Showing results by narrator "Mark Meadows" in All Categories

Lucio Battistini knows the three most important days of his life: the day he was conceived, the day his wife agreed to marry him, and the day he died. But wait. Let's go back a bit: to the day Lucio discovers he has only three months left to live, the day he realizes it's time to turn his life around. Because so far he hasn't been getting it right. In fact he's been thrown out by his wife and is sleeping in the stockroom of his father-in-law's bakery. From now on things have to change, and every moment counts.

Chris Beckett's thought-provoking and wide-ranging collection of contemporary short stories is a joy to listen to, rich in detail and texture. From stories about first love, to a man who discovers a labyrinth beneath his house, to an angel left alone at the end of the universe, Beckett displays both incredible range and extraordinary subtlety as a writer. Every story is a world unto itself - each one beautifully realized and brilliantly imagined.

What secrets lay buried in the heart of the forest? When Maya strays into the forest she also walks straight into a nightmare. It's not just the horrific discovery she makes among the trees, it's what's waiting for her at home. Something too terrifying to believe in. She's not even sure she believes it herself. Perhaps she's going mad, only imagining the sounds in the night and the feeling of being stalked.

Vigàta is bustling as the new filming location for a Swedish television series set in 1950. In the production frenzy, the director asks the locals to track down movies and vintage photos to faithfully recreate the air of Vigàta at that time. Meanwhile, Montalbano is grappling with a double mystery, one that emerges from the past and another that leads him into the future.

Florence, 1691. The Renaissance is long gone, and the city is a dark, repressive place, where everything is forbidden and anything is possible. Knowledge is still the property of the few, and they guard it fiercely. Art, sex and power - these, as always, are the obsessions. Facing criminal charges, Gaetano Zummo is forced to flee his native Siracusa at the age of 20, first to Palermo, then Naples, but always has the feeling that he is being pursued by his past, and that he will never be free of it.

Samuel Etherstone, a penniless artist, is adrift in London. His disturbing art is shunned by patrons and critics alike, his friend Oscar Wilde is now an exile living in Paris, and a personal tragedy has taken its toll. So when he is contacted by a mysterious heiress, Mrs Chesterfield, and asked to work on a commission for the house she is building on the desolate Smugglers' Coast of North Yorkshire, he accepts the offer. Staying overnight in the local village pub, Samuel is warned not to spend too much time there.

In the crippling heat of August in Rome, a flat goes up in flames, the doors sealed from the outside. Five illegal immigrants are trapped and burnt alive—their charred bodies barely distinguishable amidst the debris. When Detective Inspectors Rossi and Carrara begin to investigate, a terror organisation shakes the city to its foundations. Then a priest is found murdered and mutilated post-mortem—his injuries almost satanic in their ferocity.

Exploding the tired stereotypes of autism, Daniel Tammet - an autistic savant himself - reaches across the divides of age, gender, sexuality and nationality to draw out the inner worlds of his subjects. Portraying a range of experiences as richly diverse as the spectrum itself, this illuminating, life-affirming work of narrative nonfiction celebrates the power and beauty of the neurodivergent mind, and the daring freedom with which these people have built their lives.

As children, Gareth and Helen went ignored and utterly unsupervised in their isolated English farmhouse while their mother obsessively tended to her beloved, exquisite garden. When they were little, Gareth would occupy himself by trapping insects under glass and Helen would find ways to entertain herself - but the older they grew, the more sinister their lives became, with no attentive parent to shield them from the predators of the world. Decades later, Helen is in the same crumbling house, unhappily married and looking after their bedridden mother, and Gareth finally returns home.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Rain by Barney Campbell, read by Mark Meadows. Corporal Thomas (my acting sergeant since Adams died) and I have to go down the line of the boys as they're checking their kit before we go out. Some of them are crying - not bawling, just weeping gently but still steadfast; others are just pumped to the max, bouncing their heads up and down like they're listening to trance music, just amped about getting the rounds down.

Simon Majumdar is a man on a mission, and he might just be hungry enough to accomplish it. Setting out in search of the ultimate meal, he travels to every corner of the globe - from China to Brazil and from Finland to Japan. He tries everything, from mouldy shark in Iceland (not very nice) to kare stew in the Philippines (almost unimaginably delicious) and befriends (and sometimes fights with) some extraordinary characters along the way.

In 1928 the Ravat-Wonder cycling team became the first English-speaking peloton to compete in the Tour de France. The riders, from faraway New Zealand and Australia, were treated as exotics and isolated from their surroundings by a thick barrier of language and culture. Underfinanced and undertrained, the team faced one of the toughest routes in the race's history, 5,476 kilometers over unsealed roads through a landscape heavy with the legacy of the Great War.

Alex is in his thirties, a solitary man who has finally found love in the form of his beautiful and vivacious wife, Rachel. When Rachel is brutally murdered one Midsummer Night in the grounds of their alma mater, Worcester College, Oxford, Alex's life as he knew it vanishes. He returns to Oxford that winter and, through the shroud of his grief, begins to try to piece together the mystery surrounding his wife's death.

Thomas Geve was just 15 years old when he was liberated from Buchenwald concentration camp on 11th April 1945. It was the third concentration camp he had survived. Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Thomas was separated from his mother and left to fend for himself in the men’s camp of Auschwitz I, at the age of 13. During the 22 months he was imprisoned, he was subjected to and forced to observe first-hand the inhumane world of Nazi concentration camps.

July 1945. Eighteen daring young British, Australian and New Zealand special forces from a top-secret underwater warfare unit prepare to undertake three simultaneous and incredibly risky missions against the Japanese. Using four brilliantly conceived XE-craft midget submarines, the raiders will creep deep behind Japanese lines to sink two huge warships and sever two vitally important undersea communications cables.

SS Obersturmführer Paul Meissner arrives in Auschwitz from the Russian front. After being badly wounded he is fit only for administrative duty, and his first and most pressing task is to improve flagging camp morale. He sets up a chess club which thrives, as the officers and enlisted men are allowed to gamble on the results of the games. However, when Meissner learns from a chance remark that chess is also played by the prisoners, he hears of a Jewish watchmaker who is “unbeatable”.

Ross Kemp's fascinating guide to the worst places in the world. Want to know where to discover the perfect sunset in Fiji? How about a tropical paradise in St Lucia or one of the world’s beautiful natural wonders in the Alps? Well this is NOT the book for you. But if you want to know about meeting transvestite prostitutes in a South African prison or being attacked for a can of tuna in the Congo, buying crack cocaine in a Venezuelan prison or being chased by dogs in a haunted house in Belize, then look no further.

Six raids that changed the course of history. Operation Judgement: one of the most spectacular efforts of World War Two, where obsolete British biplanes attacked the Italian fleet in Taranto. Operation Archery: the first true combined operation carried out by all three British forces. This successful raid persuaded Hitler that the Allies were planning a full-scale invasion. Operation Biting: a cross-Channel raid into France that was the first major attack by the British Airborne Division and its first battle honour. Operation Gunnerside: a dramatic demolition assault on Hitler's atomic bomb plant in Norway....

A novel of Leonardo da Vinci - visionary painter of the Mona Lisa, the smiling, enigmatic Gioconda. We know him as the Renaissance genius: inventor, scientist, artist. They knew him as Leonardo from Vinci: heretic, butcher, lunatic. A solitary child, Leonardo's only intimate is Lisa Gherardini, the girl who spies on him in his workshop. Spurned by his tutor, he is sent by his despairing father to Florence as an apprentice.

DCI Mark Lapslie suffers from a rare neurological condition that ‘cross-wires’ his senses. The sickening clamour of sounds he can taste has smothered his marriage and stifled his career...and it’s getting worse. His colleagues have written him off as a drunk – or worse – and Lapslie has quarantined himself in an isolated Essex cottage. Carl Whittley has got his own problems to deal with too: he’s just tortured a minor TV celebrity to death and blown an apparently anonymous commuter to pieces.