Showing results by narrator "David Rintoul" in All Categories

When Emily and Jess Volnik's family inherits a remote, crumbling Scottish castle, they also inherit the Boggart - an invisible, mischievous spirit who's been playing tricks on residents of Castle Keep for generations. Then the Boggart is trapped in a rolltop desk and inadvertently shipped to the Volniks' home in Toronto, where nothing will ever be the same - for the Volniks or the Boggart. In a world that doesn't believe in magic, the Boggart's pranks wreak havoc. And even the newfound joys of peanut butter and pizza and fudge sauce eventually wear thin for the Boggart. He wants to go home....

Join Joanne Harris on a beautiful journey through her gloriously reimagined take on traditional British folktales. Drawing inspiration from The Child Ballads, this collection brings together her award-winning novellas A Pocketful of Crows, The Blue Salt Road and Orfeia. Published in one beautiful volume for the first time, this collection also includes a brand new introduction by Joanne Harris, and three original short stories.

Paris, 1939: The pavement rumbles with the footfalls of Nazi soldiers marching along the Champs Elysees. A young writer, recently arrived from Ireland to make his mark, smokes one last cigarette with his lover before the city they know is torn apart. Soon he will put his own life and the lives of his loved ones in mortal danger by joining the Resistance....

In 1941, when she was turned into an armed merchant cruiser, the SS Benbecula was already old. Yet even she was needed to protect the vital Atlantic sea lanes. Commander Lindsay, her new captain, had to work desperately to mould the ship’s company - raw recruits and old-timers - into a fighting force. And better than anyone, Lindsay knew this could be his last command, his last chance.

Commissaire Adamsberg leaves Paris for a three-day conference in London. Accompanying him are Estalere, a young sergeant, and Commandant Danglard, who is terrified at the idea of travelling beneath the Channel. It is a welcome change of scenery, until a macabre and brutal case comes to the attention of their colleague Radstock from New Scotland Yard.Just outside the gates of the baroque Highgate Cemetery a pile of shoes is found. Not so strange in itself, but the shoes contain severed feet.

Here are three important but very different Dialogues from the Middle Period. Symposium, the most well-known in this collection, is concerned with the theme of love. In the house of Agathon, a group of friends - each very different in personality and background - meet to consider and discuss various kinds of love. Each one, Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes (the playwright) and Agathon (a prize-winning tragic poet), presents his particular view in a short discourse.

Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.

Returning to Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, Fritz Bauer – a gay Jewish lawyer and outspoken critic of Hitler – was determined to reclaim the Germany he had once loved. But he soon saw that the perpetrators of the Holocaust had largely got away with their crimes. Top Nazi officers – mass-murders and cruel sadists – had been given plum jobs at major German companies; held prestigious offices in top universities; were in positions of power as lawyers, judges and political advisors.

From the author of The First to Land, a novel set during World War II. They called them the Scrapyard Flotilla. After a quarter of a century of service, the eight destroyers had seen all kinds of action. Now they were to be used in raids to open the way for the invasion of Occupied Europe.

Book Two in Herbert’s classic ‘rats’ series.They've waited long enough.The mutant white rats had grown and mated, creating offspring in its own image. They dominated the others, the dark-furred ones, who foraged for food and brought it back to the lair. Now the dark rats were restless, tormented by a craving they could not satisfy. But the white sluglike thing that ruled them knew. Its two heads weaved to and fro and a stickiness drooled from its mouth as it remembered the taste of human flesh.

The Russian Classics Collection is a wide-ranging collection of 12 classic novels and short stories by Russian authors, read by an award-winning cast of narrators. Included here are stories by some of the greatest writers of all time, including Tolstoy; Dostoyevsky; Chekhov; Gogol; Turgenev; and more.

Alexander McCall Smith returns once again to his favourite fictitious house, set in a real street in Edinburgh. First published in 110 episodes in The Scotsman newspaper, this is vintage McCall Smith, tackling issues of trust and honesty, snobbery and hypocrisy, love and loss, but all with great lightness of touch.

Alistair Urquhart was a soldier in the Gordon Highlanders captured by the Japanese in Singapore. He not only survived working on the notorious Bridge on the River Kwai, but he was subsequently taken on one of the Japanese 'hellships' which was torpedoed. Nearly everyone else on board died and Urquhart spent 5 days alone on a raft in the South China Sea before being rescued by a whaling ship. He was taken to Japan and then forced to work in a mine near Nagasaki. Two months later a nuclear bomb dropped just ten miles away . . .

The Radetzky March is a meditation on the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the prism of three generations of the Trotta family. The novel opens in 1859 at the Battle of Solferino, when the young Lieutenant Trotta saves the life of the Emperor and is ennobled. He owes the Empire everything, and his son also becomes a conscientious servant of the great multinational state even as it enters into its period of chaos, with competing nationalisms and ideologies tearing it apart.

HMS Wagtail is a river gunboat, a ship seemingly at the end of her unusual life, lying in a Hong Kong dockyard awaiting her last summons to the breakers' yard. Commander Justin Rolfe is also seemingly at the end of his useful naval life, an embittered man, brooding and angry from a court-martial verdict. Then the offshore island of Santu is threatened with invasion from the Chinese mainland.

When the naive David Balfour sets out on his quest for a long-lost relative, a terrifying chain of events is set in motion. He is plunged into a world of infamy and violence from which there seems no escape - until, that is, he meets the enigmatic and valiant Highlander, Alan Breck....

The Consolation of Philosophy is one of the key works in the rich tradition of Western philosophy, partly because of the circumstances in which it was written. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c480-c524) was of aristocratic Roman birth and became consul and then master of offices at Ravenna, one of the highest posts under the Ostrogothic Roman ruler Theodoric. But Boethius was unjustly charged with treason in 524, and this led to house arrest, then torture and execution.

Nathaniel Starbuck is a rebel, a young Yankee fighting for the South against the North in the American Civil War. It is the summer of 1861 when Nate arrives in Richmond, Virginia, suddenly to be rescued from a lynch mob by Washington Faulconer, who is raising his own Legion in the interests of the Confederacy.

The Republic is perhaps the single most important, the most studied and the most quoted text of all of Plato's Socratic Dialogues. Through the medium of Socrates, Plato outlines his view and ideas concerning the ideal working of the city-state. Socrates narrates a conversation that took place the previous day with Cephalus, Glaucon, Thrasymachus and others. The dialogue is organised into 10 books and covers a broad range of topics, including the ideal community and the ideal rulers of the community.

In The Undiscovered Self Jung explains the essence of his teaching for an audience unfamiliar with his ideas. He highlights the importance of individual responsibility and freedom in the context of today's mass society and argues that individuals must organise themselves as effectively as the organized mass if they are to resist joining it.