Showing results by narrator "Derek Perkins" in All Categories

Jonathan Swift's world-famous books - from Gulliver's Travels to A Modest Proposal - are unparalleled in their piercing critique of modern society. Half-orphaned, a Dubliner by birth, but a man who would always insist he was English, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a figure of great contradictions.

Many Christians experience times of doubt and uncertainty. At various times we can ask: Does God love me? Am I really a Christian? And even, is there a God at all? This short, understandable book unpacks the difference between good and bad doubt and shows us where it comes from and how to deal with it in ourselves and others. It explains clearly and simply the liberating reality of what the Bible tells us about doubt, assurance, and the Christian life.

What passes for investing today is, in fact, gambling: the notion of making money quickly and without effort...and that's just how Wall Street likes it. By charting the development of the modern financial system from its roots in the madness of the first bubbles and Roaring '80s, this book will cast a light on the chicanery of the big banks and hedge funds - and give you the information you need to make the right choices for your own investing future.

Meet the MacLauchlan Berserkers - Roderick, Finn and Connor. They are three of the world's Unwanted. On a snowy Solstice night, their tale becomes one of blood and vengeance, of love, redemption, and forging the bonds that make a family.

This is a short story about a young man who wants to be a wizard. Within, you will encounter one of the most powerful, life-transforming, secrets ever revealed. If you find it, you are ready for The Journey.

In 1900 the global average life expectancy at birth was 31 years. By 2000 it was 66. Yet, alongside unprecedented improvements in longevity and material well-being, the 20th century also saw the rise of fascism and communism and a second world war followed by a cold war. This book tells the story of the battles between economic systems that defined the last century and created today's world. The 19th century was a period of rapid economic growth, but it also brought great inequality.

A British soldier walked over to the German front line to deliver newspapers; British women married to Germans became ‘enemy aliens’ in their own country; a high-ranking British POW discussed his own troops’ heroism with the Kaiser on the battlefield. Just three amazing stories of contact between the opposing sides in the Great War that eminent historian Richard van Emden has unearthed - incidents that show brutality, great humanity, and above all the bizarre nature of a conflict between two nations with long-standing ties of kinship and friendship.

Flying the notorious "hump route" between India and China in 1943, a twin-engine plane suffered mechanical failure and crashed in a dense mountain jungle. Among the passengers and crew were celebrated CBS journalist Eric Sevareid, a Soviet double agent posing as an OSS operative, and General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell's personal political adviser. Against the odds, all but one of the 21 people aboard the aircraft survived - but they fell from the frying pan into the fire.

Nikolai Borodin has been assigned to the Soviet diamond export agency's London station for one purpose only: to keep in close touch with the System, the ruthless worldwide diamond cartel headquartered at 11 Harrowhouse Street. Recently, the System has been buying large quantities of one-carat diamonds mined in Siberia. But now contraband from the same source is showing up on the market, and the System wants the smugglers stopped.

The citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, never tire of their heritage. For decades, the intellectuals of this little hamlet have continued endless debates about Concord’s favorite sons: Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and their contemporaries. Concord’s latter-day transcendental scholars are a strange bunch, but none is more peculiar than Homer Kelly, an expert on Emerson and on homicide. An old-fashioned murder is about to put both skills to the test.

Eighteen days after the action closes in An Air of Treason, courtier Sir Robert Carey and Carey's surly, larcenous, and loyal henchman, Henry Dodd, are back in Carlisle and the Debateable Lands. A Chorus of Innocents ushers forward Lady Elizabeth Widdrington, a married woman whom Carey adores but respects. It opens when a very pregnant young woman rides to Lady Widdrington's tower, crying that her minister husband has been murdered and she herself has been raped.

Auguste Dupin is one of the few persons in Paris who can identify the rare Cthulhu Encryption inscribed in the flesh of a dying madwoman. The Comte de Saint-Germain has a second cryptogram that's a partner to the one Dupin now owns, and believes it to be the key to a fabulous treasure hoard buried by the pirate Levasseur. Harassed by shoggoths and tracked by Saint-Germain, Dupin must find the key to the complex puzzle. Can the might of Cthulhu be held at bay? And will any answer that Dupin finds enable him and his friends to escape with their lives?

A short story about a mysterious man who arrives in a small 19th century Orkney Island fishing village. He has the air of an aristocrat, the clothes of a beggar and a leather pouch filled with the biggest pearls anyone has ever seen. The women can't take their lustful eyes off him, the men are jealous, but he only has one woman and one purpose on his mind.

When Holmes gives up the adventurous life of a consulting detective and retires to the Sussex countryside to raise bees, little does he or his old friend Dr. John Watson realize that their greatest adventures lies ahead - an adventure spanning centuries and extending across the solar system.... For nothing less than human civilization lies at state as Sherlock Holmes finds himself moving inexorably toward the final and most terrible confrontation with his ancient enemy, the time-jumping Napoleon of crime, professor Moriarty!

Nine-year-old Laddy Merridew, sent to live with his grandmother for reasons he does not understand, stumbles off the bus in a small Welsh town where he begins an unlikely friendship with old Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, the town beggar-storyteller. Through Ianto, Laddy learns of the collapse decades earlier of a coal mine called Kindly Light - a disaster whose legacy has echoed through generations, shaping lives in unexpected ways. And while Ianto spins the lively stories of so many men and women in this town, it's his own history in Kindly Light that is the story he can't tell.

The Club is a blistering, timely, and gripping novel set at Cambridge University, centering around an all-male dining club for the most privileged and wealthy young men at Cambridge and following an outsider who exposes the dark secrets of this group, the Pitt Club.

When Octavia Garamond passed away, she left explicit instructions in her will: The police must be present at her funeral, and the coroner should be exceptionally thorough when examining her body. Amelia Kennerly is perplexed to find herself the sole executor of her great-aunt's will, as she barely knew her. Further questions arise when the local parson is anything but happy to conduct Octavia's service. Then someone breaks into Octavia's home and tears the house apart. It seems the old lady's words may have been eerily prescient: "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."

Émile Zola was the leader of the literary movement known as "naturalism" and is one of the great figures of the novel. In his monumental Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93), he explored the social and cultural landscape of the late 19th century in ways that scandalized bourgeois society. Zola opened the novel up to a new realm of subjects, including the realities of working-class life, class relations, and questions of gender and sexuality, and his writing embodied a new freedom of expression, with his bold, outspoken voice often inviting controversy.

Food trucks announcing "halal" proliferate in many urban areas but how many non-Muslims know what this means, other than cheap lunch? In this audiobook, Febe Armanios and Bogac Ergene provide an accessible introduction to halal (permissible) food in the Islamic tradition. Historically, Muslims used food to define their identities in relation to co-believers and non-Muslims. Food taboos are rooted in the Quran and prophetic customs, as well as writings from various periods and geographical settings.

In Victorian England, gossip is often as precious as gold. But the Highlanders are a more mysterious bunch. And if anyone found out what Stephen MacAlasdair really was, he'd be hunted down, murdered, his clan wiped out. As he's called to London on business, he'll have to be extra vigilant-especially between sunset and the appearance of the first evening star.