Showing results by narrator "Graeme Malcolm" in All Categories

In 2010 Clive James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Deciding that "if you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do", James moved his library to his house in Cambridge, where he would "live, read, and perhaps even write". James is the award-winning author of dozens of works of literary criticism, poetry, and history, and this volume contains his reflections on what may well be his last reading list.

Today, India stands on the threshold of global dominance. And as it faces the road ahead, attention focuses on one man: its Prime Minister, Nahrendra Modi. A controversial figure in his own country and abroad, he has garnered unprecedented political support while facing criticism for his nationalism, his record in government and his economic policies. As it seeks to control its relationships with China and Pakistan, to revitalise its economy and improve the health and education prospects of its citizens, the key to understanding its future may lie in understanding its leader. 

A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut, Death in the Air, is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. In winter 1952, London automobiles and thousands of coal-burning hearths belched particulate matter into the air. But the smog that descended on December fifth of 1952 was different; it was a type that held the city hostage for five long days.

Mark Blake draws on his own interviews with band members as well as the group's friends, road crew, musical contemporaries, former housemates, and university colleagues to produce a riveting history of one of the biggest rock bands of all time. We follow Pink Floyd from the early psychedelic nights at UFO, to the stadium-rock and concept-album zenith of the '70s, to the acrimonious schisms of the late '80s and '90s.

Who can foretell India's future? Mr. Joshi is a fortune teller in a slum in south Delhi who uses a soothsaying green parrot to make predictions. When Adam Roberts visited him in 2012, Joshi's parrot declared that India was destined to become the most powerful nation under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Through vivid storytelling and insight, Superfast Primetime Ultimate Nation examines the problems and promises of fast-growing India to reveal how it might reach its full potential and become, as Mr. Joshi's parrot predicted, a truly powerful nation.

Essayist. Preservationist. Mountain man. Inventor. John Muir may be California’s best-known icon. A literary naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club and Yosemite National Park, Muir left his legacy on the landscape and on paper. But the celebrity of John Muir does not tell the whole story. In Essential Muir, for the first time, Muir's selected writings include those that show his ecological vision without ignoring his racism, providing a more complete portrait of the man. 

 The Freedom Years is an upbeat and humorous look at some of the challenges and opportunities presented as you move from work to retirement. Most people don’t give much thought to how they’ll adjust and don’t have a clue what’s going to hit them, but this witty and inspirational guide is all you need to convince you that the best is yet to come. 

Peace on Earth isn’t everyone’s cup of tea in Charlotte MacLeod’s “A Cozy for Christmas”. Peter Lovesey’s “The Haunted Crescent” delivers a holiday ghost story with a twist. A training session for department-store Santas turns up Saint Nicks who are anything but angels in Isaac Asimov’s “Ho, Ho, Ho”. Marcia Muller’s “Silent Night” finds a tough private investigator searching San Francisco’s Tenderloin district - and discovering something unexpected.

The Arctic, 1897: Nils Strindberg crashes his hydrogen balloon during the mysterious Andrée Expedition to the North Pole. Germany, 1942: Gruesome and inexplicable experiments are performed on concentration-camp prisoners. Sweden, present-day: Cave diver Erik Hall finds a dead body wearing an ancient ankh, buried deep in an abandoned mine. Religious symbol expert Don Titelman seeks out Erik to study the ankh, but finds Erik dead. Don is the prime suspect, and soon he's being chased across Europe.

The alien race known as the Ancients vanished before Earth's last ice age - but not before building interconnected rings that form a highway system across the galaxy. Humanity has used these rings for years but has never figured out how to build its own, or even how to alter the connection pattern. Now, the Imperial starship Pandora is on a mission to discover and explore new interstellar connection points. While on Venus, an unexpected guest arrives - Marvin, a rogue robot who puts his strange mind to work on reconnecting the rings into a new pattern. Everything goes haywire.

"They", published in 1905, is a somber short story that recalls a tragedy of Kipling's own life - the sudden death of his daughter, Josephine.

A stunning first novel that is an evocative reimagining of a World War II civilian disasterOn a March night in 1943, on the steps of a London Tube station, 173 people die in a crowd seeking shelter from what seemed to be another air raid. When the devastated neighborhood demands an inquiry, the job falls to magistrate Laurence Dunne. In this beautifully crafted novel, Jessica Francis Kane paints a vivid portrait of London at war. As Dunne investigates, he finds the truth to be precarious, even damaging.

What happens when a reactionary, retired British brigadier general comes to Los Angeles looking for his missing goddaughter? Comic chaos, that's what, with California beach babes, Jamaican drug gangs, and other colorful characters feuding, fighting, but not quite fornicating, in a mad search and rescue operation.

Love and Fatigue in America records an Englishman’s decade-long journey through his newly adopted country in the company of a mystifying illness and a charismatic dog. When he receives an unexpected invitation from an unfamiliar American university, he embraces it as a triumphant new beginning. Instead, on arrival, he is stricken with a persistent inability to stand up or think straight, and things quickly go wrong. Diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome he moves from state to state, woman to woman, and eccentric doctor to eccentric doctor.

In "The Problem of Thor Bridge", Neil Gibson, who has earned the nickname the Gold King for his status as the world's greatest gold-mining magnate, seeks Sherlock Holmes' help in finding his wife's real killer. His governess, Miss Dunbar, has been convicted of the crime due to an abundance of evidence against her - including a gun in her wardrobe - but Gibson believes her innocent. A few enlightening revelations, including the unhappy state of the Gibsons' marriage, lead Holmes and Watson down the path toward the truth.

In "The Adventure of theMazarin Stone", Dr. Watson arrives at 221B Baker Street to find his old friend and colleague keen on a case. Holmes has taken it upon himself to find the missing Crown diamond, the Mazarin stone, which has been stolen by swarthy big-game hunter Count Negretto Sylvius. When the count pays Holmes a visit, the brilliant detective must rely on his cleverness to learn the jewel's location and wrap up the case.

One winter's night in 1976, over 20 million people in Britain watched John Curry skate to Olympic glory on an ice rink in Austria. Many millions more watched around the world. Overnight he became one of the most famous men on the planet. He was awarded the OBE. He was chosen as BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Curry had changed ice skating from marginal sport to high art. And yet the man was - and would always remain - an absolute mystery to a world that had been dazzled by his gift.

In 1845, a disaster struck Ireland. Overnight, a mysterious blight attacked the potato crops, turning the potatoes black and destroying the only real food of nearly six million people. Over the next five years, the blight attacked again and again. These years are known today as the Great Irish Famine, a time when one million people died from starvation and disease and two million more fled their homeland.

The year is 2016. Not our 2016. Theirs. Earth is dying, the result of a worldwide nuclear holocaust caused by America’s dictatorial President-for-Life Lewis Henderson, a man who will use any means necessary to maintain power and survive. Enter: The Splitter. A machine capable of splitting off an exact replica of Henderson’s world. A world where the cataclysmic events causing its destruction have yet to occur. That world is ours.

When last the vampire Lestat was seen, he was rising from the dead in present-day New Orleans to walk again among Anne Rice's unforgettable undead. Now Lestat lives again but in a twilight world of music and memory. His charismatic friend Louis de Pointe du Lac is tortured by the memory of the child vampire, Claudia, whom he loved and lost. He calls on Merrick, a young and gorgeous mixed-race by-blow of the rich New Orleans Mayfair clan. To save Louis' sanity, Merrick must use her black witchcraft to call up the ghost of Claudia - however dangerous this may be.