien at her most remarkable, exciting, engrossing, and enriching.

Curiosities opens with a present-day amateur historian, Anne, who describes her unexpected discovery of five seventeenth-century manuscripts that, astonishingly, tell the same strange story from vastly different points of view. The five manuscripts spin this tale: after the Plague descends upon a village in England, two small children, Joan and Thomasina, are the only survivors.

After several millennia living as a lone sentinel in the Garden of Eden, the angel Tesque is contemplating leaving his post in rebellion against God. Meanwhile, in another time and place, a professor of mathematics isolates herself in remote Iceland as she finds herself increasingly at odds with society. The connection between these two characters? A letter, a sentient dog, and a deep-seated resistance to the demands of love.

The remarkable new novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which leaps across centuries past and future as if different eras were separated by only a door. Why did people, who lived so briefly in this universe, contain so much time? Lina and her ailing father have taken refuge at an enclave called the Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions, among them three volumes from The Great Lives of Voyagers encyclopaedia series.

Country born and bred Miss Caledonia Johnston has come to London during the Silly Season, not to dance and flirt, and please her Mama by making an advantageous match. Enter one Simon Roxbury, Viscount Brockton, surprising himself when he comes to Callie’s aid...which infuriates her, but she’ll find a way around him to complete her “mission.” He seems nice enough, and his mother is a dear thing, so she agrees to be good...especially considering she’d almost shot the man.

Lady Marie O’Shea lives life by her own rules...but her days of running free end when her brother, Lord Fergus O’Shea, returns from England, intent on marrying his sisters off to keep them from being the scourge of the county. And when Marie lands herself in a scandalous amount of trouble, she ends up as the first sister doomed to whatever marriage of convenience her brother can arrange. Bad boy Christian Darrow is having too much fun to be tied down, and as the younger son of an earl, he isn’t expected to amount to much.

Marguerite Balfour lived an enchanted life as the beloved daughter of her soft-spoken mother and her adored father, a dreamer who filled her young life with hope and wonder. Anything was possible in Marguerite’s life...until the day her father died while she was in her young teens and her mother all but retreated from life. Marguerite carried on, trying to live by the words her father taught her, until everything she’d believed in came crashing down when her mother whispered into her ear as she was dying.

In this dark, haunting tale, Richard Merton recounts the story of his close friend, Tony, a young lawyer recently returned from the war and the subtle, sinister destruction of his personality by his servant, Barrett. Seeking ease and comfort, Tony hires Barrett to cater to his needs, not realizing that his new servant has a hidden agenda.

The running wolf inscription told the world that a Solingen blade was at its throat. When a German smuggler is imprisoned in Morpeth Gaol in the winter of 1703, why does Queen Anne's powerful right-hand man, the Earl of Nottingham, take such a keen interest? At the end of the turbulent 17th century, the ties that bind men are fraying, turning neighbour against neighbour, friend against friend and brother against brother.

Lady Shannon O’Shea has seen all of her sisters married off by their brother, Fergus, in order to keep them out of trouble. She is determined not to encounter the same fate. She has far too many other things on her hands, including her secretive, scandalous, and growing beer brewing business. She is convinced that the end of the century will be the beginning of a new world for women, and the last thing she has time for is a man.

The fierce warriors of Black Isle are used to living with the threat of war hanging above their heads at all times. They work hard to survive and celebrate even harder. Shifters of various types must band together to defeat their numerous enemies, yet they never forget that life and love is precious and to grab happiness wherever they can find it. After all, any given day could be their last.

Lady Colleen O’Shea simply cannot stand Lord Benedict Boleran. He is overbearing, he is arrogant, he is opinionated, he is handsome and has lovely eyes and a fine form and…oh dear. But no, she most definitely cannot abide him. And she won’t fall victim to her brother’s marriage machinations and marry the man.

Lady Chloe O’Shea lives life with her head in the clouds—or rather the stars. As a budding astrologer, she thinks the course of the world and her life is written in the stars, and if she just looks hard enough, she can see where the future will take her. But the last thing she saw coming was a handsome duke with a secret. Deane Crenshaw, the Duke of Blackburn, is in Ireland looking for a bride after an embarrassing scandal that has turned all of the eligible English maidens against him.

Churchill was far from transparent about his religious beliefs and never regularly attended church services as an adult, even considering himself “not a pillar of the church but a buttress”, in the sense that he supported it “from the outside”. But Gary Scott Smith assembles pieces of Churchill’s life and words to convey the profound sense of duty and destiny, partly inspired by his religious convictions, that undergirded his outlook.

Broc’s reign as King of the Black Isles had lasted seven years already. That was a long time to go without a queen and therefore, an heir. He knew what he had to do: to claim the human offering and make her his own. When they met, it changed everything. A glimmer of hope, even of love, in unexpected places. But life on the Black Isles was far from simple. And there were powerful secrets, yet to be uncovered, that could change everything yet again.