Showing results by narrator "Gordon Griffin" in All Categories

General Treyvon Rayner is the Supreme Commander of the Kaliszian Defenses. He is the cousin and trusted friend of the Kaliszian Emperor, Emperor Liron Kalinin, in spite of Treyvon's ancestor being one of the causes of the Great Infection so many centuries ago. It is never far from Treyvon's mind, and he vowed he'd spend his entire life trying to make things right. Chef Jennifer Neibaur dreamed of traveling to exotic places, of experiencing different cuisines, and learning how to prepare them.

Tan Twan Eng's debut novel casts a powerful spell and has garnered comparisons to celebrated wartime storytellers Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. Set during the tumult of World War II, on the lush Malayan island of Penang, The Gift of Rain tells a riveting and poignant tale about a young man caught in the tangle of wartime loyalties and deceits. In 1939, 16-year-old Philip Hutton - the half-Chinese, half-English youngest child of the head of one of Penang's great trading families - feels alienated from both the Chinese and British communities.

Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brilliant characters: his fiancée Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions; and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. The most ambitious of Maugham's novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.

The lights dim at the Paris Opera House. The exquisite Christine Daae enraptures the audience with her mellifluous voice. Immediately, Raoul de Chagny falls deeply in love. But the legend of the disfigured opera ghost haunts the performance, and as Raoul begins his pursuit of Christine, he is pulled into the depths of the opera house, and into the depths of human emotions.

In April 1917, as Tsar Nicholas II's abdication sent shockwaves across war-torn Europe, the future leader of the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin, was far away, exiled in Zurich. To lead the revolt, Lenin needed to return to Petrograd immediately. But to get there, he would have to cross Germany, which meant accepting help from the deadliest of Russia's adversaries and betraying his homeland.

Mackenzie 'Mac' Wharton had agreed to guide a group that had wanted an adventure on her mountain. They got more than they bargained for when they were all abducted by a group of aliens called the Ganglians. Badly beaten and barely alive, Mac finds herself in the arms of the largest male she's ever seen. She should fear him, should be fighting to get away from him, but there was something about the massive male that called to her.

From the origins of Homo sapiens to the Space Race, and from the French Revolution to the Digital Revolution, this installment in the best-selling Big Ideas series offers an essential exploration of the human timeline up to and including the rise of modern Islam, the World Wide Web, and the global financial crisis. Making big historical ideas accessible and easy to understand, with stunning facts and memorable quotes, The History Book audiobook is perfect for students, adults, or anyone who wants to travel back in time and understand the fascinating past of mankind.

When a body is discovered in a picturesque South Devon village, DI Wesley Peterson is called in to investigate. The victim, Barry Brown, is a celebrity ghostwriter and the theft of his laptop suggests that the motive for murder may lie in his work. While Wesley investigates Barry's famous clients, Wesley's teenage son Michael joins family friend, Dr Neil Watson, on an intriguing excavation of a crashed World War Two plane on Dartmoor.

Thomas Mallen of High Banks Hall had many sons, most of them bastards. But to all of them he passed on his mark - a distinctive flash of white hair running to the left temple, known as the Mallen Streak. It was said that those who bore the streak seldom reached old age and that nothing good ever came of a Mallen. In 1851, Thomas Mallen found himself a ruined man, forced amid scandal and disgrace to sell the hall. With him went his two young wards and their indomitable governess. Then the Radlet brothers of Wilbur Farm arrived, one of whom bore the unmistakable Mallen Streak.

"The first concern of an author is to do down his colleagues." In the long, hot Roman summer of AD 74, Falco, private informer and spare-time poet, gives a reading for his family and friends. Things get out of hand, as usual. The event is taken over by Aurelius Chrysippus, a wealthy Greek banker and patron to a group of struggling writers, who offers to publish Falco's work.

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.' Douglas Adams, Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.We human beings have trouble with infinity - yet infinity is a surprisingly human subject. Philosophers and mathematicians have gone mad contemplating its nature and complexity - yet it is a concept routinely used by schoolchildren. Exploring the infinite is a

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Dummies takes you through the eight-week MBCT course, using the principles of mindfulness to complement established CBT techniques. You'll discover how using MBCT can help lower your risk of relapsing into depression and reduce the risk of other mental health disorders including anxiety, stress, and low self-esteem.

May 1940: Sergeant Jack Tanner has been posted to a training company on the southeast coast of England where the mysterious deaths of two Polish refugees lead him to believe there has been foul play. As the Germans launch their blitzkrieg in Europe, the entire company are sent to join the battle to stop Hitler's drive across the Low Countries. Pitted against the die-hard Nazis of the SS "Death's Head" division and the great panzer commander, General Rommel himself, it is left to Tanner to get his men back to Allied lines.

In 1945, Gwen Moffat deserted from her post as dispatch rider in the Army and went to live rough in Wales and Cornwall, climbing and living on practically nothing. She hitch-hiked her way around, travelling from Skye to Chamonix and many places in between, with all her possessions on her back. When the money ran out, she worked as a forester, went winkle-picking on the Isle of Skye and did a stint as an artist's model. And always there were the mountains, drawing her away from a "proper" job.

Jayne is quiet. She keeps to herself and has no grand expectations for her days. But after a chance encounter with her elderly neighbor, Meredith, Jayne is forced to reevaluate her determination to keep the world at a distance. Meredith's dust-covered home is chaotic and neglected. And slowly, Jayne starts to grasp that Meredith herself is quite lost. She can't seem to remember anything: what she last ate, when she last went out or saw her daughter, or even Jayne's name, despite what are becoming frequent visits.

With a single daring leap from an Italian train carrying prisoners of war, John Miller jumped out of the war of soldiers and into the war as lived by Italian civilians - many of whom risked their lives to help him. The year was 1943 and Captain Miller had been in captivity for over a year. Italian anti-fascists harboured and fed him, first in a remote mountain village, then in Rome itself.

Pargeting is a highly skilled trade. And Pargeters is the name given to the Suffolk home of John Mercer in honour of Adam Woodley, the craftsman who had decorated it so lovingly. Over two generations, and throughout the turbulent years of the Civil War, Pargeters comes to stand as a symbol of unity for a household divided by conflicting political loyalties and abandoned by its menfolk. And it is the mistress of Pargeters, Sarah Woodley-Mercer, who holds the small household together in this troubled time.

One night a stranger wrapped in bandages and eccentric clothing arrives in an English village. That stranger, Griffin, is a brilliant and obsessed scientist who has discovered how to turn his entire body invisible. Although he initially feels joy at his newfound freedom and abilities, that joy quickly turns to despair when he struggles to discover a way to reverse the process.

Since resigning from the papacy in 2013, the first pope in more than 700 years to do so, Pope Benedict has lived quietly in a convent in the Vatican gardens in Rome. He has devoted himself to a life of prayer and study and has vowed to remain silent, until now. So much controversy still surrounds Pope Benedict’s time in office - in this book, written with best-selling German author Peter Seewald, he addresses the issues of his papacy and reveals how, at his late age, governing and reforming the Church was beyond him.

DS Wesley Peterson, newly arrived in the West Country town of Tradmouth, has his hands full when a child goes missing and a young woman is brutally murdered on a lonely cliff path. Then his old friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, unearths the skeletons of a strangled woman and a newborn baby in the cellar of an ancient merchant's house nearby. As the investigation continues, Wesley begins to suspect that these deaths, centuries apart, may be linked by age-old motives of jealousy, a sexual obsession and desperate longing.