Showing results by narrator "David Rintoul" in All Categories

A woman wakes one night to find that a strange man has walked into her bedroom. She lies there in terrified silence unable to move. The woman is an author and the man one of her prospective characters. So desperate is he to have his story told that he has resorted to breaking in to her house to make her tell it. She creates Alvar Eide, forty-two years old, single, who works in an art gallery. He lives a quiet, dutiful life, carefully designed to avoid surprise.

A 12-year-old boy runs wildly into his local police station claiming to have seen Halldis Horn's brutally murdered corpse. Errki Johrma, an escaped psychiatric patient and known town misfit, was sighted at the scene disappearing into the woods. The next morning the local bank is robbed at gunpoint. Making his escape the robber takes a hostage and flees and, once again, a suspect takes to the woods. As the felon's plans begin to fall apart he is, in contrast to his quiet hostage, rapidly losing his control and power.

HMS Wagtail is a river gunboat, a ship seemingly at the end of her unusual life, lying in a Hong Kong dockyard awaiting her last summons to the breakers' yard. Commander Justin Rolfe is also seemingly at the end of his useful naval life, an embittered man, brooding and angry from a court-martial verdict. Then the offshore island of Santu is threatened with invasion from the Chinese mainland.

Amidst strikes, conflicts and untold hardships, the Italian prisoners of war sent to a tiny Orkney island during World War Two create a monument to the human spirit’s ability to lift itself above great adversity. One artist falls in love with a local Orkney woman and leaves a token of his love in the chapel. It is still there today and, until now, no-one has ever known its true meaning.

The Emperor's Tomb is a magically evocative, haunting elegy to the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to the passing of time and the loss of youth and friends. Prophetic and regretful, intuitive and exact, Roth's acclaimed novel is the tale of one man's struggle to come to terms with the uncongenial society of post-First World War Vienna and the first intimations of Nazi barbarities.

The Radetzky March is a meditation on the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the prism of three generations of the Trotta family. The novel opens in 1859 at the Battle of Solferino, when the young Lieutenant Trotta saves the life of the Emperor and is ennobled. He owes the Empire everything, and his son also becomes a conscientious servant of the great multinational state even as it enters into its period of chaos, with competing nationalisms and ideologies tearing it apart.

This audiobook includes unabridged recordings of all Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 15 novels and novellas.

Caroline, Fiona and Ruth are lifelong friends, who've grown up together, laughed and cried together, and stood by each other through thick and thin. They may not always see eye to eye, and they might drive each other crazy, but they can't do without each other. But life's got a lot more complicated since they were 22, when the only things they carried around were handbags. Now, in midlife, they've got more baggage than the average airport carousel.

When the young English widow Lilia Herriton takes off on the grand tour and along the way marries a penniless Italian, her in-laws are far from amused. That the marriage should fail and poor Lilia die tragically are only to be expected. But that Lilia should have had a baby - and that the baby should be raised as an Italian - are matters of grave concern to Philip Herriton, his dour sister Harriet, and their well-meaning friend Miss Abbott.

Jonathan Oldbuck, the antiquary of the title, has a passion for the past–and delights in trying to convey it. He meets the mysteriously taciturn young Lovel and the two strike up a friendship, bonding over Roman ruins. When Lovel falls for Isabella, daughter of a local landowner, it looks like an impossible situation. Sharp, funny, gothic, romantic, and full of action, this is a thoroughly entertaining window on Scottish life in the summer of 1794: it was Scott’s intention to show the spirit of the times, and how the past affects the present–and it was his own favourite of all his novels.

First published in 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson's rollicking historical novel Kidnapped was an instant bestseller. It was followed by an 1893 sequel, Catriona, which Stevenson regarded as his 'high water mark', declaring that he would 'never do a better book'. Included here is the epic 10-part BBC radio dramatisation of both action-packed tales.

Xenophon's The Art of Horsemanship is a highly unusual text in the corpus of Classical Greek literature. It is a short survey on the various aspects of care for horses as seen by a highly experienced rider from the 5th century BCE. It is particularly notable because so many of its observations are relevant to the modern rider. Xenophon, friend of Socrates and professional soldier, is best known as the author Anabasis, the vivid account of a failed military expedition deep into Persia.

Rumer Godden is well known for her acclaimed novels for adults and children. She wrote over 60 works in her lifetime, nine of which were made into films. Included here are dramatisations of three of her classic tales, as well as a fascinating interview with the renowned author.

When an old prison is renovated, the fragile diary of one of the inmates is found. The entries contained detailed information about a series of unsolved murders from a long time ago. With Anna's support, Karl starts to interview former inmates of the prison while Sigmund tries to identify the killer on the basis of the diary entries.

A bank is robbed in Vienna. The constables quickly arrive on the scene - one of the bank robbers is arrested while the others flee with the loot. Karl involves Sigmund in the questioning of the arrested man - the mentally unstable man is the only chance they have to find the other robbers and their spoils.

When two little children are murdered and the suspect - the children's mother as well as one of Freud's patients - is arrested, the Professor is compelled into action: he is sure the suspect is innocent. Instead he suspects the children's father committed the murder. He is able to persuade Karl Gruber of his suspicions.

The Cemetery of the Nameless in Vienna is where those who take their own lives are buried - suicide victims who jumped into the Danube to kill themselves. But when the obvious victim of a murder washes up on the banks of the Danube, Karl initiates a homicide investigation. Supported by Anna and Sigmund, Constable Gruber heads into the world of prostitutes and pimps in Vienna's red-light district.

The influence of Plato, his Dialogues and his ‘Academy', cast a long shadow. Around 35 Dialogues, almost all featuring Socrates as the principal figure, are generally ascribed to Plato and form one of the most important threads in Western philosophy. These four Dialogues may fall into the ‘Attributed Texts' category, but they are of sufficient interest to warrant study in our time and when set against the principal canon.