Showing results by narrator "Simon Vance" in All Categories

From the meadow of his youth to the crowded, frosty streets of London, Black Beauty tells the story of his life under many masters in Victorian England, among them the kind Squire Gordon, the principled Jeremiah Barker, and the exploitive Nicholas Skinner. No matter the circumstance, Beauty bears joy and hardship with grace, heeding his mother's advice to be good, gentle, and hardworking - always.

A scientist and gentleman inventor in industrialized Victorian England claims to have irrefutable proof that time is not simply a concept - it's a whole other dimension. When he reveals the prototype of a time-traveling machine to his peers, he's met with skepticism at first...until he returns one week later, disheveled, bloody, and with a fantastic story to tell.

Davon wants a quiet life, but the Queen orders her new clerk to delve into the affairs of the lovely Lady Hightower to uncover the truth about the mysterious plot. He discovers that powerful and prestigious conspirators don't like meddlesome clerks, and Davon must dodge bullets and increasing scrutiny, fearing the exposure of his past life. As the clues fall into place, Davon finds that the fate of Bittermarch and the Eternal Flame itself are in his flame-branded hands.

In The Tower, the thrilling conclusion to Simon Toyne’s bestselling Sanctus trilogy, an ominous countdown has begun that some believe could be the first sign of an imminent global catastrophe. Toyne’s latest thriller opens at the NASA Control Center in Maryland where the center’s director...

Titus Crow and his faithful companion and record-keeper fight the gathering forces of darkness - the infamous and deadly Elder Gods of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Cthulhu and his dark minions are bent on ruling the earth. A few puny humans cannot possibly stand against these otherworldly evil gods, yet time after time, Titus Crow drives the monsters back into the dark from whence they came. Spawn of the Winds is the fourth book in the Titus Crow series.

In these 14 brilliant stories, the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending examines longing and loss, friendship and love, the historical past and contemporary life - all with his trademark wit and sharply observant eye.

Rabbit Room Press is proud to present these historical documents to the world for the first time. With contributions from visiting scholars such as Jonathan Rogers, Malcolm Guite, Junius Johnson, A. S. Peterson, and many more, these tales have been scrupulously compiled and annotated by leading experts of dubious renown.

John Russell, an English journalist who specializes in human-interest pieces, had always been a reluctant spy. It’s a dangerous life—especially when you are tasked with being a double agent for Soviet and American intelligence, in a city as fraught with hazard as Nazi-occupied Berlin. But it’s been years, now, since Russell was finally able to extricate himself from his life of espionage—through a shady deal with a high-ranking Soviet official. Now it’s 1953, and Russell and his family live a life of relative comfort in Los Angeles.

This wonderful collection of 18 short stories includes work by some of literature's most treasured names, including Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, and many more. This superlative treasury includes "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe; "A Piece of String" by Guy Le Maupassant; "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin; "The Mark on the Wall" by Virginia Woolf; "Nuns at Lunch" by Aldous Huxley, and many more!

Amitav Ghosh’s extraordinary first novel makes a claim on literary turf held by Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie. In a vivid and magical story, The Circle of Reason traces the misadventures of Alu, a young master weaver in a small Bengali village who is falsely accused of terrorism. Alu flees his home, traveling through Bombay to the Persian Gulf to North Africa with a bird-watching policeman in pursuit.

Considered by many to be the first modern mystery novel, Trent's Last Case introduces the gentleman sleuth Philip Trent, a freelance reporter and invistigator. Trent becomes involved in the case of the murder of millionaire American financier Sigsbee Manderson, slain while on holiday in England.

Barnes’ appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyperliterate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of nouvelle vague cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that is the Tour de France. Above all, Barnes is an unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and writers. Lively yet discriminating in its enthusiasm, seemingly infinite in its range of reference, and written in prose as stylish as haute couture, Something to Declare is an unadulterated joy.

Art teacher Walter Hartright is on the road to London when he encounters an enigmatic woman dressed entirely in white. She's an unnerving portent of strange things to come as Hartright starts a new job as drawing-master at Limmeridge House. There the teacher falls in love with Laura, his betrothed pupil, who bears a striking resemblance to the woman in white. Soon Walter is drawn into a family intrigue of greed, secrets, madness, and revenge.

The great pyramids of Giza have intrigued humanity for thousands of years. Questions about the construction and the purpose of these majestic monuments have existed since the middle period of ancient Egyptian civilization; in the sixth century B.C., Herodotus was the first of generations of explorers to travel to Egypt in an attempt to unlock their secrets. Recent cutting-edge research has uncovered information, unimaginable to previous generations, about how and why they were built.

In different corners of the world four high-profile figures are assassinated in less than a week. Nobody links the deaths but one thing is certain: each of them has been stalked, sought out, and killed with care and preparation. Then a sinister connection is established: a single, blood-tipped rose is sent to each funeral and an unremarkable female agent is murdered in Switzerland.

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy is widely acknowledged to be, as Robertson Davies pronounced, "a classic of our age." In these extraordinary novels, Peake created a world where all is like a dream - lush, fantastical, and vivid. Yet it was incomplete. Parkinson's disease took Peake's life in 1968, depriving his fans of the fourth and final volume of the series, Titus Awakes except for a few tantalizing pages, after which his writing became indecipherable. Or so it seemed....

On holiday in Victoria, British Columbia, Bond becomes by intrigued Lee Fu-Chu, a half-Blackfoot, half-Chinese philanthropist who is known as "Brokenclaw" because of a deformed hand. On his return to the UK Bond is tasked to investigate the kidnapping of several scientists who have been working on a new submarine detection system. It becomes clear that Brokenclaw is behind the kidnapping.

See You At San Diego is the comprehensive chronicle of Comic-Con International and modern geekdom itself as told through countless stories by nearly fifty of the most integral members of the Comic-Con and fandom scene. This full-fledged oral history—bursting with intimate reflections, hilarious observations, and at times, heartbreaking stories—is about how the geek at last inherited the earth and the story of the transformation of mainstream American pop culture into comic book culture over the past century.

These two tales, the first ever written by Clive, are offered here for the very first time. Their production has been lovingly supervised by Clive himself to ensure that these are not mere books, but works of art to be cherished. First Tales is sure to delight everyone from longtime fans to new listeners.

The Cold War is over. After two British agents die under mysterious and strangely old-fashioned circumstances in Germany, Bond is paired up with beautiful CIA agent "Easy" St. John. He's been assigned to track down the surviving members of "Cabal," a Cold War-era intelligence network that received a mysterious and unauthorized signal to disband.