Showing results by narrator "Rachel Atkins" in All Categories

Award-winning author Lynne Reid Banks is perhaps best known for her classic children's book The Indian in the Cupboard. But it was her groundbreaking debut novel for adults, The L-Shaped Room, that made her name. First published in 1960, it was an instant success and has been in print ever since. This collection contains both The L-Shaped Room and sequel The Backward Shadow, as well as two stories specially written for BBC radio and a bonus edition of Bookclub.

The Letter: Booktrack Edition adds an immersive musical soundtrack to your audiobook listening experience! Tina Craig longs to escape her violent husband. She works all the hours God sends to save up enough money to leave him, also volunteering in a charity shop to avoid her unhappy home. Whilst going through the pockets of a second-hand suit, she comes across an old letter, the envelope firmly sealed and unfranked. Tina opens the letter and reads it - a decision that will alter the course of her life for ever....

1937. War with Germany is dawning, and a civil war already raging in Spain. Split across political lines, the six Mitford sisters are more divided than ever. Meanwhile their former maid Louisa Cannon is now a private detective, working with her policeman husband Guy Sullivan.

You lost your daughter. You will never forgive yourself. And now someone is determined to make you pay.... Seventeen years ago, something happened to Jess' daughter, Beth. The memory of it still makes her blood run cold. Jess has tried everything to make peace with that day, and the part she played in what happened. It was only a brief moment of desire...but she'll pay for it with a lifetime of guilt.

Ever since her sister, Anya, was murdered in Sotogrande, a playground for the rich, Natasha's life has gone off the rails. After three months of poring over the details of what happened, Natasha travels to the scene of the crime where she hopes to unravel the truth—about her sister's death and life. With no job, how did Anya end up in a multimillion-Euro apartment in one of the most exclusive areas on the continent? The police have no suspect. Publicly, they claim the killing was likely gang-related. But their key person of interest, a local with links to organized crime, is also now dead.

Three brand-new adventures for glamorous bounty hunter Vienna Salvatori. 'Dead Drop' by Mark Wright. Dwarfed by the burning star of the Hyspero system, two devastating battle fleets face each other across the stars. On one side the Dyarid Primary Vanguard, commanded by Admiral Salaron aboard the starship Custodian. On the other a Chtzin battle cluster.

Using forbidden Marrangha magic and the three stolen vapours, the evil sorcerer Zharradan Marr has created a creature....but for what purpose?

When Vale Moonwing is summoned to the Black Tower, she must prepare herself for a confrontation with the dread warlord Balthus Dire.

When 12-year-old Mira stumbles across a white stallion in a forest in Berlin, she doesn’t realise that this horse will take her on an incredible journey. Together, they’re going to ascend the starry heights of Grand Prix show jumping and sweep back in time to Poland in 1939, where another young girl is risking everything to save the horse that she loves....

A man lies half-drowned on a Cornish beach at dawn in the furthest days of this century. The old woman who discovers him, once a famous concert violinist, is close to death herself--or perhaps a new kind of life she can barely contemplate. Does death still exist at all, or has it finally been obliterated? And who is this strange man she's found? Is he a figure returned from her past, a new Messiah, or an empty vessel? God or the Devil?

1940, London. A man learns a shocking truth about his past. Warsaw. A mother writes a diary as the ghetto walls go up. From the bombed streets of London, to occupied Warsaw, to the Polish forests bristling with partisans, will their paths cross? Will their pasts be reconciled? And will they survive the deadly assaults on their freedom and their lives?

Eighteen months after Natalie Gray loses her husband, Bernie, in a horrific hit and run accident, she finds love with his best friend, Ed Cooper, and moves into his home with her teenage daughter, Scarlett. But she begins to suspect Ed has a dark side - and even darker intentions. Natalie must get her troubled child to a safer place, but when Scarlett starts to hear voices coming from the empty apartment next door it seems she has unwittingly moved them into the heart of danger.

Sarajevo, spring 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect makeshift barricades, splitting the city into ethnic enclaves. Each morning, the people who live there—whether Muslim, Croat, or Serb—push the barriers aside. When violence erupts and becomes, finally, unavoidable, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her husband and elderly mother to safety in England. She stays behind, reluctant to believe that hostilities will last more than a few weeks. As the city falls under siege, everything she loves about her home is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops.

In 1962, Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley created a software company when the concept of software barely existed. Freelance Programmers employed women to work on complex projects such as Concorde's black box recorder from the comfort of their own homes. Shirley empowered a generation of women in technology, giving them unheard of freedom to choose their own hours and manage their own workloads. The business thrived, and Shirley gradually transferred ownership to her staff, creating 70 millionaires in the process.

When troubled teenager Immy disappears, she leaves her widowed mother Bea completely devastated. Bea pours her love into her six-year-old niece Phoebe, even taking her in when her single father Ewan takes a job abroad. Then Immy returns, in desperate need of her mother’s help and love. But Ewan is clear: he will never let Bea see Phoebe again if she welcomes her daughter back. As Bea grapples with this impossible choice between two girls who sorely need her, a long-buried secret comes out that changes everything.

Desperate to escape their stepfather’s house, sisters Amy and Lillian stow away aboard a train full of children being evacuated from London and the threat of Hitler’s bombs. Arriving in the seaside town of Worthing, they are taken in by kindly Norah and her husband, Jim. With their future now entrusted to strangers, can the girls finally find a safe harbour in these dark days of war? And will they find the strength to confront what they have been running from, when their past finally catches up with them?

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted to make new acquaintances, including flirtatious Isabella, who shares her love of Gothic romance and horror, and the sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney. When the Tilneys invite her to their family's mysterious home, Northanger Abbey, she's eager to visit. But once there, her imagination, which has been influenced by gothic novels of sensation and intrigue, makes her suspect their father, General Tilney, of committing terrible crimes.

The question of how and why organisms age has teased scientists for centuries. There are myriad competing theories, from the idea that ageing is a simple wear and tear process, like the rusting of a car, to the belief that ageing and death are genetically programmed and controlled. In fact, there is no clearly defined limit to life and no single, predictable program playing itself out: different things are happening within and between tissues, and each system or organ accumulates damage at its own pace, according to the kind of insults imposed on it by daily living. 

Jenny and Mark have been together since they were at school. Now they are getting a divorce - largely, it would appear, because it is easier than answering difficult questions. (For example, why has it taken them 15 years to get married?) Only Jenny and Mark are determined that their carefully planned separation will lead to the world's first truly amicable divorce. But Jenny and Mark's friends and family are not so happy about their plans for a 'perfect divorce'. They find their loyalties divided.

In prison, accused of murder, Tully Truegood begins to write her life story. A story that takes her from a young girl in the backstreets of 18th-century London to her stepmother Queenie's Fairy House - a place where decadent excess is a must. Trained by Queenie to become a courtesan and by Mr. Crease - a magician who sees that Tully holds similar special powers to his own - Tully soon becomes the talk of the town.