Showing results by narrator "Anna Bentinck" in All Categories

In 1945, two brothers die in the icy Barents Sea and a book is all that survives of them. More than 60 years later, Donny and his mother set out for Suffolk to meet his mysterious great aunt. There is an accident and Donny is taken into care. But are the officials all that they seem and why won't they believe Donny's story? Soon he discovers that his life has been built on a lie.

Anna's family hope that a South African safari holiday will help her to get over her beloved husband's death. No one is more surprised than Anna herself when she finds herself strongly attracted to a fellow traveller, Lewis Masters, and despite her initial resistance, she is soon drawn into a new relationship. But back home, Anna's journalist son Jonathan is being repeatedly contacted by a young woman asking for his help, even though she's too frightened to say what is worrying her....

Our Island Story by H. E. Marshall is an Edwardian history book for younger listeners (age six to 12) which tells the story of England, concluding with the reign of Queen Victoria. Antonia Fraser and many other current historians declare that it was this book that opened the delights of history for them. It fell from fashion in the 1960s, but its recent re-release in hardback has seen it become a publishing surprise in the UK, with sales of some 75,000 copies in a few months.

Winner of the Académie Française award 2010. "In a house on a suburban street in Nagasaki, meteorologist Shimura Kobo lives quietly on his own. Or so he believes. Food begins to go missing. Perturbed by this threat to his orderly life, Shimura sets up a webcam to monitor his home. But though eager to identify his intruder, is Shimura really prepared for what the camera will reveal? This prize-winning novel is a heart-rending tale of alienation in the modern world.

In Book Three of Holly Webb's The Mysteries of Maisie Hitchins, 12-year-old Maisie and her dog Eddie are invited to join Maisie's friend Alice on a trip to the country. It's lovely to get away from the London smog, but there is something strange about the manor where the girls are staying. Odd noises, horrid smells, and sightings of a spectral cat keep them up at night. Has Alice's father rented a haunted house? There must be a logical explanation, and Maisie plans to use her detecting skills to find out what it is!

Inspired by the lost voices of the Romany Holocaust, this heartbreaking and tender novel will appeal to readers who loved Sophie's Choice, Schindler's Ark, and The Book Thief. "Remarkable - brave, big-hearted and beautifully written" (Andrew Miller, author of the Costa Award-winner PURE) Austria, 1944. Jakob, a gypsy boy - half Roma, halif Yenish - runs, as he has been told to do. With shoes of sackcloth, still stained with another's blood, a stone clutched in one hand, a small wooden box in the other.

This is the story of the Hasting family - their secrets, their loves and losses, dreams and heartbreaks - captured in a seamless series of individual moments that span the years between the first World War and the present.

The novel opens in 1914 as William, a young factory worker, spends one last evening at home before his departure for the navy.… His son Billy, grows into a champion cyclist and will ride into the D-Day landings on a military bicycle.… His son in turn, Will, struggles with a debilitating handicap to become an Oxford professor in the 1960s.

Soho in the 1980s is electric. For Eliza, the heady pull of its nightclubs and free-spirited people leads her into the life she has craved - all glamour, late nights and excitement. But it comes at a heavy cost. Cassie is fascinated by her family's history and the abandoned Beaufont Hall. Why won't her mother talk about it? Offered the chance to restore Beaufont to its former glory, Cassie jumps at the opportunity to learn more about her past. Separated by a generation but linked by a forgotten diary, these two women have more in common than they know....

There is far more to Switzerland than beautiful scenery, chocolate, watches, faceless bankers, and spotless cities. The real Switzerland is full of surprises and anything but bland. This small, rugged, landlocked country at the heart of Europe has been a confederation since the first three cantons came together in a defensive alliance in 1291. Four national languages are spoken within its borders. Its present 26 cantons are largely autonomous and retain their individual characters.

Recently divorced, Jay Morton returns to her hometown and secures a job helping to set up a museum at the sinister-looking Pendle House, now derelict and overgrown. While searching for artefacts in the attics, Jay stumbles across some extraordinary original masks and is intrigued by their malevolent and threatening eyes…Those very eyes haunt Donna in her nightmares

Having given up a high-powered job, Tessa Hainsworth had no idea how hard she would struggle when she fulfils her dream of moving to Cornwall. Within months, she is almost ready to return to London: the family is running out of money – fast. But a chance encounter in the local post office leads her to accept the unlikeliest of job offers – as a postwoman.

Perhaps England's greatest literary family. To find one brilliant novelist in a family is extremely rare. But two? Three?

The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily Jane and Anne, together with their brother Patrick, are famed throughout the world. And amongst their many talents was poetry. Of course, being Brontë's, they were rather good at that too.

Puglia, 1921. Leandro Cardetta, born into poverty, emigrated to America to make his fortune and has returned home to southern Italy a rich man, accompanied by his glamorous wife, Marcie, an ex-showgirl fighting middle age. Now Leandro has money enough to hire renowned English architect, Boyd Kinsgley, to renovate a crumbling palazzo into an Art Deco statement of wealth, and host Boyd's teenage son and his diffident young second wife, Clare, for one extraordinary summer.

Gateshead, April 1866. The Apprentice of Split Crow Lane takes the forgotten case of a child murder in 1866 as a springboard to delve deeply into the pysche of the Victorians. What Jane Housham finds in this exploration of guilt, sexual deviance and madness is a diagnosis that is still ripe for the challenging and a sentence that provokes even our liberal modern judgment.

In this fourth mystery about 12-year-old Maisie, the young detective must solve a crime for her friend, Professor Tobin. The professor travelled all over the world collecting strange and wonderful objects, and the British Museum is opening a special room to house his collection. But before the professor's donation, a thief steals a valuable Amazonian tribal mask! With just a single feather left behind, Maisie doesn't have much to go on, but the stakes in her newest case are higher than ever.

Stella Darnell is a cleaner. But when she isn't tackling dust and dirt and restoring order to chaos, Stella solves murders. Her latest case concerns a man convicted of killing his mistress. His daughter thinks he's innocent, and needs Stella to prove it. As Stella sifts through piles of evidence and interview suspects, she discovers a link between the recent murder and a famous case from forty years ago: the shocking death of six-year-old Sarah Ferris, killed in the shadows of an empty playground. Stella knows that dredging up the past can be dangerous.

As night falls, 17-year-old Cassie Baker leaves Winchcome and takes her usual shortcut down a moonlit country lane. She never makes it home. With no body and no evidence, she's just another teenage runaway.

London, June 1940. When the body of silent screen star Mabel Morgan is found impaled on railings, the coroner rules her death as suicide, but DI Ted Stratton of CID is not convinced. As he starts asking questions, it becomes clear that Morgan's fatal fall may have been the work of one of Soho's most notorious gangsters. When Stratton's path crosses with MI5 agent Diana Calthrop, they uncover a criminal network and a secretive pro-Fascist organisation.

Adrian Mole is an adult. At least that's what it says on his passport. But living at home, clinging to his threadbare cuddly rabbit 'Pinky', working as a paper pusher for the DoE and pining for the love of his life, Pandora, has proved to him that adulthood isn't quite what he expected.

This collection of Culture Smart guidebooks introduces listeners to China, Japan, and India. Each guidebook includes concise chapters on the local customs, traditions, and values of the country's inhabitants and, crucially, the key historical and cultural events that have shaped them. There are sections on social and business etiquette, tips on communication, both verbal and non-verbal, and advice on how to be a good guest.