Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Oliver" in All Categories

It is night in Manhattan. The president of the United States is scheduled to have dinner with an old friend, but in the building across the street a man has disabled the security and stands at a window, a rifle in his hand. The assassination doesn't go according to plan, but this is only the beginning. Someone is recruiting a shadowy network of agents with the intention of creating terror. Their range is broad, their identities masked, their methods subtle.

As with his previous best seller, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, in An Anthropologist on Mars Oliver Sacks uses case studies to illustrate the myriad ways in which neurological conditions can affect our sense of self, our experience of the world and how we relate to those around us. Writing with his trademark blend of scientific rigour and human compassion, he describes patients such as the colour-blind painter or the surgeon with compulsive tics that disappear in the operating theatre - patients for whom disorientation and alienation but also adaptation are inescapable facts of life.

A tense and nerve-shattering classic from the highly acclaimed master of action and suspense. A rolling for Knox. is how the journalists describe the Presidential motorcade as it enters San Francisco across the Golden Gate. Even the ever-watchful FBI believe it is impregnable - as it has to be with the President and two Arab potentates aboard. But halfway across the bridge the unthinkable happens. Before the eyes of the world a master criminal pulls off the most spectacular kidnapping in modern times....

Italy is exhausted. Tired of the political class. Tired of the inept moderates and the agonising machinations of a democracy that no longer seems to be working. While the leaders of the country have sat idly in the safety of parliament, achieving nothing, one man on the outside has risen to the top. Like an animal, he can smell that change is coming. He is Benito Mussolini.

Sean Dillon is back in a blistering new adventure. The American president, on a planned visit to Europe, is entertained by the British prime minister on the terrace of the House of Commons. On the same day, London-born Mullah Ali Salim makes an impassioned speech at Hyde Park Corner accusing the president of war crimes, objecting to his presence, and offering a blessing to anyone who will assassinate him. Dillon, Major Ferguson, and Daniel Holley are called into action, helped by a new recruit, Intelligence Corp Captain Sara Gideon.

How are illnesses diagnosed? When did the first successful organ transplant take place? Why are some pandemics so deadly? This audiobook explores big questions like these, explaining the breakthroughs and discoveries that have shaped our modern-day understanding of medicine and helped us protect and promote our health. The Medicine Book cuts through the jargon and is packed with pithy explanations of the most important milestones in medical history to untangle knotty concepts.

When 17-year-old Isabelle Mattias, the privileged daughter of an artist and a dead rock star, disappears from her college in the middle of the night, Chief Superintendent Andrew Fenwick arrives to investigate. As unsettling hints of an abusive past surface, Fenwick grows ever more concerned for Isabelle's safety. Is it too much to hope that the girl is still alive? And meanwhile, Inspector Louise Nightingale is preoccupied with her own investigations into the identity of a serial rapist.

Oliver Sacks, the best-selling author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, is most famous for his studies of the human mind: insightful and beautifully characterised portraits of those experiencing complex neurological conditions. However, he has another scientific passion: the fern. 

Agatha Christie, in London to visit her agent, boards a train preoccupied with the knowledge that her husband Archie is having an affair. She feels a touch on her back, loses her balance but is pulled to safety from the rush of the incoming train. So begins a sequence of terrifying events. Her rescuer is no guardian angel but a blackmailer, and Agatha must use every ounce of her cleverness to thwart an adversary determined to exploit her genius for murder to kill on his behalf.

Imaginative and insightful, Seeing Voices offers a way into a world that is, for many people, alien and unfamiliar - for to be profoundly deaf is not just to live in a world of silence but also to live in a world where the visual is paramount. In this remarkable book, Oliver Sacks explores the consequences of this, including the different ways in which the deaf and the hearing impaired learn to categorise their respective worlds - and how they convey and communicate those experiences to others.

In this new edition of his popular 2014 work, Mark Galeotti traces the progress of the wars in Chechnya, from the initial Russian advance through to urban battles such as Grozny, and the prolonged guerrilla warfare in the mountainous regions. Bringing the book up to date, including a revised introduction and new content on the Kadyrovtsy’s role in Russia’s other conflicts, Galeotti assesses how the wars have torn apart the fabric of Chechen society and their impact on Russia itself.

Dissolute, disenchanted Dmitri Olénin decides to join the army as a cadet and is despatched to the Caucasus. There, he is transformed by seeing how the indigenous people live in harmony with nature, how their lives have more meaning than those of the superficial social elite in Moscow, and he finds a new sense of self and purpose. But nothing is ever quite that simple.

Love and loyalty are tested to the very limits in this semi-autobiographical novella, which is one of Tolstoy’s best-loved works.

George Bowling is 45, married with children, working as a suburban insurance salesman and desperate to escape London. It’s 1939, and the Second World War is imminent. Foreseeing the chaos it will bring, George decides to escape to the smaller life of his childhood, to the village of Lower Binfield where everything is quiet and peaceful. But his journey may bring nothing more than chaos, confusion and disillusionment.

When Oliver Sacks, a physician by profession, injured his leg while climbing a mountain, he found himself in an unusual position - that of patient. The injury itself was severe but straightforward to fix; the psychological effects, however, were far less easy to predict, explain, or resolve: Sacks experienced paralysis and an inability to perceive his leg as his own, instead seeing it as some kind of alien and inanimate object over which he had no control. A Leg to Stand On is both an account of Sacks’ ordeal and subsequent recovery and an exploration of the ways in which mind and body are inextricably linked.

With followers numbering in the hundreds of thousands, a hot group of friends, and a famous boyfriend, the glamorous life that fitness influencer Cleo has always wanted is within her grasp. Then just before joining her boyfriend for a holiday in the mountains, Cleo and a young woman named Rebecca set off in a canoe on a deserted lake. An hour later, Rebecca is found dead in the water and Cleo has gone missing. When word gets out, Cleo is going viral, but for all the wrong reasons.

A young woman falls to her death. The only people with her are four schoolfriends. One - or maybe all of them - is responsible. Twenty years later someone is intent on letting them have their just desserts.

When the managing director of Wainwright Enterprises dies everyone is amazed to find he was far richer than they supposed, and that he's left his estate to his nephew Alex and his wife Sally. She uncovers accounting irregularities within the company, but resists involving the police - until the firm's accountant is murdered. But DCI Andrew Fenwick's investigation reveals a web of corruption reaching the highest levels of the local community that puts his own child's life in peril.

The rich life Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is featured here: His work as a doctor, his novels and journalistic writings, his support of Spiritualism and his defense of fairies. This is a unique set for the 150th anniversary of his birth. After his early years in medicine, the writing talents of Arthur Conan Doyle took over. Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger were among his successes.

On the afternoon of Sunday April 24, 1932, a group of approximately 500 men and women set out for the summit of Kinder Scout, the highest point in Derbyshire's Peak District. They were not here to take in the fresh air and breath-taking vistas; they were here to make a stand. Kinder Scout, like almost every other site of natural beauty in Britain at that time, was privately owned and fiercely guarded. This wild, open landscape was one that they had absolutely no right to visit.

Sam and Jacob Redman. Two brothers, SAS through and through. They fight alongside each other; they watch each other's backs. They are ruthlessly professional in the field of war, fiercely loyal wherever they are. But when Jacob is booted from the Regiment for a moment of madness, he disappears. Not even his family knows where he is, or even if he's still alive.