Showing results by narrator "James Faulkner" in All Categories

Britain is in the depths of recession. A left-leaning young Oxford academic and his barrister girlfriend take an off-peak holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. By seeming chance they bump into a Russian millionaire called Dima who owns a peninsula and a diamond-encrusted gold watch. He also has a tattoo on his right thumb, and wants a game of tennis. What else he wants propels the young lovers on a tortuous journey through Paris to a safe house in the Swiss Alps, to the murkiest cloisters of the City of London and its unholy alliance with Britain's Intelligence Establishment.

The first novel which appeared in Georges Simenon's famous Maigret series, in a gripping new translation by David Bellos. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved...

Brought to you by Puffin. The thirteenth book in the beloved, bestselling Redwall saga - soon to be a major Netflix movie! Salamandastron, under the guardianship of old Lord Stonepaw, is under threat from an enemy of immense and terrifying power. Ungatt Trunn, the wildcat who can make the stars...

The second book in the new Penguin Maigret series: Georges Simenon's devastating tale of misfortune, betrayal and the weakness of family ties, in a new translation by Anthea Bell. Instead of the detail filling itself in and becoming clearer, it seemed to escape him. The face of the man in the...

A first ink drawing showed a hanged man swinging from a gallows on which perched an enormous crow. And there were at least twenty other etchings and pen or pencil sketches that had the same leitmotif of hanging. On the edge of a forest: a man hanging from every branch. A church steeple: beneath...

What was the woman doing here? In a stable, wearing pearl earrings, her stylish bracelet and white buckskin shoes! She must have been alive when she got there because the crime had been committed after ten in the evening. But how? And why? And no one had heard a thing! She had not screamed. The...

Maigret shrugged his shoulders, buried his hands in his pockets and went off without answering. He had just spent one of the most wretched days in his life. For hours, in his corner he had felt old and feeble, without idea or incentive. But now a tiny flame flickered. 'You bet we'll see' he...

Brought to you by Puffin. The hilarious tale of a family coming to terms with its ghosts - literally. Greta Woebegone did not believe in ghosts because she was a sensible young girl and sensible young girls tend not to believe in ghosts. That was until the day she was knocked over by a car and...

Cars drove past along with the trucks and trams, but by now Maigret had realised that they were not important. Whatever roared by like this along the road was not part of the landscape. ... What really counted was the lock, the hooting of the tugs, the stone crusher, the barges and the cranes...

It had a smell of holidays. The previous evening, in Cannes harbour, with the setting sun, had also had the smell of holidays, especially the Ardena, whose owner swaggered in front of two girls with gorgeous figures.. Dazzled at first by the glamour of sunny Antibes, Maigret soon finds himself...

'She came forward, the outlines of her figure blurred in the half-light. She came forward like a film star, or rather like the ideal woman in an adolescent's dream. 'I gather you wish to talk to me, Inspector . . . but first of all please sit down . . .' Her accent was more pronounced than...

It was indeed a photograph, a picture of a woman. But the face was completely hidden, scribbled all over in red ink. Someone had tried to obliterate the head, someone very angry. The pen had bitten into the paper. There were so many criss-crossed lines that not a single square millimetre had...

The city of Simenon's youth comes to life in this new translation of this disturbing novel set in Liège, book ten in the new Penguin Maigret series. In the darkness, the main room is as vast as a cathedral. A great empty space. Some warmth is still seeps from the radiators. Delfosse strikes a...

'Let's be clear that it's not your professionalism which I question. If you understand nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, it's because from the very start you've been working with facts which had been falsified.' Maigret sets out to prove the innocence of a man condemned to death for a...

The fifth book in the new Penguin Maigret series: Georges Simenon's gripping tale of small town suspicion and revenge, in Linda Asher's timeless translation. There was an exaggerated humility about her. Her cowed eyes, her way of gliding noiselessly about without bumping into things, of...

'A radiant late afternoon. The sunshine almost as thick as syrup in the quiet streets of the Left Bank . . . there are days like this, when ordinary life seems heightened, when the people walking down the street, the trams and cars all seem to exist in a fairy tale.' A story told by a condemned...

'Just take a look,' Duclos said in an undertone, pointing to the scene all round them, the picture-book town, with everything in its place, like ornaments on the mantlepiece of a careful housewife . . . 'Everyone here earns his living. Everyone's more or less content. And above all, everyone...

'Try to imagine a guest, a wealthy woman, staying at the Majestic with her husband, her son, a nurse and a governess . . . In a suite that costs more than a thousand francs a day . . . At six in the morning, she's strangled, not in her room, but in the basement locker room' Below stairs at a...

A Time to Dance charts the consequences of a relationship between a man of 54 and a girl of 18. The gap in their backgrounds, expectations, and experience proves to be as wide as that between their ages.

Bloomsbury presents Hard Copy by Fien Veldman, read by Sarah Slimani and James Faulkner. 'A talented new voice worth paying attention to.' Irish Times 'Equal parts searing intelligence and madcap sweetness. Simply brilliant.' Jenny Mustard 'Many astute observations... very funny on the tedium of...