Caribbean Life

As the founder of Island Records, fabled music producer Chris Blackwell has discovered and worked with some of the most important musicians of the second half of the twentieth century—from Steve Winwood to Cat Stevens, Bob Marley to Grace Jones, U2 to Roxy Music, plus countless others. He is also widely credited with having brought reggae music to the world stage. Now, as he turns eighty-five, Blackwell takes us back to the island where it all began: Jamaica.

Eighteen-year-old Salomon Destin graduates high school and anxiously trades life on Guadeloupe in the Caribbean for France to continue his studies. Strasbourg is his new home. He’s carving out a promising new path for himself. And most of all, he’s left behind the disorder of so much family drama, including that of a dissolute father, a mother who turns a blind eye to the chaos, his troubled and aimless brother Junior, and Salomon’s inherited obligations as peacekeeper.

The opening story in this collection follows Vinny, Kevin, and a mourning family from Liverpool on a journey to Wales. What should be a simple trip turns into something much darker. A cross between Roddy Doyle and Ken Follett, this political storytelling meets you wherever you are on life’s journey, and stays with you.

The Observer newspaper once wrote of Dudley Pope that he was ‘an author who really knows Nelson's navy’, whilst the Guardian maintained he had an 'expert knowledge of naval history'. Imagine, therefore, his heightened emotions and sense of history as he sailed his yacht past Cape Trafalgar one moonlit night. Moreover, standing beside him was his wife Kay; friend, constant companion and much loved, whose support and encouragement he relied upon. Dudley Pope later encapsulated the moment in a doubly romantic dedication in his book Ramage’s Challenge, the fourteenth in the acclaimed ...

Beyond Soul is a collection of late 20th century poems and short stories deeply influenced by societal observations, spirituality, and nature. The audiobook depicts a stream of consciousness connected by the view points of animate and inanimate narrators, discussing the matters of life and transitioning.

I woke up one day and my wife was furious with me. She said that she had had a bad dream, that I had left her in Venezuela. We’d never even been to Venezuela. This short story is based on her dream. The suspense will keep you on the edge of your seat. Stanley and Jane loved the beach, and travelling. That is until Stanley could not find his wife, Jane, in a foreign country, Venezuela. Hilarious.

A Stanley y Jane les encantaba la playa y viajar. Eso fue hasta que Stanley perdió a su esposa, Jane, en un país extranjero, Venezuela. Basado en una historia supuestamente real, completamente inventada del sueño de mi esposa.

Sebastian Barry's writing career has been as long and varied as it has extraordinary. Intimate, revealing and generous of heart, these three lectures—written and delivered as part of his three-year tenure as the laureate for Irish fiction—reflect on his life and career so far, and some of the formative moments and people he's met along the way.

John Keats died 200 years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began 100 years ago, the Jazz Age. In this biography, prizewinning author Jonathan Bate recreates these two shining, tragic lives in parallel. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender Is the Night and other works from the poet’s lines, but the two lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence.

À Fordham, par une nuit d'hiver, Ruth, la jeune apprentie de Mrs Mason n'a pas le temps de s'ennuyer : demain, c'est le grand bal de la ville et toutes les couturières sont mobilisées ! Choisie pour sa beauté, elle se tiendra dans le vestibule de la salle de bal afin de réparer les accrocs aux robes des danseuses et fera la connaissance de M. Bellingham. Ils sympathisent puis naît une relation qui vaut à Ruth d'être congédiée. Malgré le jugement de la société, ils passent des jours heureux dans le pays de Galles.

“I love the way [Ainsley Walker] goes to a different country in each book and explores. It makes me want to visit those places!” – 5-star review A faraway island. An impending hurricane. And a missing pearl brooch. An airplane en route to the U.S. is forced to land on the island of Puerto Rico—and onboard is AINSLEY WALKER Stranded in torrential rain, she is guided by another passenger towards an old plantation house in the island’s tropical interior, where she meets an elderly woman who has lost a precious family heirloom. It's a pearl brooch that had once belonged to an actual ...

"Coleshanger people are pretty bad," said Uncle Edward. "They won't cross water after sunset. And they have to be in bed by midnight, otherwise they think that they'll be turned into baboons and apes. They also worship the flea." Written in 1952, Coleshanger is a humorous, whimsical, and charming recount of English village life in the early part of the last century, a tale waiting 70 years to be heard but still very much the story of us today.