Showing results by narrator "Sean Barrett" in All Categories

"I heard, with an unpleasant surprise, close to me, a voice that was drawling, and, I fancied, sneering, repeat the words: 'Food for worms, dead and rotten; God over all.' There was a small window in the wall, here very thick, which had been built up, and in the dark recess of this, deep in the shadow, I now saw a sharp-featured man, sitting with his feet dangling. His keen eyes were fixed on me, and he was smiling cynically...."

Arthur C Clarke is the world's foremost writer of science fiction and accessible science; his predictions have been coming true since he invented the idea of communications satellites in the 1940s. In Holiday on the Moon, teen Daphne Martin travels to the moon to visit her astronomer father.

July, 1858. Forensic scientist Adolphus Hatton and his trusty assistant Albert Roumande have a morgue full of cholera victims to attend to, and an eager apprentice to teach. When a leading politician of the Irish Unionist movement is murdered, the flamboyant Inspector Grey calls on Hatton and Roumande to help solve the case. But Inspector Grey proves difficult to deal with.

Darkness falls. The undead rise to feast on the succulent blood of the living. For years vampires have fascinated great writers of the occult such as De Maupassant, Count Stenbock, E Nesbit and EF Benson. This is The Story Circle's collection of some of their spine-chilling tales told by award-winning actors.

Poetry can capture the imagination in a few short lines but narrative verse or poetry takes the form of telling a story, whether it be simple or complex in a longer form. Among the most ancient forms of poetry, it has widespread roots through almost every culture. In Volume 3 we bring you the classics 'Goblin Market' by Christina Rosseti; 'The Wreck of the Hesperus' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; 'The Raven' by Edgar Allan Poe; 'Morte D'Arthur' by Alfred Lord Tennyson; and from 'Horatius' by Thomas Babington Maculay.

The candid tale of one of Britain’s most outstanding contemporary philanthropists. These pages wryly track Peter’s varied career moves, from flogging tickets for one of The Beatles first major concerts, to getting inadvertently caught up in a New York family turf war while trying to buy a...

This is the incredible story of 89-year-old Chelsea Pensioner Sergeant Major Colin Thackery who, in 2019, made history by becoming the oldest person to win Britain's Got Talent. The show gave a glimpse into Colin's history, but the truth of his unique and eventful life is far more gripping and surprising than viewers could have imagined.

The ballad is one of the oldest poetic forms in English and are simply poems or songs that tell a story. Maybe it’s because of childhood associations or that we all enjoy a cracking good story told in rhyme but as this volume demonstrates, the ballad has endless appeal. We include favourites such as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee as well as classics such as Sir Patrick Spens, the Ballad of Reading Gaol by Wilde and La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats.

Kate Thompson - glamorous housewife-turned-MP - surprises everyone with her meteoric rise at Westminster. When Kate is sent as a trade minister to India, she hopes it will be her moment to shine. But, embroiled in a personal scandal, she gets drawn into a dangerous world of corruption and political intrigue....

Nineteen fifty-three is synonymous in the British memory with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June. But less well known is what happened in 10 Downing Street on 23 June. With Anthony Eden vying for power, the elderly prime minister, Winston Churchill, must maintain the confidence of his government, the press and the public. But after a diplomatic dinner at which he is in typically sparkling form, Churchill's Italian dining companions are rushed out of the building, and his doctor called.

A novel in verse form, Byrne echoes and takes further many of the preoccupations of Burgess's earlier fiction. It tells the story of a rampant Irish artist who, in the early days of the century, goes rapidly to the bad and ends up within Hitler's Third Reich.

A haunting, gothic love triangle set in postwar Moscow and an Arctic gulag, where forbidden passion and betrayal shape destinies and echo across decades. House of Meetings is a gothic love story, triangular in form and steeped in darkness. In 1946 Moscow, amid the palpable threat of pogroms, two...

John Bodman and his wife are polar opposites who have grown to hate each other. But without grounds for divorce, they are tied together till death. So, in a state of despair, Bodman sets his mind on murder.

Sensational eyewitness accounts from the most heroic and legendary American aviators of World War II, never before published as a book They are voices lost to time. Beginning in the late 1970s, five veteran airmen sat for private interviews. Decades after the guns fell silent, they recounted in...

A lavish and riveting thriller from one of Norway's foremost crime writers. A frozen body, a murdered biker and a lawyer with nothing left to lose. In the depths of the Norwegian winter, a woman's frozen corpse is discovered in the garden of a notorious ex-lawyer, Vilhelm Thygesen. She has been stabbed to death. A young biker, a member of a gang once represented by the lawyer, is found dead in suspicious circumstances. Thygesen starts receiving anonymous threats....

A tender, impassioned and unforgettable story of a father's love and a daughter's ambition in the wake of devastating tragedy. It all starts with the death of Martijn van Vliet's wife. His grief-stricken young daughter, Lea, cuts herself off from the world, lost in the darkness of grief. Then she hears the unfamiliar sound of a violin playing in the hall of a train station, and she is brought back to life. Transfixed by a busker playing Bach, Lea emerges from her mourning, vowing to learn the instrument.

Hodgson’s finest short story is set at sea, where one dark, starless night a schooner is hailed by a voice from a nearby rowing boat. The passenger refuses to bring his craft alongside and insists that the crew put away their lantern. He has approached them to beg for food for his fiancée, who he has left behind upon an island, but dares not come any closer. The crew float a box of food to him, and with heartfelt thanks he rows away. But three hours later he returns....

A shipboard quarrel between Nurkeed and Pambe Serang leads to a lingering grudge and a terrible revenge. Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English short-story writer, poet and novelist. He wrote tales and poems of British soldiers in India and stories for children.

Twins Aaron and Clive have been estranged for 40 years. Aaron still lives in the empty, crumbling tower block on the riverside in Deptford where they grew up. Clive is a successful property developer, determined to turn the tower into luxury flats. But Aaron is blocking the plan, and their petty squabble becomes something much greater when two ghosts from the past - twins Annette and Christine - appear in the tower. At once, the desolate estate becomes a stage on which the events of one scorching summer are relived - a summer that shattered their lives and changed everything forever.

This is a story from the Canterbury Tales III: Modern Verse Translation collection.