Showing results by narrator "Matt Addis" in All Categories

There's only one Auntie Poldi: bewigged, cursing in Bavarian, and knocking back a wee shot of grappa as a pre-breakfast aperitif...or is there? No one is as they seem (and sound) in this hilarious new mystery featuring Sicily's sultriest sleuth.

It's 1983 in Thatcher's Britain. Alec Johnston has left his comfortable family home in Cardiff and taken a flat with bikers Minto, Stobes and Black. There he meets Sindy, Minto’s strange and vulnerable young girlfriend. When she starts to view Alec as a possible saviour from her abusive relationship, it earns Alec a big target on his back. Hide takes us on a dark, unsettling journey: one that begins in a small town in Wales and continues through the vast Australian outback. As the threats get closer, Alec fears this is one journey from which he may never return.

Visible Gods is an imaginary dialogue between Socrates and four fictitious modern-day characters. Socrates' worldview is of a living cosmos with man only half-way up the hierarchy of all beings; above him reign suprahuman beings of great majesty and power - the visible gods. The moderns with whom Socrates converses disdain his ancient Greek cosmos as primitive and false.

Sebastian has long been haunted by the disappearance of his father, Jack Messenger: celebrated travel writer, potential spy and murder victim, his absent presence and equivocal past continue to cast inescapable shadows over his son, who must also contend with his ageing mother's fragmented memory and his own dereliction of a partner. So who is the stranger that buttonholes Sebastian at an academic conference on the Welsh coast, and reveals lies and transgressions neither outgrown nor comprehended? How does he know Sebastian, and what are his connections to Jack Messenger?

It's 1978. Ponte, a small community in Northern Italy: peaceful woods, discarded rubbish, a closed-down factory. An unbearably hot summer like many others, wilted flowers and trips to the waterfalls. Elia Furenti is 16, living in a secluded house with his parents, a life so unremarkable that even its moderate unhappiness has been accepted as normal. That is until the day the beautiful, damaged Anna returns to Ponte and firmly propels Elia to the edge of adulthood. But then everything starts to unravel.

Born in the 1920s on a working-class London street, Harry Miles wins a scholarship and grows into adulthood as a sensitive man, torn between his love for poetry and the immediate demands of the world around him. When he marries the magnetic and demanding Evelyn amongst the outbreak of war, his capacity to love is increasingly tested - up to and beyond when she abandons him on the cusp of death. An unconventional love story, harrowing and deeply tender, Dear Evelyn studies two people who permanently shape each other over a shared lifetime.

In this book, Harding explores the proposition that tools are "extensions of the body", and that there's no absolute boundary between the "natural" and the "artificial". Crossing over the line between the self and the not-self, Harding realized that there is no definite frontier where you can say you stop and the rest of the world begins. The Meaning and Beauty of the Artificial takes you on a wide-ranging safari through the animal kingdom and then into the human world, where you see "man and machine" with new eyes.

If these tales were by an unknown author, they would be no more than reflections on a childhood in the early 20th century. But they gain in interest because of who wrote them, for they provide insight into the young life and mind of a great philosopher and spiritual teacher: Douglas Harding (1909-2007), author of The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, On Having No Head, and other books. The stories open a window on Harding's early life; their autobiographical nature is only thinly disguised. After listening to them, you will understand Harding in a new and more intimate way.

This is a dramatic story, a wild dream, at times a nightmare, at times a hilarious and subversive satire. It involves a quest, a monster, and a shape-shifting hero, strange characters and dangerous goings-on, and an end that is a beginning - the tightest corner of hell opening out into the widest smile of heaven, the darkest of nights turning into the early morning freshness of the world.

Hansel and Gretel are sent into the forest by their mother to collect berries as a punishment. The siblings get lost in the twilight and discover the gingerbread house of an old ugly witch. She enchants the children and wants to bake them into gingerbread. Hansel and Gretel use their wits to save themselves and push the wicked old woman into her own oven. The children are finally found by their worried parents, who are looking for them in the forest. In the end the family is happily united.

If Aiden Manchester had to have a superpower, why couldn't it be something useful like predicting the future? Or Jedi mind tricks? Instead, he's afflicted with manifestations - balls of goo which materialize in midair while he sleeps. But then, Aidan learns he was a "Quiver Kid", one of seven orphaned babies drafted for an illicit experiment at Tau Nine-One.

Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year Arrest Me, for I Have Run Away is a stunning short story collection on human nature and identity. Stevie Davies' latest work, it is bound to captivate and charm the listener.

What if your past came back to haunt you and stalked the present until it became your worst nightmare? J.J. Hughes explores the lengths to which we'll go to keep the past from overshadowing the present and destroying the future.

Sensational books like Freakonomics have shown how human behaviour follows predictable patterns. But how do you take these radical ideas and apply them to your business? How do you make money from them? Secrets of the Moneylab sets out what business can learn from the findings of the new economics and social psychology. It shows how you can shape desires, use incentives and reduce risks to consistently improve the bottom line.

All the beloved, irascible Auntie Poldi wanted from her Sicilian retirement was time to enjoy the sunshine, a free-flowing supply of wine, and a sultry romance with Chief Inspector Vito Montana. But then her idyll is rudely disrupted by the last person she wants to see on her doorstep: John Owenya, detective inspector with the Tanzanian Ministry of Home Affairs, who is also her estranged lying cheat of a husband. Not only is John's sudden reappearance putting a kink in Poldi's dreamy love affair with Montana, but his presence also comes with a plea for help.

When a 10-year-old girl and her mother move in next door to professional killer Daniel, the man begins to have tormenting memories of his stolen childhood. When Daniel's faceless employers order yet another murder, he is faced with a choice for the first time—whether to carry out the assignment or face his painful past. Who—or what—wants Daniel to keep killing?

Warwick, 1468. One drowsy summer afternoon, Sir Thomas Malory – politician, courtier, outlaw, renowned author of Le Morte D'Arthur – is seized from his garden and dragged to Newgate Prison for reasons unknown. Shivering in his foul-smelling, filthy old cell, Malory mourns his misspent life as he awaits the execution bell. But when the locking bar lifts, he is greeted by a boy of about 12 winters: the gaoler's son. Giddy with relief, Malory seizes the opportunity to recount his deeds to an audience.

In Spring Rain, writer and gardener, Marc Hamer, now in his 60s, shares his path to contentment from difficult beginnings. Through the prism of family gardens, he reflects on how we reconcile our childhoods with where we end up as adults. Growing up in a violent home, as a young boy, Hamer found solace and safety in his small back garden. In particular, in its shed, where he stumbled across an incomplete set of old encylopaedias. These books, and observing the plants and insects in his private kingdom, began his lifelong love of learning and openness to the world.