Showing results by narrator "NICHOLAS BOULTON" in All Categories

Ethan Dove’s family has moved to a new home in a safe community, and it’s exactly the fresh start they need. Not only is his marriage to Emma hanging by a thread, but his son, Dylan, and twelve-year-old daughter, Rose, deserve to have a happy childhood. After Rose is bullied by the boys across the road, Ethan is relieved when the woman who lives next door steps in. Fiona Smith has come into their lives at just the right moment, and when she offers to look after Rose during the school holidays, Ethan and Emma can’t believe their luck.

Published in 1923, My Universities is the final instalment in the autobiographical trilogy by five-time Nobel Prize-nominee Maxim Gorky. Despite his failed attempts to enter the university at Kazan, Gorky forges an education of his own as he encounters an unusual array of characters–revolutionaries, religious fanatics, theological students and eccentric schoolteachers. Snatching cherished moments for reading books, a relief from the drudgery of his work in a bakery, Gorky comes to see the superficiality of a formal education.

The First World War is over. Eric Vernon is on the cusp of adulthood. Tall, bony and awkward, he finds himself torn between a desire to emulate his heroic father, who led a life of quiet sacrifice, and resentment toward his father’s roguish friend Edward Blake, who survived the war only to throw himself into gay life in Berlin.

Investigating a crime seemingly unconnected to the Royal Family, Holmes & Watson uncover a conspiracy to kidnap Queen Victoria and destabilise the British Empire. With a ticking clock to her next public engagement, Holmes and Watson must discover who is behind the plot and locate her majesty, while Mycroft tries to keep the monarch’s disappearance a secret from the British people. At first, Holmes believes Moriarty is responsible for the abduction, but when the Napoleon of Crime is proved innocent, Holmes must work with his arch-nemesis to rescue the Queen.

Swashbuckling classic adventure, with an updated twist placing Milady in the role of narrator. Young D'Artagnan arrives in Paris to join the King's elite guards but almost immediately finds he is duelling with some of the very men he has come to swear allegiance to - Porthos, Athos and Aramis, inseparable friends: the Three Musketeers. Soon part of their close band, D'Artagnan's loyalty to his new allies puts him in the deadly path of Cardinal Richlieu's machinations.

It is 1986. Assigned to a new Cold Case Unit, retired Detective Inspector Mungo ‘Bob’ Willis has reopened the investigation into the 1962 disappearance of a nine-year-old boy. Paul Bromfield was snatched from one of the last steam trains from Evercreech Junction to Burnham-on-Sea and later found dead in an abandoned bunker. A day at the seaside turned to tragedy. And a child’s name everyone remembers.

On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur Norris. This chance encounter ignites a close friendship between the two Englishmen, one that draws Bradshaw into the seedier quarters of the city. Here, Norris runs a dubious import–export business and lives in excited fear of his bullying secretary, his creditors and his dominatrix girlfriend, Anni. Yet there is something sinister about Norris himself. Bradshaw’s new companion is a man of contradictions: heavily in debt but extraordinarily lavish, excessively polite but sexually deviant.

Wilkie Collins' follow-up to The Woman in White and No Name is an innovative take on mistaken identity, the nature of evil, and the dark underbelly of Victorian England. The story concerns two distant cousins, both named Allan Armadale, and the impact of a family tragedy, which makes one of them a target of the murderous Lydia Gwilt, a vicious and malevolent charmer determined to get her hands on the Armadale fortune. Will the real Allan Armadale be revealed, and will he survive the plot against his life?

Jack loves his childhood toy Dur Pig. DP has always been there for him, through good and bad. Until one Christmas Eve something terrible happens - DP is lost. But Christmas Eve is a night for miracles and lost causes, a night when all things can come to life...even toys. And Jack’s newest toy - the Christmas Pig (DP’s annoying replacement) - has a daring plan: Together they’ll embark on a magical journey to seek something lost and to save the best friend Jack has ever known....

The Complete Charles Dickens Collection: Part Two contains all of Charles Dickens' major published works from 1844 to 1865. Dickens wrote most of his most influential and beloved novels during these years - introducing us to characters such as Pip, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, Esther Summerson, and many more who have lived long in the memory for generations. Also included here are a selection of his essays, travelogues, letters, and a short biography of Dickens by his daughter, Mamie.

Published in 1888, The Legacy of Cain is the last of Wilkie Collins’s completed novels. Two sisters, Helen and Eunice, are brought up by their father, Reverend Gracedieu. He has deliberately kept the girls in ignorance of their true ages, to disguise the fact that one of them was adopted after her birth mother was executed for the brutal murder of her husband. In time, both girls fall for the same man, Philip Dunboyne, but when he eventually chooses one of the sisters, events take a sinister turn.

For reasons of his own, Stephen Hampton, Lord Summerdale, is determined to learn the truth behind the tangled tale of Helen's ruin. There is nothing he abhors so much as scandal - nothing he prizes so well as discretion - and so he is shocked to find that he cannot help but admire her. But how can she trust a man so steeped in the culture of high society, who conceals so much? And how can he, so devoted to the appearance of propriety, ever love a fallen lady?

Recuperating from a flying accident, Jerry Burton needs to take a break somewhere peaceful. He and his sister Joanna rent a house in the little village of Lymstock, where they know no-one and hope to be able to relax. Their quiet life is shattered, however, by the arrival of an obscene...

Whimbrel House is changing. Merritt and Hulda are raising a family. Owein has signed a marriage contract with the magically compatible Lady Cora, a heavyweight of British nobility who’s an ocean away. And the lovely shape-shifting druid Fallon makes a distractingly fetching friend for Owein. But another change is in the air, and this time it’s something wicked. The greatest wizard of the millennium, Silas Hogwood, is back—after five years dead. New body, same foul scent, and driven by madness and revenge.

Libidinous, licentious, salacious and very, very funny, The Satyricon is one of the most remarkable documents from ancient Rome. It tells the ribald story of Encolpius, a man of active and varied appetites (powered notably by his passion for his favourite lover, the handsome Giton), who plunges without inhibition into the life of Roman pleasures: orgies of food, feasting, abundant sex and escapades. The kind of hedonism found occasionally in Roman mosaics is here brought to life.

Set in the financial centres of 1820s Frankfurt and London, Jezebel’s Daughter (1880) tells the story of two widows: Madame Fontaine, who will go to any lengths to secure her daughter’s marriage, and Mrs Wagner, who devotes herself to her late husband’s social reforms. In pursuit of her endeavours, Mrs Wagner befriends Jack Straw, a former inmate of Bedlam, who plays a pivotal role as the action, full of plotting and counterplotting, unfolds, culminating in the morgue, where several lives hang in the balance.

1989: The Cold War will soon be over, but for BOX 88, a top secret spying agency, the espionage game is heating up. Lachlan Kite, recruited from an elite boarding school, is sent to France, tasked with gathering intelligence on an enigmatic Iranian businessman implicated in the Lockerbie bombing. But what Kite uncovers is more terrifying than anyone expected…

1993: Student Lachlan Kite is sent to post-Soviet Russia in the guise of a language teacher. In reality, he is there as a spy. Top secret intelligence agency BOX 88 has ordered Kite to extract a chemical weapons scientist before his groundbreaking research falls into the wrong hands. But Kite’s mission soon goes wrong and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail.

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2025 A New York Times Notable Book of 2025 A Telegraph Book of the Year 2025 A Guardian Book of the Year 2025 An Observer Book of the year 2025 'Supple, horrifying and mordantly droll' New York Times 'Nothing short of brilliant' Wall Street Journal 'A...

In Mountolive, the third volume in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, the events surrounding the interwoven community of Nessim, Justine, Narouz, Pursewarden and the other major characters are given a very different perspective. The intrigues and complex relationships are seen through the political prism of a world plunging toward war. David Mountolive, once emotionally involved with Nessim’s set, now returns to Egypt as the British ambassador....