Showing results by narrator "Mark Elstob" in All Categories

Murder at Roaringwater is the inside story of a young Frenchwoman, Sophie Toscan du Plantier. In this unresolved crime, the victim seemed to have a premonition of her own terrible end. Ever since she was violently killed outside her holiday cottage in the remote countryside in 1996, mystery has surrounded the unresolved case of Sophie Toscan du Plantier. For six years, author Nick Foster has been painstakingly piecing together her life and death, developing an ongoing ‘friendship’ with the Englishman long-suspected of her murder, Ian Bailey, and his partner, Jules Thomas.

Kit Davies has been dating the gorgeous Captain Jason Buchannan for six months. Six whole months of being wheeled out as his significant other at various Naval functions. While she's not convinced she has the makings of a future Officer's wife, things have been pretty good, and at least she hasn't caused a diplomatic incident—yet. Then one memorable evening, Jason drops a bombshell. His father's health is failing and he wants to retire from the Royal Navy, and relocate to his crumbling ancestral home in the wilds of Scotland. And he wants Kit to go with him.

In How Your Brain Works, leading neuroscientists and New Scientist introduce the evolution and anatomy of the brain viewed through traits such as memory, emotions, sleep, sensing and perception. Ever wondered what's going on inside your head? You are your brain. Everything that makes you you, and all your experiences of the world, are somehow conjured up by 1.4 kilograms of grey matter inside your skull.

The End of Money is an essential introduction to cryptocurrencies and the blockchain revolution, which has been hailed as the greatest advancement since the invention of the Internet. Murder for hire. Drug trafficking. Embezzlement. Money laundering. These might sound like plot lines of a thriller, but they are true stories from the short history of cryptocurrencies - digital currencies conceived by computer hackers and cryptographers that represent a completely new sort of financial transaction.

The Raven Wing Clan have fought off their enemies and prosper on their island home. A sibling rivalry threatens to break apart the fabric of their lives and Hrolf the Horseman is sent on a mission deep in into the heart of Frankia to heal the rift. When Jarl Gunnar Thorfinnson decides to take a wife it embroils the clan in an alliance which takes the clan far from home to fight overwhelming numbers of wild and fierce warriors. It is a novel filled with battles and intrigue.

It's not often that a fledgling career in Event Management kicks off with the wedding of a Hollywood superstar. Of course the fact that this particular Hollywood star is marrying her best friend might have had something to do with the fact that former art gallery owner Kit Davies landed the job. That, and the fact that she was about to become homeless and penniless. But organizing her friend Victory's big fat Hollywood wedding in the small yachting haven of Dartmouth without alerting the media is not for the faint hearted.

Manor Farm has reinvented itself as the South of England's premium petting zoo. Now, instead of a working farm, humans and beasts alike are invited (for a small fee) to come and stroke, fondle, and take rides on the farm's inhabitants. But life is not a bed of roses for the animals, in spite of what their leaders may want them to believe. Elections are rigged, the community is beset by factions, and sacred mottos are being constantly updated. The Farm is descending into chaos. What's more, a mysterious ‘illness' has started ripping through the animals, killing them one by one.

Thomas Mann regarded his monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus. He conceived of the four parts—The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider—as a unified narrative, a "mythological novel" of Joseph's fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt. Deploying lavish, persuasive detail, Mann conjures for us the world of patriarchs and pharaohs, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, and the universal force of human love in all its beauty, desperation, absurdity, and pain.

How did we get here? All cultures have a creation story, but a little over 150 years ago, Charles Darwin introduced a revolutionary new one. We, and all living things, exist because of the action of evolution on the first simple life form and its descendants. In How Evolution Explains Everything About Life, leading biologists and New Scientist take you on a journey of a lifetime, exploring the questions of whether life is inevitable or a one-off fluke and how it got kick-started.

London, 1798. Late one night, a junior naval officer at the Admiralty intercepts a coded despatch, marked with blood: Napoleon Bonaparte is about to launch the largest invasion fleet in history. Target: unknown.

A Journey Through the Universe is a grand tour of the most amazing celestial objects and how they fit together to build the cosmos. There's a whole universe out there.... Imagine you had a spacecraft capable of travelling through interstellar space. You climb in, blast into orbit, fly out of the solar system and keep going. Where do you end up, and what do you see along the way? The answer is: mostly nothing. Space is astonishingly, mind-blowingly empty.

The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of the British Empire.

What is this strange mental world that seems so essential to being human? The conscious mind brings together sensations, perceptions, thoughts and memories to generate the seamless movie of a person's life. It makes us aware of the world around us and our own self. How all this emerges from a kilogram of brain cells is one of the greatest unanswered questions.

A little over a century ago, a young Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity to the world and utterly transformed our understanding of the universe. His theory changed the way we think about space and time, revealed how our universe has been expanding from a hot, dense state called the big bang and predicted black holes. Where the Universe Came From is a 13.8 billiion-year journey through the cosmos.

'Devilishly clever and compulsive' Daily Mail 'Science Fiction at its best' Spectator In Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, Brian W. Aldiss tells the tale of mankind's future over the course of forty million years. Each of these nine connected short stories highlights a different millennia in which...

Marx and Engels were right when they observed in the Communist Manifesto that free markets had in a short time created greater prosperity and more technological innovation than all previous generations combined. A century and a half later, all the evidence shows that capitalism has lifted millions and millions from hunger and poverty. Today's story about global capitalism, shared by right-wing and left-wing populists, but also by large sections of the political and economic establishment, does not deny that prosperity has been created, but it says it ended up in far too few hands.

The second volume of David Hume's classic survey of English history covers nearly 300 years (1200-1485) from the long reign of Henry III to the dramatic end of Richard III on Bosworth Field—he was the last Plantagenet, and the last king of England to die in battle. In telling this all-action tale, Hume delves deeply into contemporary records and presents a considered, even sympathetic view, showing that many factors, not just personalities, resulted in dramatic consequences for the nation.

Considered as the foundation of evolutionary biology, Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking On the Origin of Species profoundly transformed the field of biology at the time, as well as contemporary religious beliefs.

We inhabit a planet in peril. Our once temperate world is locked on course to become a hothouse entirely of our own making. Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide provides a post-COP26 perspective on the climate emergency, acknowledging that it is now practically impossible to keep this side of the 1.5C dangerous climate change guardrail. The upshot is that we can no longer dodge the arrival of disastrous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown that will come as a hammer blow to global society and economy.

In this third volume of Thomas Mann’s monumental retelling of the biblical story, Joseph in Egypt follows Joseph after he is sold by his jealous brothers to Ishmaelite traders. They bring him to Egypt, where he’s eventually purchased by Potiphar. Joseph's intelligence, charisma, and integrity soon earn him Potiphar’s trust, and he rises to become the overseer of Potiphar’s household.