Showing results by narrator "William Hope" in All Categories

Vincent Kahn is an astronaut in training, living with his wife in the desert. He will go on to be the first man to walk on the moon. Fay Fern is 19 years old and working in a dive bar, having rejected her parents' wealth and conservatism. She will go on to become a violent activist and one of the FBI's most wanted. The pair's brief but intense love affair will have repercussions that echo through the American century, intersecting with the race to space, the rage against the Vietnam war and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic. 

Milly Theale is a young, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy American. When she arrives in London and meets the equally beautiful but impoverished Kate Croy, they form an intimate friendship. But nothing is as it seems; materialism, romance, self-delusion, and ultimately fatal illness, insidiously contaminate the glamorous social whirl.

Beautiful but impoverished Lina Dahlstrom is dying of tuberculosis and it seems that no one can save her. All hope is lost until an eccentric doctor, Carl Dance, becomes enthralled with Lina's charms and vows to do everything in his power to cure her. But when the illness inevitably claims Lina's life, Dance's obsession with her only grows and so begins a mad and criminal scheme to bring her back from beyond the grave and claim her as his own forever.

In the 2008 US election, many Americans believed Barack Obama was a Muslim. The conspiracy theory book 9/11: The Big Lie has become a best seller. Hearsay has fuelled economic boom and bust - so much so that in many places it's now a crime to circulate false rumours about banks. Why do ordinary people accept rumours, even untrue, bizarre or damaging ones? Does it matter? And, if so, what should we do about it? As Cass Sunstein shows in his brilliant analysis of the phenomenon, there are many different ways in which rumours are dispersed.

Australia brings to mind images of the Great Barrier Reef, great white sharks, huge crocodiles, and friendly people. Zane Grey fished everywhere, but he often found himself lured back to the Pacific, especially around Australia and New Zealand. Most of the fish caught in An American Angler in Australia are sharks: great white, tiger, and even a few carpet sharks. But Zane Grey found that one can't go big game fishing in Australia and not expect to be teased by marlins.

Brilliant brothers Langley and Homer Collyer are born into bourgeois New York comfort in settled times, their home a fin-de-siècle mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, their future rosy. But before he is out of his teens, Homer begins to lose his sight, Langley returns from the War in Europe with his lungs seared by gas, and when the death of their parents in the influenza epidemic of 1918 leaves the brothers orphaned, they seem perilously ill-equipped to deal with the new era.

At the end of Charles Webb's first novel, The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock rescues his beloved Elaine from a marriage made not in heaven but in California.It is now eleven years and 3,000 miles later, and the couple live in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, with their two young sons, whom they are educating at home.

How does the world see you? Nine characters illuminate an unknowable woman. From the school art teacher who sees a spark of talent in her, to the man whose fleeting passion with her could change his life, to the female student whose friendship turns into love. Deeply affecting and luminous, this kaleidoscopic novella explores the nature of intimacy and how each connection you make forms who you are. 

America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades - celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world’s most resurgent cities.

The wife of a rich mogul has been kidnapped. Haunted by the death of his wife and daughter, who were murdered in front of his eyes by the notorious Paper Stone Scissors killer, Danny is hired to find her before the kidnappers carry out their threat of execution. But the raid goes wrong, and Danny is left for dead. Can he find her before her kidnappers? And will he be able to save her?

Two weeks before Kwasi King is due to defend his chess world title, his mother is found brutally murdered at Yale University, a tarot card next to her dismembered body. Soon, more bodies turn up at other Ivy League colleges, all with tarot cards. And lead investigator Special Agent Franco Patrese has received his own tarot card. The Fool. Could he be the next victim of this macabre intellectual battle?

As he makes an 11th-hour plea for mercy, lawyer Alex Sedaka is resigned to the fact that his client will be executed. Charged with the rape and murder of 18-year-old Dorothy Haufaman, the case seems cut and dry - until the victim's mother makes an astonishing offer.... Dorothy Haufaman's mother offers clemency in return for the whereabouts of her daughter's body before she herself dies of the terminal disease ravaging her body.

Late one night, Robert Danziger receives an unexpected call from a childhood friend, Duval Morgan. Duval has spent more than 20 years in an Illinois state penitentiary for the horrific assault of a young nurse. Now he is finally out.

Ethan Frome is an entrancing but sad story of a poverty-stricken Massachusetts farmer caught in a loveless marriage. An emerging love for his young cousin leads to one day of explosive emotions with tragic consequences.

The world is never done catching up with Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the author of Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and other classics. A prophet of environmentalism and vegetarianism, an abolitionist, and a critic of materialism and technology, Thoreau even seems to have anticipated a world of social distancing in his famous experiment at Walden Pond. In Now Comes Good Sailing, 27 of today’s leading writers offer wide-ranging original pieces exploring how Thoreau has influenced and inspired them.

Frank Baltimore is a bit of a loser, struggling by as a carpenter and handyman in rural New England when he gets his big break, building a mansion in the executive suburbs of Hartford. One of his workers is a charismatic 18-year-old kid from Liverpool, Dmitry, in the US in the summer before university. Dmitry is a charming sociopath, who develops a fascination with his autodidactic philosopher boss, perhaps thinking that, if he could figure out what made Frank tick, he could be less of a pig.  

It's 2020, and a magical cataclysm has shattered reality as we know it. Now a wizard's cabal is running the East Coast of the US, keeping a semblance of peace. Their most powerful agents, Edmund and Istvan - the former a nearly immortal 1940s-era mystery man, the latter, well, a ghost -- have been assigned to hunt down an arms smuggling ring that could blow up Massachusetts.

There were many valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan but there was only one like this.... Black didn't even know its proper name. It was the farthest, the hardest, and the worst. He thought that everything about the Valley was myth and rumour. But Black finds after traveling deep into the heart of the Valley an illumination of dark secrets that had accumulated during month after month of fighting and dying in defence of an indefensible piece of land…

When TV talk-show host Elias Claymore is accused of raping a 19-year-old girl, he turns to his friend, Alex Sadaka, to defend him. But Alex has a fight on his hands, for Claymore - a former Black Power activist - is anything but squeaky clean, and this time even the DNA evidence is stacked against him. Forced to share the defence with a lawyer from Claymore's insurance firm, Alex must battle his way through jury tampering, conflicts of interest, and vicious hate mail to uncover the truth.

About to turn 40, there’s no doubt in her mind that suburban wife and mother-of-two Claire Taylor has settled. A wild week in Chicago may have shaken things up a bit, but as she turns the key in her Wisconsin home on the eve of Hallowe’en, she knows that this is where her life is. Except that it’s all gone. The house stripped, her husband Danny, her daughters, all gone: no message, nothing.