Showing results by narrator "Rory" in All Categories

The Premier League is the most commercially successful football league in history, the self-proclaimed 'best league in the world'. But success has come at a cost, unbalancing the English game to a profound and damaging degree. In this revealing and eye-opening analysis, leading economist Mark Gregory reveals the breadth and depth of the problems facing our national men's game, and shows us a way to bring football home for good.

Brought to you by Penguin. A love affair born in rural Ireland! Two mismatched lovers, locked in a relationship that will change both of them ... forever! From the day I was born, I was brought up to believe that Gaelic games were invented for people too stupid to understand the laws of rugby...

When Rassie Erasmus took over as coach of the Springboks in 2018, few thought they had a chance of winning the Rugby World Cup. The Boks had slipped to seventh in the world rankings and lost the faith of the rugby-loving public. Less than two years later, jubilant crowds lined the streets of South Africa’s cities to welcome back the victorious team. Sportswriter Lloyd Burnard takes the listener on the thrilling journey of a team that went from no-hopers to world champions. He examines how exactly this turnaround was achieved.

Brought to you by Penguin 'If I've learned one thing,' the late, great Father Fehily used to say, 'it's that life, families and rugby balls don't always behave the way you want them to!' Looking at my life, I'd have to say, the dude wasn't wrong. My old man had been caught rigging a General...

China, 1941. While war rages in Europe, Japan has established itself as the supreme power in Asia. The beautiful province of Hangzhou has become a stronghold of the Japanese puppet government. One day, five officers from the code-breaking department are escorted to an isolated mansion outside...

Disaster strikes during a long, relentless storm which batters the village and blankets the whole area in a thick covering of snow. The doctor nearly loses his life, and the village schoolteacher loses her cottage roof. The excitement really starts when the villagers join together to raise money to repair the devastated cottage. Vernon Coleman describes an old fashioned music hall evening (during which just about everything that can go wrong goes wrong), and one of the funniest cricket matches ever described is reported in Chapters 16 and 17.

Andy Bellows is in a right state. Plagued with insomnia, anxiety and neckache, he’s convinced there’s something seriously wrong with him. And the worst thing is that his doctor agrees. The diagnosis: Andy is in the grip of a self-destructive addiction to technology - he just cannot put that bloody mobile phone down. Texting, tweeting, gaming and online dating - technology rules Andy’s life. His phone even monitors his bowel movements. So how will he cope when he’s forced to follow doctor’s orders and step away from all of his beloved screens?

Bilbury Grange is the second in Vernon Coleman's series of Young Country Doctor books. The place is the English county of Devon. The time is the 1970s. A young doctor, just married and in a new home (a vast and rambling country house in desperate need of repairs and renovation), has taken over a small village practice when suddenly the authorities decide that the village isn't big enough to have its own doctor. The villagers decide otherwise. Bilbury is the village everyone dreams of living in. It's the village where people speak to strangers and where doors are left unlocked.

When Lydia's father tells her he's obtained a husband for her, Mr. Thornton, she doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. She'd only met the man once before, and he'd immediately left her stranded in a ballroom after asking her to dance. How could she marry a man who already deemed her forgettable? Edward Thornton has succumbed to the allure of gambling one too many times, to the point where he loses his house in a game of cards. But when the man who won his house offers him a deal he can't refuse, he agrees to marry the man's daughter in exchange for a chance to redeem himself.

When he arrives in Bilbury, a small village on the edge of Exmoor, the young doctor doesn't realize how much he has to learn. But he soon finds the extent of his ignorance when he meets his patients. There is Anne Thwaites, who gives birth in the middle of a field and local rogue Thumper Robinson, who knows a good many tricks that aren't in any textbooks. And there is Mike Trickle, a TV show host, who causes great excitement when he buys a house in the village. The young doctor's employer is elderly Dr. Brownlow, who lives in a castle-like house and drives an old Rolls Royce.

A genetically modified virus mutates, transforming everyone it infects into zombies, wiping out most of the human race. Across the world, small pockets of survivors fight to stay alive and escape the terrifying hordes of flesh eaters. Tom, Becky and their two children are trying to fight their...

It was intended to eradicate the common cold; instead it eradicated most of the human race. A genetically modified virus killer mutates, transforming everyone it infects into zombies. As it rapidly spreads across the globe, small groups of survivors battle to stay alive and escape the growing...

Brought to you by Penguin. I've had some pretty bad New Year's Eves in my life. But this one was officially... The! Worst! Ever! My wife had just given birth to a baby that wasn't mine. My son had just walked out on his bride-to-be on the eve of their wedding. And my old dear was making threats...

After the success of Heretics, G. K. Chesterton was challenged and compelled to share the story of his pilgrimage to faith. The result is this bracing, watershed religious autobiography in which he follows the doctrines determined in the Apostle’s Creed to deliver a personal, yet universal, defense of Christianity. Ultimately, the literary giant answers the question - not of whether divinity can be believed - but rather, how he himself came to believe it.

One life-changing summer, Charlie meets Fran...David Nicholls’s highly anticipated new novel, narrated by Rory Kinnear In 1997, Charlie Lewis is the kind of boy you don't remember in the school photograph. His exams have not gone well. At home he is looking after his father, when surely it...

A young pretender raises an army to take the throne. Learning of his father’s death, the adolescent, dashing and charismatic and descended from the old kings of the North, vows to avenge him. He is supported in this war by his mother, who has spirited away her two younger sons to safety. Against them is the queen, passionate, proud, and strong-willed and with more of the masculine virtues of the time than most men. She too is battling for the inheritance of her young son, not yet fully grown but already a sadist who takes delight in watching executions.

Charles Tremayne is a spy out of his time. After a long career spent rescuing prisoners from the KGB or helping defectors across the Berlin Wall, the world has changed. The Wall has gone and no longer is there a need for a Russian speaking, ice-cold killer. Nowadays, state secrets are...

An irresponsible twentysomething comic and his equally shameless grandmother join forces as proud pariahs in this dark and rowdy story of dicey family ties, kindred spirits, bad behavior, and bribery. When Rory’s judgmental mother told him that he took after his grandma Evelyn, he took it as a compliment. The ninety-two-year-old cocktail-toting, offtrack-betting party girl was every bit the troublemaker he was. When she landed at a dead-end nursing home, Rory jumped at the chance to liven things up for bored Evelyn - with vodka, scratch-offs, bingo, and gaming.

Brought to you by Penguin. Costa Best Novel Award 2019 Winner. It was tempting to think, at times like this, that some bizarre hysteria had gripped the British people. Beginning eight years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by Poundland, and London, where...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Number 11 by Jonathan Coe, read by Rory Kinnear and Jessica Hynes . This is a novel about the hundreds of tiny connections between the public and private worlds and how they affect us all. It's about the legacy of war and the...