Showing results by narrator "Doyle Gerard" in All Categories

It is 1863, but not the one it should be. Time has veered wildly off course, and moves are being made that will lead to a devastating world war. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston believes that by possessing the three Eyes of Naga he'll be able to manipulate events and avoid the war. He already has two of the stones, but he needs Sir Richard Francis Burton to recover the third.

Thirteen-year-old Tom Mullen has spent his entire life in foster homes. One night, while visiting a recently discovered mass grave at the local cemetery, he falls through a hole in time and finds himself in 1847 Ireland. Taken in by the first caring family he has ever known, Tom must find a way to help them survive the famine and disease that grips their country.

At just 16, Nancy Martin leaves the small island of Cape Clear for the mainland, the only member of her family to survive the effects of the Great Famine. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she is irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love affair and a devastating chain of events that continues to unfold over three generations. Spanning more than a century, Billy O’Callaghan’s Life Sentences weaves together the journey of an Irish family determined against all odds to be free.

This is the story of John Devine - stuck in a small town in the eerie landscape of southeast Ireland, worried over by his single, chain-smoking, Bible-quoting mother, Lily, and spied on by the "neighborly" Mrs.Nagle. When Jamey Corboy, a self-styled Rimbaudian boy wonder, arrives in town, John's life suddenly seems full of possibility. His loneliness dissipates. He is taken up by mischief and discovery, hiding in the world beyond as Lily's mysterious illness worsens.

Outside an east Belfast mission hall, pastor and family man Samuel Orr meets Anna, a young Beckett scholar. They embark on an intense, passionate affair, their connection fueled by their respective love of Christ and Beckett. When Anna becomes pregnant, the affair is revealed. The repercussions are slow to emerge but inescapable, and the fallout when it finally comes is shocking, cruel, and violent. Over 30 years later, Sam, their son, is in New York, living a steady, guarded life, his childhood and family safely abandoned.

Jonathan Barnes, a shining new talent in the UK, intrigues listeners with his "wonderfully original concoction[s] of grotesque humour and sparkling prose" ( Guardian) - providing a literary "cabinet stuffed with curiosities" ( Observer). In The Domino Men, an ordinary office-working Brit discovers that he may be destined to wipe out the wicked House of Windsor.

It is 1862, though not the 1862 it should be. Time has been altered, and Sir Richard Francis Burton, the king's agent, is one of the few people who know that the world is now careening along a very different course from that which Destiny intended. When a clockwork-powered man of brass is found abandoned in Trafalgar Square, Burton and his assistant, the wayward poet Algernon Swinburne, find themselves on the trail of the stolen Garnier Collection of black diamonds.

Jack Taylor thinks he has a chance at last to rest and heal from the myriad mental and physical traumas that beset him. However, after a skateboarder long suspected of dealing drugs to children is shot dead in mid-air during a public performance, Jack receives a cryptic message with a picture of the skateboarder, a clipping about a rapist gone free through procedural error, and a chilling invitation: "Your turn." The note is signed simply "C 33."

The slave Alexi, now free of his Greek captors, infiltrates the Greek strongholds of the Bronze Age in search of his sister. In so doing he participates in the stories of Orestes, son of Agamemnon, as he seeks revenge for his father's murder, and of Telemachus, son of Odysseus, who lands on Ithaca, the home island of Odysseus, just in time to witness the arrival of a mysterious stranger. As Alexi comes to understand the damage that the Trojan War has visited upon its victors, both he and the listener are forced to confront an unpleasant truth, while Alexi must decide where his allegiance really lies.

Sir Richard Francis Burton is an explorer, linguist, scholar, and swordsman. His reputation has been tarnished, his career is in tatters, and his former partner is missing and probably dead. Algernon Charles Swinburne is an unsuccessful poet and follower of de Sade, for whom pain is pleasure and brandy is ruin. The two men are sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum, when Lord Palmerston commissions Burton to investigate assaults on young women.

When a dragon arrives at the royal society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Beasts, a rescue center for rare and endangered beasts, Ulf the werewolf uncovers a dark and terrifying secret. With the help of Orson the giant, Tiana the fairy, and Dr. Fielding the RSPCB vet, Ulf must stop the most evil beast poacher in the world...before it's too late.

Journalist Viljar Gudmundsson is no stranger to chilling stories. So when he receives an anonymous email in which the writer proclaims their intention to execute a woman for her unpunished crimes, he thinks the whole thing is a bad joke. Such things happen only in bad crime novels, after all. But the next day, the body of a woman is found, and Viljar receives a second email with another verdict from this self-proclaimed judge, jury, and executioner. Viljar joins forces with investigator Lotte Skeisvoll, who quickly realizes that the murderer is playing a deadly game with them.

In this second mystery featuring Chief Inspector Peter Cammon, the veteran detective is lured out of retirement once more. With a familiar cast of characters reacquainting themselves with readers of the series, the novel follows Peter as he embarks on his seemingly simple assignment: Travel to Canada to retrieve the body of a murdered Scotland Yard colleague. But Peter can’t resist delving into the oddities of the crime. His colleague was brutally attacked, run over by a car, and then dumped into a canal - all seemingly for the theft of three letters from the American Civil War era, one of which is signed by John Wilkes Booth.

GBH, short for Grievous Bodily Harm, is an unnerving tale of paranoia and madness in the heart of the 1970s London criminal underworld. Two intertwining narratives - past and present - chronicle the man's tragic fall from power. In London, Fowler resides at the head of a lucrative criminal syndicate that specializes in the production and distribution of "blue films" - illegal pornography and some nasty stuff. Fowler is king, with a beautiful girl at his side and a swanky penthouse office....

Limerick, Ireland. The driveway of the Stokes family home. American Oscar Harvey opens the trunk of the car his hosts have loaned him and finds in it the body of a woman beaten and bloody. But let's start from the beginning. Kate and Mannix Stokes and their children live beside Curragower Falls in Limerick, in a house they love but can barely afford in postrecession Ireland. On top of that, their autistic son, Fergus, is being bullied at school, and their daughter, Izzy, blames herself for not being able to protect him.

After the dot-com bubble burst, Dan Porter is laid off from his job and must decide what is truly important. His teenagers, Josh, Nina, and Millie, are distant and confusing. His wife, Jackie, is tempted by the attentions of a younger man at her office. And thanks to an opportunity suggested by a magazine article, Dan finds himself contemplating a drastic change in his life.

After their nan accidentally burns their home down, twin brothers Pat and Dom must move with their parents and baby sister to the seaside cottage they've summered in, now made desolate by the winter wind. It's there that the ghost appears - a strange boy who cries black tears and fears a bad man, a soldier, who is chasing him. Soon Dom has become not-Dom, and Pat can sense that his brother is going to die, and their overwhelmed parents can't see what's happening.

Introducing veteran Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Peter Cammon, this novel finds Cammon journeying to the Jurassic Coast to solve a seemingly ordinary domestic crime. At first glance, the perpetrator appears to have murdered his wife before drowning in the English Channel, but Cammon soon learns that his case is merely a sideshow. A broader series of murders has been unfolding along the cliffs, baffling the local police.

One day old Mr. Franklin asks Bet to go out to the field and read aloud from a book about earthworms. Why? Who is listening? Soon, Bet becomes the most trusted friend of her listener, who turns out to be a bewitched mole.

In a brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original collection of essays, the best-selling and award-winning author of Brooklyn and The Empty Family offers a fascinating exploration of famous writers’ relationships to their families and their work.From Jane Austen’s aunts to Tennessee Williams’s mentally ill sister, the impact of intimate family dynamics can be seen in many of literature’s greatest works. In New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín traces and interprets those family ties.