Showing results by narrator "Peter Marinker" in All Categories

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. The shortlisted stories have all been chosen for this year's Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award - the world's richest and most prestigious prize for a single short story, dubbed the 'equivalent of the Man Booker for the short story' by the Sydney Morning Herald.

We are all storytellers - through stories, we make sense of our lives. But it is not enough to tell tales. There must be someone to listen. In his work as a psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz has spent the last 25 years uncovering the hidden feelings behind our most baffling behaviour. The Examined Life distils over 50,000 hours of conversation into pure psychological insight, without the jargon. This extraordinary book is about one ordinary process: talking, listening, and understanding.

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....

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.

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.

In Tree Wisdom, Vincent teaches us what a year of healing among the trees can look like. Each lesson mirrors the wondrous way our tall timber friends have learned to thrive through the seasons. Each lesson is simple in nature, a push of the pause button, a chance to re-centre on what matters. 

Why policies should be based on careful consideration of their costs and benefits rather than on intuition, popular opinion, interest groups and anecdotes. Opinions on government policies vary widely. Some people feel passionately about the child obesity epidemic and support government regulation of sugary drinks. Others argue that people should be able to eat and drink whatever they like. Some people are alarmed about climate change and favour aggressive government intervention. Others don't feel the need for any sort of climate regulation.

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. 

Arthur Miller's plays have held the world's stages for almost half a century. Among them are Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and All My Sons, which have been read and performed countless times across the world. His memoir, Timebends, shows that the life of the man is as compelling as his plays. With passion, wit and candour, Miller recalls his childhood in Harlem and Brooklyn in the 1920s and the Depression; his successes and failures in the theatre and in Hollywood; the formation of his political beliefs....

A young boy is hiding for his life having witnessed a murder. Thirty years later, that boy, Jack Renoir, is in the business of dicovering other people's secrets, yet keeping his own. Renoir is forced to confront the horrors of his past in order to ensure a future with the woman he loves.

The night before the March on Washington in 1963, Martin Luther King asked his aides for advice about the next day's speech. "Don't use the lines about 'I have a dream'," Wyatt Walker told him "It's trite, it's cliché. You've used it too many times already." Martin Luther King delivered at least 350 talks in 1963 alone. Countless speeches have been delivered on civil rights and, indeed, many others beside Martin Luther King's were delivered at the March on Washington. So what was it that made that particular speech historical? Why do we remember it?

Mesmerized and somewhat unnerved by his 97-year-old father's vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an original investigation of our flesh-and-blood existence, our mortal being. Weaving together personal anecdote, biological fact, philosophical doubt, cultural criticism, and the wisdom of an eclectic range of writers and thinkers - from Lucretius to Woody Allen - Shields expertly renders both a hilarious family portrait and a truly resonant meditation on mortality.

Reality Hunger is a manifesto for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists who, living in an unbearably artificial world, are breaking ever larger chunks of 'reality' into their work. The questions Shields explores - the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real - play out constantly around us, and Reality Hungeris a radical reframing of how we might think about this 'truthiness'.

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 birthday he comes into his inheritance. With a little help from an old teacher, he finds it equips him to broadcast over the internet.

Roderick Hudson is one of Henry James's first novels.

Originally published in 1875 as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly, it traces the development of the title character, a sculptor. Funded by the wealthy Rowland Mallet, Roderick Hudson travels from America to Rome, where he becomes the talk of the city. He soon finds that Europe tests him in ways he had not anticipated, both as an artist and as a man.

Though by profession a doctor (he coined the word anesthesia) Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) was one of the leading 19th century American poets and a member of the famous Saturday Club with Emerson, Longfellow, and Lowell. The 200th anniversary of his birth occurs in 2009. Here are his major poems, including "Old Ironsides" and "The Last Leaf" in a rare audiobook collection read by Peter Marinker.

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of the strange legal case of film star Peter Lorre, written and produced by Michael Butt and starring Stephen Greif. Originally broadcast as the ‘Afternoon Play’ on 10 May 2010.Towards the end of his unique career, movie star Peter Lorre found himself at the centre of an unusual legal case. Incorporating verbatim extracts from the court transcripts, Michael Butt's play wonders what was going through Lorre's troubled mind as he fought to protect his name and identity.

In the sequel to the "The Jesus-Video", the video has caused for some changes and it is a blessing and a curse for Stephen Foxx and Judith Menez. Meanwhile, a man named Samuel Barron is trying something else entirely. He wants to recreate the time travel and sends back his son and three companions. They are to bring back Jesus Christ to the present time. If they can bring back the Son of God, will that fulfil the prophesized return of Jesus and more importantly, will it cause the Apocalypse?

The fire that was to change so many lives started with a single shaft of lightning. It struck on a still and moonless night and cocooned for a while in the heart of an ancient pine. The woman camped nearby with her group of troubled teenagers slept on, hearing nothing. But one among them would be lost forever. For soon the pupa of fire would hatch and engulf the entire mountain. Into this inferno will come the Smoke Jumper.

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.