Showing results by narrator "Leighton Pugh" in All Categories

Susan Hill meets Alfred Hitchcock in Alison Littlewood's latest chiller. Asylum doctor Nathaniel is obsessed with the beautiful Mrs Harleston - but is she truly delusional? Or is she hiding secrets that should never be uncovered? Haunted by his father's suicide, Nathaniel walks away from the highly prestigious life of a consultant to become an asylum doctor. He takes up a position at Crakethorne Asylum, but the proprietor is more interested in phrenology and his growing collection of skulls than the patients' minds.

Part novel, part philosophical treatise, part satire, Sartor Resartus is a masterpiece of 19th-century literature, following in the footsteps of Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and a key influence on Melville’s Moby-Dick. Bubbling over with ideas, humour and inventiveness, it is—on the surface—a long-suffering British editor’s skeptical account of a German philosopher’s book, Clothes: Their Origin and Influence, which itself is steeped in German idealism.

Nuclear Russia probes the juncture of history of science and technology, political and cultural history, and environmental history. It considers the atom in Russian society as a reflection of Leninist technological utopianism, Cold War imperatives, scientific hubris, public acceptance, and a state desire to conquer nature. Furthermore the audiobook examines the vital – and perhaps unexpected – significance of ethnicity and gender in nuclear history by looking at how Kazakhs and Nenets lost their homelands and their health in Russia in the wake of nuclear testing.

James Marlowe puts in long alcohol- and cocaine-fuelled hours as an advertising director. As his life disintegrates around him, he comes to despise his clients, the corporate world, and himself. Now his imagination is fired by a set of characters he calls The Zoo. They lead him into a world crazier than the one that's thrown him out. The way back to sanity might lie behind the fantasy.

The first of Kafka’s three great novels, The Man Who Disappeared (America) follows the picaresque adventures of Karl Rossman, who is banished to America following a family scandal. Upon his arrival, Karl immediately happens upon his uncle, and from there follows a pattern of wandering, adoption and expulsion as Karl marches inexorably on towards the interior of the continent. With its blitheness and comical moments, The Man Who Disappeared is perhaps the most charming of Kafka’s works.

King Lear has decided to retire from his royal duties. He calls his three daughters and asks each to tell him how much they love him. The eldest two, Goneril and Regan, flatter him with their words. Cordelia the youngest, only says that she loves him as a daughter must love her father. Furious, he disinherits her and divides his kingdom between her two sisters. But Goneril and Regan soon turn against Lear.

It has never been more important for business leaders to look to the future. Yet, when we are living through some of the most uncertain times we have ever faced, it can feel daunting to know where to start.

The friends are closer than most - too close, some might say. Every year they leave their cosy suburban neighbourhood to go on holiday together to a remote Swedish island. But this year, their holiday won't go as expected. A terrible series of tragedies will unfold, seemingly random, all somehow connected. Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas will have to look into the friends' tangled pasts to find the truth. What malevolent force has followed them to the island? Or was it amongst them all along? Even the closest friends don’t share everything....

What does it mean to be lucky? How might we mitigate the effects of bad luck and maximise those of good? Is there actually such a thing as ‘luck’—some force that intervenes between desire and its consummation, that impedes or hastens it? To answer these questions, David Flusfeder sets out on a search for the definition of luck.

Jonas Merrick - mockingly nicknamed 'Eternal Flame' by his colleagues at MI6 because he was desk bound and considered a long redundant encyclopaedia of names and faces - was on the edge of retirement. Having escaped his own insincere retirement party and taken refuge on a bench within the grounds of Thames House, he finds himself sitting next to Winston Gunn, a young man drawn into the Jihadi activist net while serving 18 months imprisonment. A young man packed tightly with explosives ready for detonation....

Kovalyov wakes one morning to discover that his nose has disappeared! It has mysteriously found its way into a loaf of bread on the barber Yokovlevich's breakfast table. The barber tries to get rid of it, but when Kovalyov steps out onto the St Petersburg streets, he finds his nose, now the size of a human, wearing a gold-embroidered uniform and travelling around in a carriage....

The unresolved and ambiguous details of Robert Schumann’s psychological decline and death have tended to dominate his biography. Yet in his time Schumann was lauded as a protean Romantic literary genius whose writings, as a music critic, poet, novelist and dramatist, eclipsed his musical creativity. How did Schumann reconcile these elements? Does his music suggest he suffered from bipolar disorder? How did his pianist wife, Clara, influence his compositions?

In the late 1950s, during his National Service, Drummond meets the two people who will change his life: Carter, a rich, educated young man sent down from Oxford, and Gwen, a barmaid with whom he feels an instant connection. His feelings for both will be tested at a military base known as Doom Town. It is an experience that will colour the rest of his - and his family’s - life. The Blind Light moves from the '50s through to present day, taking in the global and local events that will shape and define Drum’s family.

This audiobook is the first to offer a concise, accessible overview of the evolution of the Soviet Union as a multiethnic empire. It reflects on how the Soviet Union was home to many ethnic minorities, and how their fates, and that of the USSR itself, were bound to the question of how the Soviet state responded variously throughout its existence to the fundamental question of ethnic difference across its vast and diverse territory. The audiobook then examines how the Soviet collapse in 1991 fractured the Union along markedly national lines.

A gripping thriller full of twists you won't see coming... Seven years ago, psychiatrist Dr Claps assisted police in capturing Giacomo Riondino, a man accused of abducting, torturing and murdering two women. On arrest, tests had revealed that Riondino suffered from a rare and disturbing psychiatric condition and was sectioned. Six years later, Riondino is on the run after escaping from a rehabilitation centre, leaving a trail of bloody murders in his wake.

It is 1971, the height of the Cold War and anti-American feeling among Icelanders is running high. When a teenager is found dead after a drunken night out, her clothes torn and face bruised, anger is directed towards the military personnel at the NATO air base at Keflavik who outnumber the local population. British Agent Bill Conran, invited by the Americans to uncover a Russian spy ring, comes to realise that this is no routine assignment. Unsure who can be trusted and targeted by an unknown assassin, he discovers that Iceland, for all its cold beauty, has never been hotter.

Felix Mendelssohn was a child prodigy to rival Mozart and achieved great fame during his lifetime, fêted across Europe, and composing in the widest possible range of musical genres. However, his music has also been denigrated for its elegance, charm and symmetry. This insightful biography explores the breadth of his achievements, the complexities of his privileged upbringing, and the reasons for the fluctuating nature of his reputation. Musical excerpts include the Violin Concerto, String Octet and Elijah, as well as his choral works, symphonies, sonatas and songs.

They say that third time's a charm... It's been two years since mass murderer, Giacomo Riondino, disappeared after killing Greta Alfieri. Dr. Claps, devastated and guilt-ridden by Greta's death, has been on a man-hunt for Riondino ever since. Meanwhile, an American girl disappears on the 382nd step of the Cerro trail in Guayaquil, Ecuador. No one saw her disappear. Who took her? And how? When the US authorities contact Claps, he is certain that it must be Riordino. But, unlike Riondino's other victims, the girl has disappeared into thin air.

When the leader of one of Denmark’s major political parties is seriously injured in a car crash a mere three weeks before an election, two of his deputies vie to succeed him. But only one can emerge victorious, and a vicious, dirty-tricks campaign—marked by the unearthing of past indiscretions, malignant arm-twisting, and forged documents—ensues. Everyone else is just a pawn in this high-stakes game of chess, in which even the reporters covering the Danish Parliament have their own agendas.

The search for a missing child reveals she is not the only one... In a little village in Lombardy, it's a cold November morning when Ami steps out of her house to go to school... and never comes back. As soon as her father raises the alarm, a frantic search begins. The investigation is led by Police Commissioner Sensi. His men immediately find a trail to follow, but it soon proves to lead nowhere. Three months later, Police Commissioner Sensi decides to visit Dr Claps, an old friend and a renowned criminologist, who guesses from his first few words the real reason for the visit.