Showing results by narrator "Dan Stevens" in All Categories

Calcutta, May 1916. Lieutenant Peake pauses for breath outside the ruins of Jheeter's Gate station knowing that he only has a few hours to live. Inside his overcoat he is sheltering two newborn babies - twins, a boy and a girl. Peake runs at full tilt to the house of Aryami Bose, to whom he entrusts the children. In 1932 we meet the boy, Ben, and his group of friends the night before they are due to leave St Patricks orphanage.

In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martín, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books, and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city's underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner.

Small-time private investigator Ray Lovell veers between paralysis and delirium in a hospital bed. But before the accident that landed him there, he had promised to find Rose Janko. Rose was married to the charismatic son of a travelling gypsy family, Ivo Janko. When Ray starts to investigate her disappearance he's surprised that her family are so hostile towards him.

In Beirut, a brilliant young Sky TV reporter Katie Dartmouth has been captured by a ruthless gang of Hezbollah terrorists. She is to be executed live on television unless British troops are withdrawn from Iraq. A nation holds its breath and the government is tottering on the edge of collapse.

In the eighth book in the number-one best-selling Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz, Alex meets international do-gooder Desmond McCain. But a simple card game between them rapidly leads to a duel to the death - one that could result in the destruction of an entire country.

Anna Ogilvy hasn’t opened her eyes for four years. Not since that night at The Farm when she was found asleep with a kitchen knife in her hand, her clothes bloodstained, the bodies of her two best friends lying close. She’d committed the crime of the century – but nothing and no-one could wake her from the nightmare. Believers in her innocence call her Anna O. Believers in her guilt call her Sleeping Beauty.

Week after week the postcards arrive, addressed to a name Ellie does not know, with no return address, each signed with an initial: A. With their bright skies, blue seas and alluring images of Greece, these cartes postales brighten her life. After six months, to her disappointment, they cease. But the montage she has created on the wall of her flat has cast a spell. She must see this country for herself.

Piet Barol is an alluring and intelligent young man who has escaped his drab existence, living with his father in the university town of Leiden, and moved to Amsterdam to take up a job at a stunning mansion in the city's 'Gilded Curve'. He has been employed by the extremely wealthy Vermeulen-Sickerts family to tutor their son Egbert, a boy with prodigious musical talent who has not set foot outside for a year and a half.

A huge novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women.It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. Their destiny is entangled with that of an ambitious young aide to U.S.

Max Carver's father - a watchmaker and inventor - decides to move his family to a small town on the Atlantic coast, to a house built for a prestigious surgeon, Dr Richard Fleischmann and his wife, that was abandoned when the couple's son drowned in a tragic accident. Behind the house, Max spies an overgrown garden full of statues surrounded by a metal fence topped with a six-pointed star....

The world’s most famous detective. The most brilliant mind in fiction. But before he became the great detective, who was young Sherlock Holmes? The year is 1868, and Sherlock Holmes is 14. His life is that of a perfectly ordinary army officer’s son: boarding school, good manners, a classical education – the backbone of the British Empire.

It's 1919, and Britain is realising that it is no longer at war. Now, Nadine and Riley, Rose, and Peter and Julia must try to regain a sense of normality. But long shadows cast by the war dim the potential joys of peacetime, and matters of the heart prove arduous and bewildering. Normality doesn't seem to exist the way it did, and there is no going back to anything. What must give, for happiness to stand a chance?

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, read by Max Deacon and Dan Stevens. At the start of the 20th century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself; these profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for writers and artists of all kinds.

Now, in 1949, employed as an extra in a war film that echoes his real experience, Alfred Day begins to recall what he would rather forget.

From Margaret Atwood, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, comes a dazzling collection of fifteen stories. These stories explore the full warp and weft of experience, from two best friends disagreeing about their shared past, to the right way to stop someone from choking; from a daughter determining if her mother really is a witch, to what to do with inherited relics such as World War II parade swords.

Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers—characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.

Richard MacBlair has all the answers Idina Moorfield needs and is finally willing to share them. Well, most of them. Who knew there was a whole special forces division? Dedicated to people exhibiting magical powers to deal with unique challenges? Things are starting to make a lot more sense to Idina. But a lot more changes may be coming her way.

Far from the savage remnants of humanity, Henry and his family have managed to survive the grip of desolate, perpetual winter on a vast tundra that was once an ocean teeming with life. When the family is discovered, their peaceful existence is shattered and their lives changed forever. Henry’s siblings are kidnapped, leaving him alone in the ruins of their home. Broken, altered, and tormented by all that has befallen him, he is driven to wreak vengeance upon those who assume him dead...by any means necessary.

Charles Dickens was, for a time, editor of a daily newspaper. This series takes an imaginative look at how Dickens would have tackled bringing the news to the masses. We follow Dickens the editor as he contends with railway crashes, gory deaths in the River Thames, having his editorial judgment scrutinised, working with tyrannical landowners, entering the murky worlds of opium and prostitution and, most tragically of all, investigating a child's death. He and his newspaper tackle financial plotting, encountering a young and secretive Disraeli, and the prospect of war overseas.

A Week in December is Sebastian Faulks's first wholly contemporary novel. Set in London, it's a brilliant social satire, structured like a thriller, that takes place over the course of a single week at the end of 2007. It brings together an intriguing cast of characters, each apparently in his or her own world but - as gradually becomes clear - ultimately intricately related.