Showing results by narrator "Ben Onwukwe" in All Categories

Abdul is just seven years old when his parents are killed before his eyes. As a brutal war sweeps Sudan, Abdul and his three-year-old brother are forced to flee. Their gruelling journey across the Sahara to a refugee camp in Chad is fraught with danger, and every day is a struggle against hunger and disease. Until one day Abdul is offered a chance to escape. A chance that could save him, but will force him to make the most heartbreaking decision of his life. Abdul's death-defying flight leaves deep scars.

With a boom in cold-blooded cases throughout the 1980s, police began to rely on DNA evidence to help them find perpetrators, and since then forensic science has taken off as a powerful tool in solving murders. Best-selling true-crime author Wensley Clarkson takes us beyond the headlines to examine the real-life stories where forensics have played a crucial role. He speaks to experts who have worked on the most gruesome, most chilling and most shocking crime scenes and explains how notorious criminal cases from across the world were solved.

Theo, an aging Parisian cartographer, is desperately searching for the woman he once loved before Alzheimer’s takes his memories of her. Elise, his estranged daughter, moves in to take care of him. She still blames him for the tragic loss of her mother and is struggling with this new forced intimacy. Nebay, an Eritrean refugee, becomes Theo’s carer and friend. Unbeknownst to Elise, Nebay does not have a visa for France and is working illegally in order to support his sister.

Kevin Maxwell was a dream candidate for the police force: he had a long-held desire to serve his community, a strong moral compass and a clear aptitude for both the strategic and practical aspects of policing. And, as a gay black man from a working-class family, he could easily have been a poster boy for the force's stated commitment to equal opportunities. Joining just after the 9/11 attacks, Kevin entered policing determined to keep communities safe in the face of a changing world. But instead he came up against entrenched prejudice, open racism and homophobia.

A global thriller presenting an apocalyptic vision of a world on the brink of despair and destruction. What would you do if the world was brought to a standstill? If you heard deafening static followed by the words 'my children. Do not be afraid'? Would you turn to God? Subscribe to the conspiracy theories? Or put your faith in science and a rational explanation? The lives of all 26 people in this account are affected by the message. Most because they heard it. Some because they didn't.

Transported through time to the dank streets of Victorian London, Alex Locke seeks to unravel the mysteries of the Obsidian Heart, the enigmatic object to which his fate is inextricably bound. When a string of grisly murders takes place across the capital, Alex follows a trail that will lead him through the opium dens of Limehouse, into the dark and twisted world of the Society of Blood and ever closer to unlocking the secret of the Heart.

There came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement. Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins. There is no warning. No chance to prepare. They arrive in the night: thundering up through the ground, transforming streets and towns into shadowy forest. Buildings are destroyed.

Alex Locke is desperately trying to hold on to the disparate threads of the complex web of time he has created. He travels to the First World War, living through the horrors of trench warfare in order to befriend a young soldier crucial to his story, then to the 1930s to uncover the secrets of a mysterious stage magician. He moves back and forth in time, always with the strange and terrifying Dark Man on his heels, gradually getting closer to uncovering the true nature of his destiny with the obsidian heart.

Torn from his father and a loving sister, the young student Zuba is imprisoned for a crime he has not even thought about committing. His misfortune: to live in a world where corruption is rife and honest and law-abiding people are crushed by the wheels of a blind, unscrupulous bureaucracy. What seems at first to be an irksome judiciary misunderstanding gradually becomes a journey through the hell of Nigerian prisons.

Zambawi, a banana republic in sub-Saharan Africa, is on the verge of revolution. President Adini clings to power whilst his soldiers switch sides so often they don't know which uniform to wear. It is here that student teacher Jim Tulloh arrives to indulge in a spot of character building. Then Jim is kidnapped from his bush school by the rebel Black Boot Gang and his fate takes a very unexpected turn...

Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Caryl Phillips has won numerous awards for heralded worksof fiction and nonfiction. In the Falling Snow revolves around Keith, born in England to West Indian parents and raised—for the most part—by his white stepmother. Unmoored by a failing marriage, a distant son, and estrangement from his own father, Keith faces daunting change and must accept unsettling truths about himself and those around him.

In this short story, Captain Chisholm’s pride and joy, The Swordfish, is taken from him by a mutinous crew. But the sea seems to take matters into its own hands to reunite the old captain with his beloved ship.

When Philip Hope discovers that his wife, Sybil, is having an affair with his secretary, Julian, he takes great delight in thwarting their affections. Just as Philip dismisses his secretary, though, he falls from a cliff, and Julian doesn’t save him. Now free to be together, Sybil and Julian return to the place Philip died, but it becomes clear that Philip is not finished with them yet as he haunts their honeymoon.

Reported to be an account of a real haunting experienced by the author at a house in Rye, this story features fleeting glimpses of an apparition in a walled garden.

‘The Outcast’ tells the story of Mrs Bertha Acres, who is handsome and charming company, but inspires horror and dread in all who meet her, most notably her husband who killed himself after only a month of marriage. She starts afresh in a new village, but she is cursed to always be an outcast.

Brain surgeon Dr Francis Assheton is sceptical when one of his oldest friends holds a séance to show him ‘The Thing’ that has been appearing at his home. But when he witnesses it for himself and his friend then dies in mysterious circumstances, the doctor must recount his tale before it is too late.

Ex-assassin Josh Thane has given up his life of murder and bloodshed and gone to ground in London. But when glamorous MI5 agent McCallan needs his help with a dangerous operation in Berlin, Josh can’t resist being pulled back into the game. Soon he realises that a deadly organisation is out not just to get him but those closest to him. As crime bosses and intelligence officers are picked off one by one, McCallen disappears, and Josh is faced with a choice that could make this mission his last: either he walks into the trap set for him, or McCallen dies.

Intrigued by other sailors’ superstitions of a cursed island, Sam Lenartson rows out to see for himself. Once there, he discovers an abandoned house with a mysterious tenant.

Rogue assassin Josh Thane is an artist in murder. His next target is a British microbiologist suspected of creating devastating chemical weapons. Breaking into her house, he discovers someone has beaten him to it - she’s already dead. In a moment of weakness, he saves the life of her son. A single mistake that destroys everything he’s worked for and puts him and the boy in immediate danger. When Josh embarks on an international quest to find the real killer, he uncovers a criminal conspiracy with truly terrifying consequences.

A grisly spirit turns travelling companion for the unwitting passenger of a London bus; a repulsive neighbour returns from the grave, rejected by the very earth; an innocuous back garden becomes the stage for a nightmare encounter with druidic sacrifice. From deep in the British Library vaults emerges a new selection of E.F. Benson's most innovative, spine-tingling and satisfyingly dark 'spook stories'. Complete with an introduction exploring the fascinating story of Benson's life, and including the never-before-republished story 'Billy Comes Through'.