Showing results by narrator "Nathaniel Priestley" in All Categories

Madeleine is a whip-smart journalist and one of my dearest friends. So when she doesn’t come back into work after a particularly tense birthday dinner, I begin to panic. Then I get a message that chills me to the bone: It's time to settle the score. Call the police and she’s dead. Madeleine’s beaten face stares back at me from the photo, and my heart hammers at the spark of recognition in her eyes. She knows her attacker. Madeleine was always the first to get any story, and the last to worry about her own safety. She made a lot of enemies in her career, but who would want to kill her?

AD 1066. Cerdic is a prisoner of war. Captured after the Battle of Hastings, his fate is in the hands of the victorious Norman count Cynric, who is in no mood to feed and look after worthless Englishmen as the army moves inland. His survival depends on his ability to convince them of his value. Cerdic’s sole bargaining chip is his lordship of Wulfbury, a small stronghold in Northumberia, following the deaths of his father, its earl and elder brother in the invasions. If he can entice them with the lure of this fiefdom, he may yet survive.

Mr. James Alcott has carved out his place in the world with an esteemed position at Harrow School. But when the school changes direction, he’s set adrift. He can redeem himself by founding a scholarship program if he wins the annual Duke’s Trust competition for seed money. A seemingly simple task. Until a beautiful and mysterious competitor arouses his curiosity and leaves him speaking in iambic pentameter.

More than a decade ago, Madeline Wilson established herself as one of the most controversial and successful figures in modern British media. Even so many years later, she is best remembered as the figure behind a twelve-month public campaign against a man the police failed to convict of murder, which ended in a re-trial and conviction for manslaughter. Now, he has just been released. After a night out in late February with her father, Sam, and Ben, Madeline is kidnapped. What follows is a chase, as Ben and Sam seek to uncover the kidnapper, and the truth behind the original case.

Former SAS commander Pat Burke must stop known terrorist the Falcon from executing a devastating attack in Central London. Crucial to his plan is "turning" the terrorist's captivating house guest, the psychologist Yasmin. What he doesn’t expect is to develop feelings for the woman whose life he’s put in danger.

Yorkshire, 1878. Young, ambitious and in love, Albert Cowgill’s life is finally beginning in earnest. At just 23, he has already been made partner at Haigh, Ackroyd & Cowgill – the best wool business in the city. He’s also just laid eyes on the prettiest girl he ever saw, Hannah Ackroyd. Romance soon blossoms for Albert and Hannah, and they marry and set up home in Scarborough. But before long, clouds gather over Number 1, Byland Crescent. Within a year, Albert’s family begins to disintegrate.

Former special forces operative Cole Armstrong isn’t looking for love. He’d much rather focus on his current assignment, protecting his target whilst pretending to be a tourist on an organized safari in Southern Africa. Then he meets Anna, and everything changes. Tour guide Anna has been a wanderer her entire life. Then she meets the British SAS soldier who turns her world upside down. When poachers attack their party, it's Cole who leads them to safety. Except things are about to go from bad to worse—and suddenly Anna’s heart isn’t the only thing that needs rescuing.

Few sports have had a more eventful last 50 years than rugby union. Even fewer involve such a range of different cultures, contrasting characters or diverse geographical settings. With the 2023 Rugby World Cup in France and the 200th anniversary of the game’s ‘birth’ on the horizon, Around the World in 80 Minutes sets out to find the game’s most inspiring people and places. Observant, amusing and thought-provoking, the book takes listeners on a global journey to meet key figures from rugby’s ‘golden age’ between 1973 and 2023.

In The Red Hotel, former Daily Telegraph Foreign Editor and Russian expert Alan Philps sets out the way Stalin created his own reality by constraining and muzzling the British and American reporters covering the Eastern front during the war and forcing them to reproduce Kremlin propaganda. War correspondents were both bullied and pampered in a gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel. Through the use of British archives and Russian sources, the story of the role of the women of the Metropol Hotel and the foreign reporters they worked with is told for the first time.

When Instagram influencer and entrepreneur Izzy starts getting threatening notes, she turns to her mother's old friend, military veteran Pat, who runs a private security company, the Rogue Unit, to help her. Pat assigns Drake, a new recruit, to be her personal protection officer. With abs harder than barnacles and eyes the color of the ocean, Izzy can't deny her attraction to the strong, silent bodyguard - but despite her best attempts to seduce him, he remains aloof.

In 1923, four short years since the end of the First World War, and after the passing of the Act which gave all men the vote, an inconclusive election result and the prospect of a constitutional crisis opened the door for a radically different sort of government: men from working-class backgrounds who had never before occupied the corridors of power at Westminster. The Wild Men tells the story of that first Labour administration – its unexpected birth, fraught existence, and controversial downfall.

Cadenza is the City of Words, a city run by poets, its skyline dominated by the steepled towers of its libraries, its heart beating to the stamp and thrum of the printing presses in the Printing Quarter. Carlo Mazzoni, a young wordsmith, arrives at the city gates intent on making his name as the bells ring out with the news of the death of the city's poet-leader. Instead, he finds himself embroiled with the intrigues of a city in turmoil, the looming prospect of war with their rival Venice ever-present.

He's climbed Everest not long after a heart bypass operation, he's run seven marathons on seven continents, he's hauled loaded sledges across both polar ice caps and he's circumnavigated the earth. Ran Fiennes truly is the world's greatest explorer, and this book celebrates his 80th birthday by showcasing his greatest achievements in his own words.

Yorkshire, 1923. Sonny Cowgill is slowly regaining his memory. He was declared missing in action in the First World War, presumed dead. But Sonny’s beloved wife Rachel found him and brought him home. As he rebuilds his relationship with his wife and learns how to be a father to the son he never knew he had, memories begin to resurface. Sonny remembers something that the Cowgill family thought lost forever – the whereabouts of his eldest brother.

Earth, like the rest of the Known Worlds, has fallen to the Shing. Scattered here and there, small groups of humans live in a state of semi-barbarism. They have lost the skills, science and knowledge that had been Earth's in the golden age of the League of Worlds, and whenever a colony of humans tries to rekindle the embers of a half-forgotten technology, the Shing, with their strange, mindlying power, crush them out. There is one man who can stand against the malign Shing, but he is an alien with amber eyes and must first prove to paranoid humanity that he is not a creature of the Shing.

On a foggy winter morning two children discover the impossible: the wreck of an eighteenth-century ship stranded in a field. One enters the hatch on the deck and is never seen again. And she isn't the last to disappear... Soon a government agency begins to investigate, determined to uncover the ship's secrets before a media storm erupts. They enlist Robert Grim, a retired specialist of the occult, to unravel the mystery, who soon realises the ship could be a harbinger of an ancient doom awakened under the sea.

The Pontifex sits blind atop the ivory throne of the Ashen Cathedral, as Tara’s heartlands burn. The civil war of Antigonia stokes a new age, one fueled by the fires of industry, while a southern king seeks to usurp the mandate of the Heavens and the Patrian kings alike. Reed Mason and Aura Westfall are among the ranks of the Furii. These elite warriors are members of a mercenary caste and venerated as demigods by the common man. So it has been for centuries, and the Furii have long held power over their fiefs.

Steve Jones is a former senior British combat pilot flying with the Army Air Corps (AAC), and Apache At War is his vivid and uncompromising account of flying 'the ultimate fighting machine', the Apache AH1 attack helicopter in action. From patrolling 'Bandit Country' in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s, to taking out Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in the mid to late 2000s, with active service in the Balkans and Iraq along the way: Steve Jones offers the taut, gritty, and graphic reality of flying in military service.

Reminiscing over times gone by at Number 1 Byland Crescent, Jenny Cowgill takes a break from her baking to sit and enjoy the long-awaited postcard from Spain from her son, Andrew. But she is soon disturbed by a knock at the door. The policeman says a member of the Cowgill family has suffered a serious accident in London and her husband Mark must go at once. It’s Mark’s estranged sister Lizzie. Lizzie’s accident leaves her with life-changing injuries. Her career is over. Now perhaps she will finally come home to reconcile with the family in Scarborough?

Yorkshire, 1946. At last, Sonny and Rachel Cowgill hear the news they’ve been so desperate for. Their son Mark, who was injured in the very last days of the fighting, will make it home in time for Christmas. But their youngest son Billy has not been so lucky. He was declared missing in action in Crete and is presumed dead. Sonny and Rachel are learning to give up hope of seeing him again. Meanwhile, in Australia, Luke Fisher returns from the German prisoner of war camp where he was interned. His beloved fiancée Isabella Finnegan is waiting for him. But all is not well.