Showing results by narrator "Simon Vance" in All Categories

Almustafa has been exiled in the island city of Orphalese for twelve years when he sees his ship coming with the mist. Before he sets sail, the beloved prophet is asked by his followers to impart his truth. In these twenty-eight poetic essays, he offers profound inspiration on such matters of love and friendship, freedom and self-knowledge, joy and sorrow, pleasure, prayer, and death. In doing so, Almustafa offers a universal serenity. A Lebanese émigré to the United States, Gibran wrote The Prophet to transcend the barriers between East and West.

Kaith knows he’s been luckier than most. Born to a blacksmith, he’s grateful that hard work and good fortune granted him a position as a man-at-arms in the countess’ service. But when he accompanies her entourage to a joyful annual festival, the young man is shocked to find the village besieged, cursed...and Her Ladyship’s knights slaughtered. Taking shelter in the now-helpless town, Kaith feels unworthy as he and his fellow armsmen are charged with repelling the demonic enemy.

In a case of mistaken identification, Barnaby Rudge, a pale half-wit with long red hair who dresses all in green and carries a large raven on his back, is arrested as the leader of a mob of anti-Catholic rioters. He is condemned to death on the gallows, but an upright locksmith named Gabriel Varden comes to his aid.

The sudden appearance of a second space elevator in Brazil only deepens the mystery about the aliens who provided it: the Builders. Scavenger crew captain Skyler Luiken and brilliant scientist Dr. Tania Sharma have formed a colony around the new Elevator’s base, utilizing mobile towers to protect humans from the Builders’ plague. But they are soon under attack from a roving band of plague-immune soldiers.

In this thought-provoking evangelistic tool, Subramanian, a real-life Hindu of the 20th century, observes a fictitious conversation between two religious figures as they respond to each other's views of the life and the afterlife. Soon, Subramanian joins in with hard question of his own. Meanwhile, Richard, a fictional character, eavesdrops, asking himself the most important question of all: Does it really matter what I believe?

Peter Pan is missing; Neverland is in trouble. For adults, that might not matter all that much, but for children—whose dreams and imagination draw strength from the wild god’s power—the magic we take for granted in the real world is in danger of being lost forever. Such is the life of a now grown-up Michael Darling.

A portrait painting is stolen from a London home. Shortly afterwards, the owner, Nat, calls on genealogist Jefferson Tayte for his help. She believes the subject of the painting, a young girl called Jess, is a past relative and wants to learn more about her. The problem is that Nat's research has hit a brick wall - Jess appears to have vanished from the slums of Victorian London soon after the portrait was painted.

In this tantalizing tale of Victorian ghost stories and family secrets, timid, solitary librarian Gerard Freeman lives for just two things: his elusive pen pal Alice and a story he found hidden in his mother's drawer years ago. Written by his great-grandmother Viola, it hints at his mother's role in a sinister crime. As he discovers more of Viola's chilling tales, he realizes that they might hold the key to finding Alice and unveiling his family's mystery - or will they bring about his untimely death, as they seem to foretell?

When Holly and her family fly to LA for a holiday, it promises to be the trip of a lifetime. On her first day exploring the city of dreams, Holly befriends a movie director, who's captured something suspiciously dragonlike on camera while filming out in the desert. But before she can examine the tape properly, it goes missing.... Holly asks her partner-in-solving-crime, dragon detective Dirk Dilly, to join her on the hunt for clues in Hollywood. Will they be able to find the film before it falls into the wrong hands and exposes the existence of dragonkind to the world?

Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh, who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the 19th-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded in East Africa.

Papyrus rolls and Twitter have much in common, as each was their generation's signature means of "instant" communication. Indeed, as Tom Standage reveals in his scintillating new audiobook, social media is anything but a new phenomenon. From the papyrus letters that Roman statesmen used to exchange news across the Empire to the advent of hand-printed tracts of the Reformation to the pamphlets that spread propaganda during the American and French revolutions, Standage chronicles the increasingly sophisticated ways people shared information with each other....

Uniquely among the world’s religions, the central claims of Christianity concern not just timeless spiritual truths, but tangible historical events. At the heart of the of the Christian faith are things that are meant to have happened in Palestine between 5 BC and AD 30. It’s as if Christianity happily places its head on the chopping block of public scrutiny and invites anyone who wants to come and take a swing.

This wonderful collection of 18 short stories includes work by some of literature's most treasured names, including Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, and many more. This superlative treasury includes "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe; "A Piece of String" by Guy Le Maupassant; "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin; "The Mark on the Wall" by Virginia Woolf; "Nuns at Lunch" by Aldous Huxley, and many more!

Can religious beliefs survive in the scientific age? Are they resoundingly outdated? Or, is there something in them of great importance, even if the way they are expressed will have to change given new scientific context? These questions are among those at the core of the science-religion dialogue.

Publius Quinctilius Varus, a Roman politician, is summoned by the Emperor, Augustus Caesar. Arminius, a prince of the Cherusci, is playing a deadly game. He serves in the Roman army, gaining Roman citizenship and an officer's rank, and learning the arts of war and policy as practiced by the Romans. An epic battle is brewing, and these two men stand on opposite sides of what will forever be known as the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest---a ferocious, bloody clash that will change the course of history.

Recent days have seen a debate among evangelicals over how the death of Christ is to be interpreted. When a popular British evangelical leader appeared to denounce the idea that God was punishing Christ in our place on the cross as a "twisted version of events," "morally dubious," and a "huge barrier to faith" that should be rejected in favour of preaching only that God is love, major controversy was stirred. Many thought the idea of penal substitution was at the heart of the evangelical understanding of the cross.

When a visitor turns up unannounced at Dirk's office with a new case for him and Holly to solve, all is not as it seems. A Sea Dragon has disappeared, and the only clue left at the scene of the crime is the ashy outline of an elusive Sky Dragon. As their investigations take them from a dodgy billionaire's HQ to the top of the city's tallest skyscraper, trouble is set to soar sky high for this dragon detective and his partner-in-solving-crime. Will they be able to hunt down the suspect and find the missing dragon before they both disappear into thin air?

Holly is desperate to be sleuthing with her partner-in-solving-crime, dragon Dirk Dilly, but instead she's stuck at her exclusive boarding school for children of the rich and famous. She's determined to escape, until she meets Callum, the son of the Prime Minister, who claims he was kidnapped by dragons a year ago and hasn't been the same since. And when Dirk's own investigation into dragon activity brings him to the school, the two cases collide. What if Callum isn't as crazy as he seems?

Berlin, 27 February 1933. A month after Hitler's inauguration as Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag parliament building is set ablaze. The Nazis use the torching to justify a campaign of terror against their political opponents. John Russell's recent separation from his wife threatens his right to reside in Germany and any meaningful relationship with his six-year-old son Paul. He has just secured work as a crime reporter for a Berlin newspaper, and the crimes which he has to report are increasingly entangled in the wider nightmare engulfing Germany.

Rudyard Kipling's Kim is the story of Kimball O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, who spends his childhood as a vagabond in Lahore. With an old Tibetan lama, he travels through India, enthralled by the "roaring whirl" of the landscape and cities of richly colored bazaars and immense diversity of people. The novel is a masterpiece of careful organization and skillfully manipulated narrative techniques.