Showing results by narrator "Toby Webster" in All Categories

Whakapapa is a Maori idea which embodies our universal human need to belong. It represents a powerful spiritual belief—that each of us is part of an unbroken and unbreakable chain of people who share a sacred identity. Owen places this concept at the core of his methods to maximise a team's performance.

One night in December, twenty-two year old Ted Green makes his way to Waterloo Bridge determined to end his life. Lonely, despairing and utterly hopeless, it seems the only choice to make. That same night in December, Marianne Cooper is running away from a party. Having found her boyfriend in a passionate clinch with someone else, Marianne can’t get away fast enough. But as she makes her way along London’s South Bank, a figure catches her eye on top of the bridge. Then she sees him, a man ready to jump.

Most famous for his Hornblower series, iconic writer C. S. Forester tells tales of adventure like no other. This BBC radio collection features modern adaptations of five of his acclaimed novels, including The African Queen (famously adapted as an Oscar-winning film starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn) and The Gun, which was turned into the hit Hollywood movie The Pride and the Passion.

The hour is late. The candle is low. Tomorrow I will see whether it is my friends or a ship homewards I meet. But I must finish my story for you first. My future, my descendant, my mokopuna. So begins the tale of James Pōneke - orphaned son of a chief, ardent student of English, wide-eyed survivor. All the world’s a show when you’re a living exhibit. But anything can happen to a young New Zealander - a boy between worlds, having lost his family and tribe - on the savage streets of Victorian London.

Max Grimes is homeless, living on the streets of Auckland – among the forgotten, the invisible. But now someone is hunting the homeless, killing them one by one. Trying to put his shattered life back together, Max is pulled into a deadly game when a face from his past reappears, reopening wounds he thought were long buried. As whispers of a Grim Reaper spread terror through the city, Max must race against time – not only to find the killer, but to outrun the ghosts chasing him. Because if he fails, he'll be next.

After graduating university, four friends - Peter, Avery, James, and Isaac - spent a golden summer working in a vineyard. Years later, Peter is brutally murdered in Martinborough. Meanwhile, north of Auckland, the long, hot summer is over and the tourists have left Matakana wine country. A tranquil atmosphere descends, and warm autumnal winds sweep across the valleys. With the harvest due, grapes sit bursting upon the manicured vines, awaiting the pick. Then a severed hand is discovered under Avery's house.

Freelance journalist Claire Wright is offered a commission, with the kind of fee that would mean financial security for both herself and her daughter Annie. But the job is to write the story of serial sex offender Travis Crill, presently serving his term in prison. Entering Crill's world forces Claire into a winding labyrinth of ruthless pursuit and brutal secrets. Can she endure the revelations of the harm he has done to his victims?

On June 22, 1954, in the depth of a southern winter, teenage friends Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker went for a walk in a park with Pauline's mother. Half an hour later the girls returned alone. Honorah Parker lay in a sea of blood on a lonely track. She had been savagely murdered. In this mesmerizing audiobook, lawyer and true-crime writer Peter Graham tells the whole story for the first time, giving a brilliant account of the murder and ensuing trial, dramatic revelations about the fates of Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker after their release from prison and their strange lives today.

Nothing in Stan Andino's regular and uneventful existence has prepared him for the moment he discovers his wife naked, except for a black apron, bleaching the lounge carpet with a sponge. A CT scan one week later explains it: Carmen has a brain tumour. As Stan and his teenage sons grapple with the diagnosis and frightening personality changes in their wife and mother, family friends Austin and Tibbie Lamb do everything possible to assist the Andinos. Then Tibbie's body is discovered at the bottom of Browns Bay cliffs. DS Ramesh Bandara and his partner are assigned to the case.

Samira is an up-and-coming TV journalist, working the nightshift at a major news channel and yearning for greater things. So when she’s offered a trip to the Middle East, with Kris, the station’s brilliant but impetuous star photographer, she leaps at the chance. In the field together, Sami and Kris feel invincible, shining a light into the darkest of corners…except the newsroom, and the rest of the world, doesn’t seem to care as much as they do. Until Kris takes the photograph.

Anna and Will have been passing in and out of each other’s lives since they were just teenagers. Now 20 years later, Anna is married—she has a lovely house, a step daughter in university and a husband with a good job. What she doesn’t have is joy. When she runs into Will it sparks something in her, a longing for the Anna she used to be. Together they embark on a journey to find what brings them joy, to discard what doesn’t and to become the people they always wanted to be.

When twenty-one-year-old builder Joe Wright meets Leo, he falls in love hard, and seemingly for ever. Mature, philosophical and intensely handsome, Leo teaches Joe an appreciation of music and literature, and, most importantly, a passion for the beautiful old buildings that are disappearing from Auckland's central city. But when Leo suddenly vanishes from his life, then drifts back again years later, Joe—now a powerful developer of heritage architecture—is unable to move on from this first affair.

Pio Morgan is waiting outside a pub on a cold winter's night. There is a debt he must pay and no options left. What he does next drags a group of strangers into a web of confusion that over the course of a few days changes all their lives. There's the young Maori widow just trying to raise her children, the corporate executive hiding his mistake, the gang of criminals that will do whatever it takes to recover what they've lost and the outsider sent to town to try and figure out who did what. Time is running out for all of them as events take an increasingly sinister turn.

**Shortlisted for the 2021 Ned Kelly Award for True Crime** Shocking real-life stories of murderous women who used rat poison to rid themselves of husbands and other inconvenient family members. For readers of compelling history and true crime, from critically acclaimed, award-winning author...

Edwina is an old-school battler. Her life revolves around the church and her job unpacking vegetables early in the morning, while around her a new generation turns Ponsonby into a trendy, uber-chic suburb. It is a chance win in a church raffle - a gym membership - that changes her life. She meets different people; makes a new young friend named Rose and transforms herself: a metamorphosis, Rose calls it.

Worn down by a job he hates and a stressful family life, middle-aged, middle-class Bradley picks up a teenage escort and commits an unspeakable crime. Now she's tied up in his warehouse and he doesn't know what to do. Max is homeless, sleeping rough and barely existing - known for cadging a cigarette from anyone passing and occasionally even the footpath. Nobody really sees Max - but he has one friend, and she's gone missing. In order to find her, Max is going to have to call on some people from his past and reopen wounds that have remained unhealed for a very long time.

Jimmy Kokupe is a miracle: he's been cured. But he still carries the stigma, which makes life back on the mainland dangerous and lonely. To find a refuge, he's returned to the camp to care for his friend, fellow patient old Will, and disturbed young Charley. Healed of his physical ailments and dreaming of the girl he once planned to follow to a new life in Australia, Jimmy meets 'the lady', the island caretaker's beautiful but troubled wife who brings their food.

In an unspecified time and location, an unnamed boy is living what he feels to be an idyllic life in the faded and peeling lido where his father is a lifeguard. He idolises his father - never more so than when he saves the life of a suicidal man. The arrest of his sister Lilly later that summer brings the halcyon days to an abrupt end, however, and his family is torn apart, with Lilly sent to jail and the boy sent to a boardinghouse for dysfunctional boys: The Fell.

It's a story that began in a rickety old home on a cold June morning in 1994, where five members of a seemingly ordinary New Zealand family were gunned down. There were two suspects. One lay dead from a single bullet to the head. The other was the only survivor: David Bain. Since then, the country has asked: Who killed the Bain family? David, or his father Robin? And why?

Mr. Royston is driving his hansom through the night-time streets of Melbourne when he is hailed by a man supporting a slumped, intoxicated figure and requesting that the cabman take the unfortunate fellow home - before proceeding to drop his burden and make a rapid exit.