Showing results by narrator "Nezar Alderazi" in All Categories

When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset. A couple's midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a McDonald's. A woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden. An insomniac wife wakes up in a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible - even death. In every one of these stories Murakami makes a determined assault on the normal.

A beautiful woman walking into Myron Bolitar's office asking for help should have been a dream come true. Only this woman, Suzze T, is in tears - and eight months pregnant.... Suzze's rock star husband has disappeared, and she fears the rumours questioning her baby's paternity have driven him away. For Myron, questions of fatherhood couldn't hit closer to home. His own father is clinging precariously to life, and the brother who abandoned the family years ago has resurfaced - with danger following close behind. 

Tycho of Rillisk has been a lot of things: son and brother, stablehand, prisoner, soldier and friend to the king. Now, four years after Grey took the throne of Emberfall, Tycho has taken on a new role: courier and spy. As the only person the king can trust, Tycho carries secret messages back and forth between the kingdoms of Emberfall and Syhl Shallow. But even though the war is over, peace still seems far away. 

One morning on the outskirts of Damascus, two starving friends were walking through their war-ravaged city. They entered a once familiar street that had now been turned to rubble - concrete bridges towered over them like tombs, and houses were turned inside out. One of them, Aeham, turned to the only comfort he had left - his piano - and composed a song of hope. It was a song that would reach beyond the rubble and bring a message of solidarity to his fellow Syrians and all those suffering the devastation of war. 

Myron is summoned to Paris at the behest of an old lover, Terese. She is in unspecified trouble and needs his help. When he gets there, he discovers that her husband has been murdered and she is the main suspect. The interesting thing is that more than one blood-type has been discovered at the scene - and the other blood can only be attributed to her daughter. But she died 10 years before. 

The two a.m. phone call is from a young, frightened, lost girl who has called the one adult who had promised to help her if she ever got into any trouble: Myron Bolitar. But his help proves not to be enough. He picks her up from a cold street corner and - against his better judgment - is persuaded to drop her at an unknown address. This is a mistake that he lives to regret, for Aimee Biel's final wave from a darkened porch turns out to be the last time anyone will see her.

In Lessons from a Warzone, Al Roumani shares his very personal account of coping with the day-to-day realities of leading an organisation in dangerous and hostile conditions. His story shows how inspiration can come from the unlikeliest of places - from the timeless wisdom of merchants in ancient souks to the changing patterns of military checkpoints. During that time, not only did the bank remain robust when others faltered - it thrived and became the undisputed leading bank as people's trust in its capability to safeguard their lifelong savings strengthened. 

Steinbeck's first posthumously published work, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights is a reinterpretation of tales from Malory's Morte d'Arthur. In this highly successful attempt to render Malory into Modern English, Steinbeck recreated the rhythm and tone of the original Middle English.

Sami’s childhood is much like any other - an innocent blend of family and school, of friends and relations and pets (including stray cats and dogs and the turtle he keeps on the roof). But growing up in one of the largest cities in Syria, with his country at war with itself, means that nothing is really normal. And Sami’s hopes for a better future are ripped away when he is conscripted into the military and forced to train as a map maker.

The last interstellar colony ship is down to its final batch of humans after the robots in charge unhelpfully deleted the rest. But rebooting a species and training them for the arduous task of colonisation isn't easy - especially when the planet below is filled with monsters, the humans are more interested in asking questions than learning and the robots are all programmed to kill each other.