Showing results by narrator "Paul Thornley" in All Categories

Like a princess in a fairytale, Grace Hamilton has been showered with blessings: professional success, a happy marriage, and she even lives in a beautiful castle. But the only thing she really wants – her heart’s desire – is the one thing she can never have. Her sister, the beautiful Susannah, has made a mess of her life. Like a reverse Midas, everything she touches turns sour. But fate puts Grace’s future in Susannah’s hands, changing the balance of power between the sisters forever.

In Sun Country, Howard Cunnell returns to the southern England beach lands of his boyhood after the death of his mother. A love letter to the changing coast and sea, Sun Country is a book alive with light and shadow, where the white spaces between words are as charged with tension and power as the words themselves. It is a reckoning with the things we inherit – silence and absence, stories told and untold – and the transgression involved in turning a life into art.

Mahala – City of contrasts. Light and dark. Hope and despair. Rojan Dizon just wants to keep his head down. But his worst nightmare is around the corner. With the destruction of their power source, the vertical city of Mahala is crisis. Riots are breaking out, mages are being murdered and the city is divided. But Rojan's hunt for the killers will make him responsible for complete anarchy. Either that, or an all-out war. And there's nothing Rojan hates more than being responsible.

Ullsaard has won the crown. But when he is confronted with a truth too shocking to contemplate, he has to make the impossible choice between power and honour. And now the real battle has begun, in this stunning sequel to The Crown of the Blood, packed with gargantuan battles, demonic magic, and treacherous politics.

From the depths of a valley rises the city of Mahala. It's a city built upwards - where streets are built upon streets, buildings upon buildings. A city that the Ministry rules from the sunlit summit, and where the forsaken lurk in the darkness of Under. Rojan Dizon doesn't mind staying in the shadows, because he's got things to hide. Things like being a pain-mage, with the forbidden power to draw magic from pain. But when the fate of Mahala depends on him using his magic, he can't hide forever.

ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025 The definitive history of Russia’s most secret spy program, from the earliest days of the Soviet Union to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a revelatory examination of how that hidden history shaped both Russia and the West. More than a century...

When a British Special Forces soldier goes rogue, ex-MI5 controller Charlotte Button is hired to work out what his plan is and to take him down before he can carry it out. When the man returns to the UK, it looks like the threat will be a lot closer to home. Charlotte puts her best man on the case - hitman Lex Harper. It's up to Lex to get to the soldier before he carries out what could be a massive terrorist attack. But Charlotte has her own problems - someone has broken into her safe deposit box, and she must work out who is after her and what they want.

London is under siege. Nine men in suicide vests primed to explode hold hostages in nine different locations around the city. Their mission: to force the government to release jihadist prisoners from Belmarsh Prison. The bombers are cleanskins, terrorists with no obvious link to any group and who do not appear on any antiterror watch list. What has brought them together?

El Narco is not a gang; it is a movement and an industry drawing in hundreds of thousands, from bullet-riddled barrios to marijuana-covered mountains. The conflict spawned by El Narco has given rise to paramilitary death squads battling from Guatemala to the Texas border (and sometimes beyond). In this "propulsive ... high-octane" book (Publishers Weekly), Ioan Grillo draws the first definitive portrait of Mexico's cartels and how they have radically transformed.