Showing results by narrator "Robin Sachs" in All Categories

This is the true story of the real Colonel Fawcett, whose life was the inspiration for the best-selling book The Lost City of Z and an upcoming movie starring Brad Pitt. A thrilling account, it tells of Colonel Fawcett and his mysterious disappearance in the Amazon jungle, which is now considered one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.

On a summer day in 1914, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. While the world slumbered, monumental forces were shaken. In less than a month, a combination of ambition, deceit, fear, jealousy, missed opportunities, and miscalculation sent Austro-Hungarian troops marching into Serbia, German troops streaming toward Paris, and a vast Russian army into war, with England as its ally. As crowds cheered their armies on, no one could guess what lay ahead in the First World War.

An intimate friend of Adolf Hitler’s who turned against him during the Nazi rise to power delves into the character of one of history’s most evil dictators. Of American and German parentage, Ernst Hanfstaengl graduated from Harvard and ran the family business in New York for a dozen years before returning to Germany in 1921. By chance he heard a then little-known Adolf Hitler speaking in a Munich beer hall and, mesmerized by his extraordinary oratorical power, was convinced the man would some day come to power. As Hitler’s fanatical theories and ideas hardened, however, he surrounded himself with rabid extremists...

When Harry left Oslo again for Hong Kong - fleeing the traumas of life as a cop - he thought he was there for good. But then the unthinkable happened. The son of the woman he loved, lost, and still loves is arrested for murder: Oleg, the boy Harry helped raise but couldn't help deserting when he fled. Harry has come back to prove that Oleg is not a killer. Barred from rejoining the police force, he sets out on a solitary, increasingly dangerous investigation that takes him deep into the world of the most virulent drug to ever hit the streets.

Is there any difference between memory and invention? That is the question that fuels this stunning novel, written with the depth of character, the clarifying lyricism, and the heart-wrenching humor that have marked all of John Banville's extraordinary works. And it is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave as he plumbs the memories of his first - and perhaps only - love (he, just 15, the woman more than twice his age, the mother of his best friend; the situation impossible, thrilling, devouring, and finally devastating).

For the first time in decades, here, in a single volume, is a fresh look at the fabled Tudor dynasty, comprising some of the most enigmatic figures ever to rule a country. Acclaimed historian G. J. Meyer reveals the flesh-and-bone reality in all its wild excess.

Businessman Mischa Fox has wealth, charisma, and an uncanny ability to influence those around him. When he moves to buy a small feminist magazine in London called the Artemis, Mischa becomes entangled in the lives of the Artemis’s editor, Hunter, his sister, Rosa, and her boarder, Annette, as well as their circle of friends. As Mischa instigates a series of ominous events that will change their lives, Murdoch’s masterful prose brings these rich characters - and their darkly humorous troubles - to vivid life.

With riches accumulated from an American crime spree, Professor Moriarty proceeds to annihilate his enemies. He murders the leaders of Europe's underworld one by one, then prepares his most hideous revenge for his arch-enemy, Sherlock Holmes. Will he succeed in this most terrible plan?

What is it like to be a swift, flying at over one hundred kilometres an hour? Or a kiwi, plodding flightlessly among the humid undergrowth in the pitch dark of a New Zealand night? And what is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise? Bird Sense addresses questions like these and many more, by describing the senses of birds that enable them to interpret their environment and to interact with each other.

The return of the shifter Geth!In the wake of the Last War, a new king has risen and seeks to unite the newly formed goblin kingdom of Darguun under his rule. He seeks an ancient scepter, a symbol under which to unite his people and hires Geth, a shifter who owns one of the trio of artifacts to which the scepter once belonged, to find it. But will the artifact do what the Darguul king needs it to?

Few were disappointed when Raoul Vernet was found with his head bashed in, dead in a pool of his own blood. On vacation in England, the Belgian seducer comes to visit Matilda, an old flame from a few years before. She agrees despite suspicions that Vernet has been deploying his legendary charm on another member of the family: young Rosie, who has returned from her Swiss boarding school carrying a child. None of the family members were in the house when Raoul was killed, but all were within a fog-choked London mile.

On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the earth and the sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system - but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs: eight years later, the scientists would have another opportunity to succeed.

Lindsey Davis’ Master and God is a vastly entertaining historical novel set in the reign of the Emperor Domitian in first-century Rome. It is on the one hand a love story between Gaius Vinius Clodianus, a valiant but reluctant member of the Praetorian Guard, whose military career is as successful as his marital history is disastrous, and Flavia Lucilla, daughter of a freed slave and hairdresser to the ladies of the imperial household. A devastating fire in Rome brings them together....

A young woman is murdered in her Oslo flat. One finger has been severed from her left hand, and behind her eyelid is secreted a tiny red diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star - a pentagram, the devil’s star. Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case with his long-time adversary Tom Waaler and initially wants no part in it. But Harry is already on notice to quit the force and is left with little alternative but to drag himself out of his alcoholic stupor and get to work. A wave of similar murders is on the horizon....

Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase possess extraordinary pieces of an ancient puzzle that leads them from Singapore to the jungles of South America. Inside a storm of political and drug warfare, Nina is getting close to one of history’s greatest secrets: the mythical golden city of El Dorado.

For the past half century, John Keegan, the greatest military historian of our time, has been returning to the scenes of America’s most bloody and wrenching war to ponder its lingering conundrums: the continuation of fighting for four years between such vastly mismatched sides; the dogged persistence of ill-trained, ill-equipped, and often malnourished combatants; the effective absence of decisive battles among some two to three hundred known to us by name.

Tired of dodging fishwives’ brooms and carriage wheels, alley cat Skilley yearns for the comfort of Ye olde Cheshire Cheese, a popular London inn. When he hears that the innkeeper is in need of a mouser, he hatches a scheme so audacious it will surely set him up for the rest of his nine lives. Once installed at the Cheese, Skilley looks forward to a life of ease. But a resident mouse named Pip uncovers Skilley’s scandalous secret, and the desperate cat is forced to make a pact with him.

In this genre-twisting novel, infamous necromancer Johannes Cabal, after beating the Devil and being reunited with his soul, leads us on another raucous journey in a little-known corner of the world. This time he’s on the run from the local government.

In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual. Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology, and literature.

Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase have stunned the world with their discoveries, from the legendary sword Excalibur to the golden city of El Dorado. Now, by bringing together three ancient statues from three different continents, Nina is about to tap into a colossal energy source - one not felt since the days of Atlantis. But when the statues are stolen and Eddie is falsely accused of murder, forcing him to go on the run to hunt the man responsible, a violent struggle erupts among a secret, vastly powerful group.