Showing results by narrator "Leighton Pugh" in All Categories

1939. As Europe teeters on the brink of war, Alfred Kendall is tasked with carrying out a minor mission for the British Intelligence Service. Travelling to Prague, he takes his troubled young son, Hugh, as cover.  When Hitler invades Czechoslovakia, Alfred is given an ultimatum by the Czech Resistance. They will arrange for him to return to England, but only if he leaves his son Hugh behind as collateral. Hugh is soon taken under the wing of a Nazi colonel - Helmuth Scholl. 

When Denmark’s erstwhile Minister of Justice and Foreign Secretary dies suddenly from what appears to be a heart attack, down-on-his-luck journalist Ulrik Torp finds himself drawn into the case. Relegated to writing obituaries for a local paper, Torp is tasked with crafting the notice of the man’s untimely death—and then a former Member of Parliament expires under similarly suspicious circumstances. But who may have killed these two political archrivals, and why?

What does it mean to be lucky? How might we mitigate the effects of bad luck and maximise those of good? Is there actually such a thing as ‘luck’—some force that intervenes between desire and its consummation, that impedes or hastens it? To answer these questions, David Flusfeder sets out on a search for the definition of luck.

Melting ice, a military arms race, the rush to exploit resources at any cost - the Arctic is now the stage on which our future will be decided. And as temperatures rise and the ice retreats, Vladimir Putin orders Russia's oil rigs to move north. But one early September morning in 2013, 30 men and women from 18 countries - the crew of Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise - decide to draw a line in the ice and protest the drilling in the Arctic.

James Marlowe puts in long alcohol- and cocaine-fuelled hours as an advertising director. As his life disintegrates around him, he comes to despise his clients, the corporate world, and himself. Now his imagination is fired by a set of characters he calls The Zoo. They lead him into a world crazier than the one that's thrown him out. The way back to sanity might lie behind the fantasy.

Simon Tolkien’s gripping Oxford-based thriller which sees Inspector Trave in a race for justice against deception, conspiracy and the long shadow of the past. When an eminent art historian is found dead in his study, all the evidence points to his estranged son, Stephen. With his fingerprints...

“Sophisticated and erudite. . . . Hughes-Hallett is a natural heir to A.S. Byatt, delivering a densely patterned novel that shimmers with human interest as it probes our cultural story.”—Wall Street Journal The Costa Award-winning author of The Pike makes her literary fiction debut with an...

From the International Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Order of the Day and The War of the Poor comes a searing account of a conflict that dealt a fatal blow to French colonialism. A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2023 'Excoriating and profound . . . A remarkable work' - Scotsman 'Absolutely...

Berlin, 1962. Morale is at rock bottom in East Germany, thrown into chaos by the new Berlin Wall. The Ministry for State Security is hunting for a new weapon in the war against capitalism - and their solution is stranger than fiction. Rather than guns, tanks or bombs, the Stasi resolve to fight the enemy through rhyme and verse, winning the Culture Wars through poetry - and the result is the most bizarre book club in history.

Twelve-year-old Carl Hunter has been snatched at gunpoint from his home on Jersey. He and his kidnapper have vanished without a trace. Enter Ben Hope, now working freelance to rescue kidnapped children. But as Ben begins his search for Carl, he soon discovers that nothing about this case is as it seems. Behind the mystery of the boy's disappearance lies a sinister secret that threatens to destroy anyone who comes into contact with it...

The war is over, but Berlin is a desolate sea of rubble. There is a shortage of everything: Food, clothing, tobacco. The local population is scrabbling to get by. Kasper Meier is one of these Germans, and his solution is to trade on the black market to feed himself and his elderly father. He can find anything that people need, for the right price. Even other people. When a young woman, Eva, arrives at Kasper's door seeking the whereabouts of a British pilot, he feels a reluctant sympathy for her but won't interfere in military affairs.

Sultan Gadaffi has escaped from Libya with a fistful of dangerous secrets. The British Government want ex-Special Forces operative Steve Range, the go-to man for any Black-Ops missions, to lead an ultra-covert mercenary group to seize him from his near-impregnable desert stronghold. Saed is defended by Tuareg warriors armed to the teeth with stolen NATO hardware. If Range's team can somehow overcome them, then they will earn themselves gold bullion worth $500 million.

Winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for History From the two-time winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award, the first full depiction of the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that followed the Russian Revolution and how they laid the groundwork for the Holocaust Finalist for the Lionel Gelber...

On Halloween night, 1906, young working class Lotta Rae is attacked by a wealthy gentleman. She seeks justice at an Old Bailey trial alongside her barrister, William Linden, who she believes to be her ally. The verdict is devastating and Lotta Rae soon realises the guardians of justice do not support her. But what none could foresee were the shocking consequences. Twelve years later, as the suffragettes rise and the ghost of WW1 looms over London, William is joined again by Lotta Rae. Now they will travel to a fateful destination, where truths must be faced and wrongs will be righted.

Jonas Merrick - mockingly nicknamed 'Eternal Flame' by his colleagues at MI6 because he was desk bound and considered a long redundant encyclopaedia of names and faces - was on the edge of retirement. Having escaped his own insincere retirement party and taken refuge on a bench within the grounds of Thames House, he finds himself sitting next to Winston Gunn, a young man drawn into the Jihadi activist net while serving 18 months imprisonment. A young man packed tightly with explosives ready for detonation....

Brought up in Switzerland, the only son of well-to-do parents, Charles Fryerne is somewhat unprepared for the world he meets when he goes up to Oxford University in the early 1980s. There he meets a fascinating social set, including a stellar young playwright, a student dubbed 'the future leader of the Conservative party' and a mercurial figure with ambitions to become the youngest prime minister since Pitt. When they leave university, the characters go their separate ways.

Jocelyn Pierston, a successful sculptor, is helpless in the face of "the well-beloved": the manifestation of perfect womanhood that seems to move like a will-o'-the-wisp from one acquaintance to the next. It shapes his whole life. Where his artistry involves permanence - cold stone objects - his heart is caught by ephemeral beauty. After years spent in London, a return to his rocky birthplace, the Isle of Slingers, sparks Pierston's extraordinary involvement with three generations of the Caro family.

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A riveting account of a forgotten holocaust: the slaughter of over one hundred thousand Ukrainian Jews in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century...

When Detective Inspector Robert Finlay is sent to a military barracks to investigate a connection to weapons discovered in the possession of London gangsters, he is given strict instructions not to get involved in a suicide enquiry into the recent death of a young, recruit soldier. The army partners Finlay with Floria McLaren, an ambitious military policewoman who doesn't believe the death was a suicide.

They say that third time's a charm... It's been two years since mass murderer, Giacomo Riondino, disappeared after killing Greta Alfieri. Dr. Claps, devastated and guilt-ridden by Greta's death, has been on a man-hunt for Riondino ever since. Meanwhile, an American girl disappears on the 382nd step of the Cerro trail in Guayaquil, Ecuador. No one saw her disappear. Who took her? And how? When the US authorities contact Claps, he is certain that it must be Riordino. But, unlike Riondino's other victims, the girl has disappeared into thin air.