Showing results by narrator "Peter Marinker" in All Categories

Brought to you by Penguin. **SUNDAY TIMES BESTELLER** This book is about learning to live. Echoing Socrates' statement that the unexamined life not worth living, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz draws on his twenty-five years of work and more than 50,000 hours of conversations to form a collection of...

Diverse and moving, these six outstanding stories are meditations on grief and loss, love, communication and loneliness. Each one will take the reader on a brief yet unforgettable journey into private worlds and unexpected corners of the human heart.

Heavy snow falls on San Piedro and impedes the progress of Kabuo Miyomoto's trial. Hatsue, Kabuo's wife and Ishmael, a journalist on the case, find themselves reckoning with the past and their lost love.

Two novels by the award-winning Canadian writer Carol Shields, dramatised for BBC Radio Carol Shields was one of Canada’s most renowned contemporary authors. Often compared to Jane Austen, her deft, witty and compassionate works depicting the everyday lives of ordinary people won her numerous...

Fifteen years ago, Susan Morrow left her first husband Edward Sheffield. One day, comfortable in her home and her second marriage, she receives--entirely out of the blue - a parcel containing the manuscript of her ex-husband's first novel. He writes asking her to read the book; she was always his best critic, he says. As Susan reads, she is drawn into the fictional life of Tony Hastings, a maths professor driving his family to their summer house in Maine. And as we read along with her, so are we....

The world is never done catching up with Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the author of Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and other classics. A prophet of environmentalism and vegetarianism, an abolitionist, and a critic of materialism and technology, Thoreau even seems to have anticipated a world of social distancing in his famous experiment at Walden Pond. In Now Comes Good Sailing, 27 of today’s leading writers offer wide-ranging original pieces exploring how Thoreau has influenced and inspired them.

Full-cast adaptations of four works by Nathaniel Hawthorne Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts. A descendant of judge John Hathorne, who oversaw the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, he wrote several works inspired by Puritan New England, with themes of guilt, sin and retribution...

These four works show Samuel Beckett at his most penetrating. Both Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Not I (1972) are among the most striking pieces written for the theatre in the 20th century. An old man sits at a table, playing back old tapes made when he was younger, mixed glimpses of past feelings. In Not I, we have just a mouth expressing memories and torment in a torrent of words.

A quirky BBC Radio 4 comedy by Ben Lewis about a teenager who becomes an internet phenomenon. Originally broadcast as the ‘Afternoon Play’ on 17 September 2010. This is the story of a legend in the making. A nervous young man lives at the dead end of a dead-end town. On his eighteenth...

A mysterious man appears aboard the Titanic on its doomed voyage. His mission? To save the ship. The result? A world where the United States never entered World War I, thus launching the secret history of the 20th century. In April 2012 Joseph Kennedy, nephew of John F. Kennedy, lives in an America occupied in the East by Greater Germany and on the West Coast by Imperial Japan. He is one of six people who can restore history to its rightful order - even though it would mean his death and the deaths of everyone he loves.

It is 1865: the American Civil War is ending. Eliza Duane Mulvey sets out from Lafayette, Louisiana, the town her mother Mary Duane called home. Alone, she walks across a devastated country in search of a youngster she has not seen in four years. One of the hundred thousand children drawn into the war, his fate has been mysterious and will prove extraordinary.

Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of Native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native peoples and white colonisers. Through these layers of conflict Cooper threads a thrilling narrative, in which Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of a British commander on the front line of the colonial war, attempt to join their father.

Alexander Litvinenko: Mr Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian living in London, was poisoned by Polonium-210, traced by alpha detectors to a British Airways flight from Moscow to Heathrow. A Champions League match between Arsenal and CKSA Moscow had brought thousands of Russian fans to London. Was one of them responsible for Litvinenko's death?

"To inherit a great fortune. To inherit a great misfortune." These words, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's notebook, neatly encapsulate the theme of The House of the Seven Gables - that of a family whose fortunes are poisoned by its past misdeeds.

In Paris' Pre-Lachaise cemetery, Jim Morrison's graffiti-scrawled tombstone is a place of pilgrimage for local devotees, adolescent hedonists, and wayward backpackers alike. Found dead in his bathtub aged only 27, having achieved worldwide stardom as lead singer of The Doors, Morrison was quickly immortalized amongt the rock and roll deities such as Hendrix and Joplin. In death, however, this debauched "rock poet" remained more stubbornly enigmatic than ever.

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Why was it so important these documents should not be seen? What ancient historical secret was so big that it had to be buried forever? Freemasons: Is this group of seemingly innocuous middle-aged men linked to almost every evil perpetuated? Are they really just an eccentric bunch of patriarchal do-gooders, or are they in fact sinister agents of satanic forces? The Gunpowder Plot: Why is it that we reserve particular scorn for Guy Fawkes when there were six other men involved?

A superb collection of dramas guaranteed to thrill and entertain from best-selling author Peter Ackroyd. Set in the heart of London, these star-studded adaptations feature parallel investigations into killings across two centuries, black magic, haunted houses, holy ghosts and a stunning performance by Simon Callow as the magnificent Charles Dickens. Novelist, biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd has cemented his place at the heart of the culture and history of London. This fantastic collection is full of vitality from a world-class author and stellar cast.

The different ways that social change happens, from unleashing to nudging to social cascades. How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely kept out of mainstream discourse; now there is no shortage of media outlets for them. In this book, with the help of behavioral economics, psychology and other fields, Cass Sunstein casts a bright new light on how change happens.

For years legendary broadcaster Alistair Cooke brought America to the rest of the world with incomparable wit and wisdom. This is his classic "personal history" of America, guiding us through centuries of changing life in the USA. Beginning with his own arrival in America as a graduate in the...

The Phantom of the Opera goes to New York. Forsyth picks up the story following the phantom's escape to the New World, where he begins his new and secret life in a place where he carves out a kingdom of fortune and power. He builds the most glittering opera house in the world, a place to lure Christine.