Showing results by narrator "Patience Tomlinson" in All Categories

Homeless Bodies and Other Stories is an original fiction podcast featuring audio-exclusive short stories from award-winning authors and Sunday Times best-sellers, inspired by objects & artefacts from Wellcome Collection’s permanent exhibition, 'Medicine Man', in London. Exploring themes of otherness, humanity, history, society and belief, Homeless Bodies and Other Stories brings together a gripping collection of tales that are unsettlingly eerie and provokingly current.

Seven-year-old Jocelyn Holt loves her nanny Hannah more than her own mother. When Hannah disappears one summer night, Jo never gets over the loss. Thirty years on, now a young widow with a daughter of her own, Jo is forced to return to her family home, and the mother she’s always despised, just as a skull is pulled out of the lake in the grounds. Could this explain her beloved nanny’s disappearance? What other secrets will that lake give up to the police?

When someone hacks into the systems of eight self-drive cars, their passengers are set on a fatal collision course. The passengers are: a TV star, a pregnant young woman, a disabled war hero, an abused wife fleeing her husband, an illegal immigrant, a husband and wife - and parents of two - who are travelling in separate vehicles and a suicidal man. Now the public have to judge who should survive, but are the passengers all that they first seem?

A S Byatt's fairy tales and fables are among the best-loved features of her fiction. Innumerable listeners have asked for the two marvellous fairy tales in Possession - 'The Glass Coffin' and 'Gode's Tale' of the Breton Naie des Trepasses - to be published separately. Here they take their place with three other stories with medieval and oriental settings. 

The Dhammapada, a collection of 423 verses in 26 chapters, is perhaps the most famous of all Buddhist texts. It presents the Buddha’s teachings in a clear and highly accessible form and has been used for personal instruction and teaching for centuries throughout the Buddhist world. It comes from the Khuddaka Nikaya section of the Pali Canon and is here collected with two other key texts from the same source.

In The Genius of Birds, acclaimed author Jennifer Ackerman explores the newly discovered brilliance of birds and how it came about. Consider, as Ackerman does, the Clark's nutcracker, a bird that can hide as many as 30,000 seeds over dozens of square miles and remember where it put them several months later; the mockingbirds and thrashers, species that can store 200 to 2,000 different songs in a brain a thousand times smaller than ours; and the well-known pigeon, which knows where it's going, even thousands of miles from familiar territory.

Born in Prague to a Jewish family in 1929, Dita Kraus has lived through the most turbulent decades of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Here, Dita writes with startling clarity on the horrors and joys of a life delayed by the Holocaust. From her earliest memories and childhood friendships in Prague before the war, to the Nazi occupation that saw her and her family sent to the Jewish ghetto at Terezín, to the unimaginable fear and bravery of her imprisonment in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and life after liberation. 

The world of running is completely alien to Libby Sarjeant and her friend Fran Wolfe, but when Libby’s son Adam and Fran’s stepdaughter Sophie join the Nethergate Harriers, they have to take an interest. And when one of the runners goes missing in the middle of the Nethergate 5K, they take more than an interest! It’s not long before a body is found - and Libby and Fran are caught up in another investigation.... 

Max Tobin brings his all-male dance company to Steeple Martin, with his new ballet, Pendle, based on the infamous Pendle Witch Trials, due to be performed at the Oast Theatre. There have been unpleasant incidents during rehearsals in London, and Max asks Libby Sarjeant and her friend Fran Wolfe to look into them. To everyone’s surprise, the incidents continue at the Oast, and their seriousness escalates until, inevitably, someone is murdered. While the police look into the murder, Libby and Fran wonder why someone seemed so set against the ballet. 

Libby Sarjeant and friends are taking a well-earned holiday at a village on the Turkish coast – but despite their best intentions it seems that murder has even followed them there. When out on a boat trip they discover a body, but at first it has nothing to do with them, for once...until they find out that the deceased was English – and so are the suspects.  

In 2017 Susie Kennaway asked her son Guy to kill her. 88 years old, with an older and infirm husband, Susie wanted to avoid sliding into infantilised catatonia. Her son immediately started taking notes and Time to Go is the result. In turns a manual for those considering the benefits of assisted dying, a portrait of a mother - son relationship, and a sympathetic description of old age, this audiobook is a route map through the moral, legal, emotional, intellectual and practical maze that is the biggest issue facing the senior generations today: leaving life on their own terms. 

For many of those who lived through it, the Second World War was the most exciting, dynamic, and frightening time of their lives. This wonderful collection of contemporary letters tells their stories, from the battlefields of Europe to the bombed out back streets of London, from the conflict in the skies to the hardships of the home front.

In the spring of 1939, with the Second World War looming, two determined 24-year-olds, Heather Jenner and Mary Oliver, decided to open a marriage bureau. They found a tiny office on London's Bond Street and set about the delicate business of matchmaking. Drawing on the bureau's extensive archives, Penrose Halson - who, many years later, found herself the proprietor of the bureau - tells their story and the stories of their clients. We meet a remarkable cross section of British society in the 1940s.

Orphaned at a young age, Melody Craven grew up depending on the charity of kindly relatives, so she had to be reconciled to being treated as second best to her dainty pretty cousin, Mary. But when both girls fell in love with the same handsome young officer, Roger Hallet, briefly on leave in England from serving in the British army in 19th-century India, it looked as though the girls' friendship might be ruined by the rivalry.

It was insupportable! Just because she couldn't prove her father had died in Africa and so couldn't claim her inheritance, was no reason to put her virtue at risk from her employer's nephew! But due to a series of mishaps making her escape, Miss Corisande Clifford found herself walking to Bath, only to be nearly mown down by Marc, the wild Marquis of Dene!

In 1944 Tom Wainwright, a British soldier, arrives in the small Italian town of Petriano. He forges a friendship with the Parini family - and in particular with the eldest daughter, Giuliana. When the war ends he chooses to stay in Italy, planning to build a life with the woman he loves, but his hopes are dashed.

Velma is charm itself, especially when she's being inexact with the truth. Now she wants Bea, widowed owner of the Abbot Agency, to check up on her stepson Philip - he's somehow acquired a valuable picture last seen in the flat of an elderly lady who's been murdered. Maggie, Bea's assistant, moves into a flat in Philip's building, to investigate. However, Rafael a professional art thief who aims never to leave his victims alive, is also after the picture.

Melissa's life is in disarray. There are cracks in her marriage, and her mother, Elizabeth, is losing her memory. Elizabeth presents her daughter with a gift that suggests a very secret history - one that leads Melissa to Kalami, where Julian Adie, poet, traveller and novelist, once lived. But what is the connection between the hedonistic Adie and Melissa's mother? As Melissa chases Adie's shadow across the places he loved, she finds her mother may not have been the person she thought.

Floundering in the footsteps of a deliberately downplayed police enquiry, Libby manages to stir up more mud than the rotavator. When television personality Lewis Osbourne-Walker buys Creekmarsh Place, near Steeple Martin in Kent, Libby Sarjeant's son Adam is employed to help with the renovation of the garden. What he doesn't expect is to uncover a long buried skeleton.

A member of a local ukulele group is found dead in Steeple Martin's churchyard. Libby's first reaction is relief that the victim isn't anyone she knows. She and the usual suspects have other things to occupy them, as they are gearing up for a Christmas concert and pantomime in the Oast Theatre, but when Libby's cousin gets romantically involved with a man in whom the police are taking an interest, she can't help asking a few questions - and getting into trouble....