Showing results by narrator "Mark Meadows" in All Categories

From muddy football fields in Belgium to a dot-com start-up in New York, from the heights of the Tibetan Plateau to the stillness of a meditation hall in Kyoto, Johan Depraetere's journey has been shaped not by caution but by moments of daring. He imagined these choices as reaching into a bag of gummy bears and pulling out the rare green ones: dramatic, bold, life-changing. Others were like picking a yellow gummy bear: quieter, softer. Yet each choice, whatever its colour, opened doors to possibility and growth.

Hamburg, 1947. A ruined city occupied by the British who bombed it, experiencing the coldest winter in living memory. Food is scarce; refugees and the homeless crowd into shantytowns and sheds. There is a killer on the loose, and all attempts to find him or her have failed. Plagued with worry about his missing son, Frank Stave is a career policeman with a tragedy in his past that is driving his determination to find the killer.

Will lies in a deserted lane, his life slipping away. Against all the odds he survives but with an almost total loss of memory. At night he is tormented by visions, in the daytime by hostile strangers. Why does he have so many enemies? And who is the strange child who seems to have a story to tell him?

Chipo and his little sister Gentle live on Papa Fudu's dumpsite in Rubbish Town, searching for valuable things amongst the rubbish to try to stay alive. Life isn't easy - luckily, Chipo has spirit, courage and lots of imagination! But when he finds something precious that Papa Fudu wants for himself, he knows they are in danger. Suddenly they're on the run.

Clones Rachel and Theo now live thousands of miles apart. They keep in touch, but things just aren’t the same. When Rachel discovers that evil scientist Elijah is still working for a secret section of the government and is about to murder Daniel, she sets out to rescue the little boy - but her plans backfire with disastrous consequences. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Theo becomes suspicious when Rachel misses their weekly internet chat.

Michael and Francis are best friends, drawn together by their common secret - Evgard. Evgard is a fantasy world that Michael and Francis have created together, a world both fierce and dangerous. It is also a world that has become weirdly entwined in both their lives; actions in one world are uncannily mirrored by actions in the other.

It starts with the phone call late at night. The mysterious boy says he is dying. Dusty doesn't want to get involved - but the boy seems to have a link to the one person who's most important to her. Soon she has been drawn in - and now she has to deal with the other people who are looking for the boy - the violent man and his two sons and the police, too.

Haworth, West Yorkshire, 1848. Branwell Brontë - unexhibited artist, unacknowledged writer, sacked railwayman, disgraced tutor and spurned lover -finds himself unhappily back in Haworth Parsonage, to face the crushing disappointment of his father and his three sisters, whose own pseudonymous successes - allegedly kept secret from him - are only just becoming apparent.

Bloomsbury presents Start-Up Century by James Wise, read by Mark Meadows. A fresh look at the boom in entrepreneurship and start-ups – and how it’s changing the world of work. Does it feel like everyone you know is thinking about starting a business? That’s because they are. In the last...

Denis is searching for his mother’s past, knowing she had secrets. In Nice, he finds her friends, Monique and Clemence. In the 1950s, they were Matisse’s assistants when he was old and ill, pinning up his coloured paper shapes, putting the great cut-out works together. Monique inspired his great designs in the chapel at Vence, Clemence, in pursuit of love, was caught in an affair that led to violence and disaster. So they have their own intense and colourful past - but they hold the key to Denis’s past, too. He’s about to face the greatest challenge of his life.

Hitman Don Drake owes a gambling debt to a demon. Forced to carry out one more assassination to clear his debt, Don unwittingly kills an innocent child and brings the Furies of Greek myth down upon himself. Rescued by an almost fallen angel called Trixie, Don and his magical accomplice - the Burned Man, an imprisoned archdemon - are forced to deal with Lucifer himself whilst battling a powerful evil magician.

Henry’s confession of spying on Russians in London doesn’t get the reaction he expects. Nea has her own dark secrets to guard and refuses to see her patient again. Now frightened and on his own, a chain of events leads to murder. Having stumbled upon a poison at the heart of the British establishment, Henry fears for his life and decides to lie low at his holiday home in Lisbon. A professional killer catches up with him and a terrifying chase across Europe ensues.

Jamie is under pressure from his father to succeed. In the competitive world of squash, his dad is determined that where he failed, Jamie should succeed. The emotional and physical bullying that Jamie has to endure makes him recoil into himself until he feels backed into a corner and doesn't know where to turn. Then he discovers the girl hiding in his shed and sees an opportunity, not only to help her, but to get away from his own life, too. Together they go on the run - but danger is coming after the girl and it's surely only a matter of time before they're both discovered.

Hamburg 1947: It is the year of extremes. After a bitterly cold winter of starvation, the bombed city groans under excruciating heat. And Chief Inspector Frank Stave is confronted with a new case. In the ruins of a shipyard, the corpse of a boy is found and Stave's hunt for the killer leads him into the world of "wolf children" - orphaned children who have fled from the Occupied Eastern Territories and are now united in gangs. When two more bodies are discovered Stave is under even increasing pressure....

It all starts when a mysterious train appears in the park. Before they know what’s happening, Joe and Scarlett are whisked away on a journey back in time. Magically transported to World War II, they’re given a mission: to save a young boy’s life.But with bombs falling on London they find they are counting down to disaster...An exciting time-slip story from award-winning author Sophie McKenzie.

In the tunnels deep under London, the Earth Elementals are dying. Hunted by something they know only as the Rotman, the Elementals have no-one trustworthy they can turn to. Enter Don Drake, diabolist and semi-reformed hitman, and an almost-fallen angel called Trixie. When the matriarch tells Don that Rotman is actually the Archdemon Bianakith, he knows this is going to be a tough job. Bianakith is the foretold spirit of disease and decay whose aura corrupts everything it comes near.

As the rain falls, the nightmare begins. Blake Hudson is an environment officer who lives in a converted lighthouse on the southwest coast of England. Sky McPherson is a pathologist, recently assigned to the area. Both of them share a past.

Alec Reid’s ghosts of the 21st century seldom lurk in old houses or waft across chilly moors. His dark tales may breathe alongside the supernatural, but they take place in broad daylight, in our daily lives. Their themes include dead warriors resurrected via Bluetooth, Rumpelstiltskin in the suburbs, an algorithmic fear of ghosts, and the shattered dreams of immortality. The world they describe is the one you inhabit, but you would live in terror were you to recognize it for what it is.

Nature teaches us that a balanced state is a fertile state; and in this audiobook Gerad Kite shows how 'balance' can be the secret to successful conception, even when all else has failed. In The Art of Baby-Making, he presents a unique, holistic approach to creating the right conditions for new life to take hold. His method combines the ancient wisdom of Chinese medicine with psychotherapy, drawing on his years of experience and effective practice.

When Tsar Alexander II decided to drag Russia into the industrial age, he began by inviting Welsh businessman John Hughes to build an ironworks. A charismatic visionary, John persuades influential people to invest in his venture while concealing his greatest secret: he couldn't even write his own name. John recruited adventurers prepared to sacrifice everything to ensure the success of Hughesovka (Donetsk, Ukraine).