Showing results by narrator "Laurence Bouvard"

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Only Human by Sylvain Neuvel, read by a returning cast. We always thought the biggest threat to humanity would come from the outside. We were wrong. As the human race picks up the pieces of destruction left behind, a new world order emerges. New alliances are formed. Old divisions are strengthened. And, with a power struggle fuelled by the threat of mutually assured destruction, nothing is certain.

In 2088 humankind is at last ready to explore beyond Earth's solar system, and astrophysicist Reggie Straifer knows where we should go. He's discovered a distant anomalous star that appears to defy the laws of physics. It could be a weird natural phenomenon, or it could be alien. Convoy 7's mission to discern the nature of the star's strange qualities will use vast resources and take centuries, so in order to maintain the genetic talent of the first crew, clones will be used for the expedition.

You think you know how the world works? Think again. From best-selling author Neal Stephenson and critically acclaimed historical and contemporary novelist Nicole Galland comes a captivating and complex near-future thriller that questions the very foundations of the modern world. Magic has faded from the minds of mankind, until an encounter between Melisande Stokes, linguistics expert at Harvard, and Tristan Lyons, shadowy agent of government, leads to the uncovering of a distant past.

Why is it that the behaviour of teenagers can be so odd? As they grow older, young children steadily improve their sense of how to behave, and then all of a sudden, they can become totally uncommunicative, wildly emotional and completely unpredictable. We used to think that erratic teenage behaviour was due to a sudden surge in hormones, but modern neuroscience shows us that this isn't true.

The year is 1880. Two hundred years after the trials in Salem, witches Adelaide Thom and Eleanor St Clair finally feel safe and have opened a tea shop in Manhattan, specialising in cures, palmistry and potions. When an enchanting young woman called Beatrice joins the witches as an apprentice, she soon proves indispensable, but her new life is marred by strange occurrences. She sees things no one else can see. She hears voices no one else can hear. Objects appear out of thin air, as if gifts from the dead.

When Zoe meets Dan, he's everything she is looking for in a man - intelligent, charming, supportive. It's only after they're married that she realises that he's controlling, aggressive, paranoid. And there's no way out. Or is there? Zoe knows she has to escape, but Dan's found her once before, and she knows he can find her again. But Dan has plans of his own. Plans that don't necessarily include Zoe. Be careful whom you trust....

It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening uninvited, where he notices a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman. When Bert kisses Beverly Keating, his host's wife, he sets in motion the joining of two families. In 1988, Franny Keating, now 24, meets one of her idols, the famous author Leon Posen. After telling him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story.

A stunning new emotional tour-de-force from the author of Shadow, Born to Run and War Horse. May, 1915. Alfie and his fisherman father find a girl on an uninhabited island in the Scillies - injured, thirsty, lost… and with absolutely no memory of who she is, or how she came to be there. She can say only one word: Lucy. Where has she come from? Is she a mermaid, the victim of a German U-boat, or even - as some islanders suggest - a German spy?

Alessandra is not quite fifteen when her prosperous father brings a young painter back from Holland to adorn the new family chapel. Fascinated by his ability she is lured into closer involvement. On the streets of Florence she observes a terrible evil stalking the city and a fiery priest, who has set out to rid the city of vice, even art itself.

For identical twins, Kate and Violet are about as unlike as two peas from the same pod can be. Except for their 'Senses', a special kind of intuition that can allow them to see things that are yet to come. When one day Violet ignites a media storm by predicting a major earthquake in the St Louis area where they live, Kate’s normal suburban family life is turned upside down.

Motherhood hasn't come at all easy for Molly Anderson. But she's finally enjoying life as mother to five-year-old Ella and as arts reporter for the small but respectable Ridgedale Reader. That is until a body is found in the woods adjacent to Ridgedale University's ivy-covered campus, a discovery that threatens to unearth secrets long buried by the town's most powerful residents.

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old Jewish girl, is arrested by the French police in the middle of the night, along with her mother and father. Desperate to protect her younger brother, she locks him in a cupboard and promises to come back for him as soon as she can. Paris, May 2002: Julia Jarmond, an American journalist, is asked to write about the 60th anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv'--the infamous day in 1942 when French police rounded up thousands of Jewish men, women and children.

Lily was abducted from outside her high school gates. For eight long years, she's been locked away from the outside world. During that time she's changed from a girl into a woman. She's had a baby. And now she has seized her chance and escaped. Running for her life, with her daughter in her arms, she returns to her family and the life she used to know - to her much-loved twin sister, Abby; her mum; her high school boyfriend - and her freedom. But is it possible to go back?

The Washington Post said, "Nobody does smart, gutsy, funny, sexy women better than Susan Isaacs". Add to that praise the adjective "strong", and you've got Susan's latest protagonist, Marianne Kent. Her life may not seem thrilling - living with her widowed mother, majoring in economics, working in an elegant dress store after classes to put away money for graduate school - but she's determined to make a better life for herself and her mom.

Imagine you are a hunter-gatherer some 12,000 years ago. You've got a choice - carry on foraging or plant a few seeds and move to one of those new-fangled settlements down the valley. What you won't know is that urban life is short and riddled with dozens of new diseases; your children will be shorter and sicklier than you are; they'll be plagued with gum disease and stand a decent chance of violent death at the point of a spear. Why would anyone choose this? But choose they did.

On a small isolated island, there's a community that lives by its own rules. Boys grow up knowing they will one day reign inside and outside the home while girls know they will be married and pregnant within moments of hitting womanhood. But before that time comes, there is an island ritual that offers children an exhilarating reprieve. Every summer they are turned out onto their doorsteps to roam wild: they run, they fight, they sleep on the beach and build camps in trees. They are free.

NASA's history is a familiar story, culminating with the agency successfully landing men on the moon in 1969. But NASA's prehistory is a rarely told tale, one that is largely absent from the popular space-age literature but that gives the context behind the incredible lunar program. America's space agency wasn't created in a vacuum; it was assembled from preexisting parts, drawing together some of the best minds the non-Soviet world had to offer.

Soon, we'll be able to predict everything. We'll predict weather patterns, traffic jams. We'll predict who is going to run countries. Laurence Walker wants to be President of the United States. He's a sure thing: adored by the public, ex-military, a real family man. A good man. But then ClearVista, the world's foremost prediction software, tells the world his chances. And not only will he not be President, but it predicts that he's going to do the worst thing he can imagine.

In the city that's become a symbol for the death of the American dream, a nightmare killer is unravelling reality. A terrifying new thriller from Lauren Beukes, award-winning author of The Shining Girls. Detective Gabi Versado has hunted down many monsters during her eight years in Homicide. She's seen stupidity, corruption and just plain badness. But she's never seen anything like this.

"Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know." (Jonathan Franzen) Virginia, 1966. The motionless deeps of the lake outside Stillwater College are being ruffled. Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, is determinedly fondling Peggy, an ingénue freshman with literary pretensions, in his canoe. So begins a long affair, but the two are mismatched from the start.