Journalist, presenter, broadcaster, husband, father, vigorous all-rounder - Alan Partridge - a man with a fascinating past and an amazing future. Gregarious and popular, yet Alan's never happier than when relaxing in his own five-bedroom, south-built house with three acres of land and access to a private stream. But who is this mysterious enigma? Alan Gordon Partridge is the best - and best-loved - radio presenter in the region. Born into a changing world of rationing, Teddy Boys, apes in space and the launch of ITV, Alan's broadcasting career began as chief DJ of Radio Smile....
In Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, Walter Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs' professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs' family members and key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, this is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.
Simon Serrailler is faced with that most complicated of investigations - a cold case. Freak weather and flash floods all over southern England. Half of Lafferton is afloat. A landslip on the Moor has closed the bypass and, as the rain slowly drains away, a shallow grave - and a skeleton - are exposed. It doesn't take long to identify the remains as those of the missing teenager, Harriet Lowther, last seen carrying a tennis racket while waiting for a bus. But that was 16 years ago.
Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder - and that the killer is a member of his own family. He employs journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet's disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history.
As I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today. I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning. Thinking I'm still a child. Thinking I have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me ...'Memories define us.So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep?Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love - all forgotten overnight.And the one person you trust may only be telling you half the story.Welcome to Christine's life.
London is under attack. People are dead. Many more lives hang in the balance as a group of highly trained gunmen storm the historic Lanchester Hotel on Park Lane. The gunmen have given the government just five hours to meet their demands before they blow up the building. Shots ring out. Some guests panic. Others text their loved ones. Still more try to escape. All are united by one thing: fear for their lives.
As winter approaches in 74 BC, few travellers are abroad. But one man is making the long and weary last stage of his way home. Large parts of his homeland, Thrace, a land north of Greece, has fallen under the hated power of Rome. This Thracian has fought in the Roman legions for nearly a decade. He is skilled, hardened in battle, a sophisticated fighter. Spartacus.
The death of a child and what seems to be a murderous puppet make a perfect case for Bryant and May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit. As John May and his team interrogate the suspects, Arthur Bryant heads into the secret world of illusions and stagecraft. As a second impossible death occurs, the detectives uncover forgotten museums and London eccentrics. The stage is set for a race against time with a surprising twist...
Even though he is still young, Kenny has just weeks to live. Before he dies, he wants to find his childhood friend Callie Barton and thank her for the kindness she showed him. When Kenny discovers that Callie has gone missing, he has no choice but to take matters into his own hands. And knowing that time is running out on him, he's prepared to do whatever it takes....
This is Rory's story of being brought up a Catholic, going to Catholic school, being an altar boy; of the parents, priests, the nuns who taught him, the life and characters at his local Church. Until, that is, as a teenager in crisis, he abandons his faith and enters the god-forsaken world and the glamour of its evil ways with a spring in his step.
An orphan poses nervously for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena, and an artist's servant girl in seventeenth-century Amsterdam snatches a moment away from her work to lose herself in tales of knights and battles. In a Victorian photography studio, a woman holds a book that she barely acknowledges while she waits for the exposure, and in a Shoreditch bar in 2008 a woman reading catches the eye of a young man who takes her picture.
Someone is killing Britain's warlocks.... Twenty-two years after the Second World War, a precarious balance of power maintains the peace between Great Britain and the USSR. For decades, the warlocks have been all that stand between the British Empire and the Soviet Union - a vast domain stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the shores of the English Channel. But now each death is another blow to Britain's security.
Detective Inspector Lynley is approached by business magnate Bernard Fairclough for a confidential review - not a formal investigation - of the circumstances of his nephew's demise. The coroner's verdict is accidental death.Still grieving for his murdered wife, Lynley has personal reasons for welcoming a spell away from London. He heads to the wild beauty of the Lake District, with Deborah and Simon St James to provide cover for his inquiries.
Five years ago his daughter, Rebecca, went missing on the eve of her 13th birthday. A year later the first card arrived: homemade, with a Polaroid picture stuck to the front - Rebecca, strapped to a chair, gagged and terrified. Every year another card: each one worse than the last. The tabloids call him The Birthday Boy. He's been snatching girls for 12 years, always in the run-up to their 13th birthday, sending the families his homemade cards showing their daughters being slowly tortured to death.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse. And Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside, but not for him a mere body in the wardrobe. There are many, many bodies and an ancient crime more terrible than murder. He is out of his jurisdiction, out of his depth, out of bacon sandwiches, and occasionally snookered and out of his mind, but never out of guile. They say that in the end all sins are forgiven.
What if you could go back in time and change the course of history?11.22.63, the date that Kennedy was shot - unless.... King takes his protagonist Jake Epping, a high school English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, 2011, on a fascinating journey back to 1958 - from a world of mobile phones and iPods to a new world of Elvis and JFK, of Plymouth Fury cars and Lindy Hopping, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill who becomes the love of Jake's life.
A Game of Thrones (Part One): Book 1 of A Song of Ice and Fire
By
George R. R. Martin
Narrated by
Roy Dotrice
4.30
(284 ratings)
This is Part One of Book 1 of the A Song of Ice and Fire Series. This first volume in the hugely popular and highly acclaimed epic fantasy series A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE is unabridged and split into two parts. Now a major Sky Atlantic TV series from HBO, starring Sean Bean. Summers span decades. Winter can last a lifetime. And the struggle for the Iron Throne has begun.
Journalist, presenter, broadcaster, husband, father, vigorous all-rounder - Alan Partridge - a man with a fascinating past and an amazing future. Gregarious and popular, yet Alan's never happier than when relaxing in his own five-bedroom, south-built house with three acres of land and access to a private stream. But who is this mysterious enigma? Alan Gordon Partridge is the best - and best-loved - radio presenter in the region. Born into a changing world of rationing, Teddy Boys, apes in space and the launch of ITV, Alan's broadcasting career began as chief DJ of Radio Smile....
Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder - and that the killer is a member of his own family. He employs journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet's disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history.
In Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, Walter Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs' professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs' family members and key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, this is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.
This dazzling memoir promises to be a courageously frank, honest and poignant read. It will detail some of Fry's most turbulent and least-well-known years, with writing that will excite you, make you laugh uproariously, move you, inform you, and, above all, surprise you.
Inheritance: The Inheritance Cycle, Book Four, Part One
By
Christopher Paolini
Narrated by
Gerrard Doyle
4.40
(47 ratings)
Not so very long ago, Eragon-Shadeslayer, Dragon Rider,l was nothing more than a poor farm boy, and his dragon, Saphira, only a blue stone in the forest. Now, the fate of an entire civilization rests on their shoulders.Long months of training and battle have brought victories and hope, but they have also brought heartbreaking loss. And still, the real battle lies ahead: they must confront Galbatorix.
A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's fascinating and humorous quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. He takes subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry, and particle physics, and aims to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. In the company of some extraordinary scientists, Bill Bryson reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.
Narrated by
Jenna Lamia,
Bahni Turpin,
Octavia Spencer,
Cassandra Campbell
4.80
(900 ratings)
Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Aibileen is a black maid raising her 17th white child. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is the sassiest woman in Mississippi: a wonderful cook with a gossip's tongue. Graduate Skeeter returns from college with ambitions, but her mother will not be happy until she's married. Although world's apart, Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny's lives converge over a clandestine project that will change the town of Jackson forever.
A huge novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women. It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London.
Shortlisted for the Audiobook Download of the Year, 2007. When the queen chases a straying corgi through the grounds of Buckingham Palace, she happens upon the City of Westminster travelling library, and begins a journey of discovery.
No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980s
By
Andy McSmith
Narrated by
David Holt
4.30
(31 ratings)
The 1980s was the revolutionary decade of the 20th century. From the Falklands war and the miners' strike to Bobby Sands and the Guildford Four, from Diana and the New Romantics to Live Aid and the 'big bang', from the Rubik's cube to the ZX Spectrum, McSmith's brilliant narrative account uncovers the truth behind the decade that changed Britain forever - politically, economically and culturally.
With Meryl Streep winning plaudits for giving the Hollywood version of Margaret Thatcher's rise to success, listen to this reality check on the decade that the Iron Lady shaped for the UK.