Showing results by narrator "Peter Noble" in All Categories

Cuba - Culture Smart! provides essential information on attitudes, beliefs, and behavior in Cuba, ensuring that you arrive aware of basic manners, common courtesies, and sensitive issues. This concise guide tells you what to expect, how to behave, and how to establish a rapport with Cubans. This inside knowledge will enable you to feel confident in unfamiliar situations and develop trust, friendships, and successful business relationships on the largest island in the Caribbean.

It's a few days before Christmas in Versailles. Olivier has come to bury his mother, but the impending holidays and icy conditions have delayed the funeral. While trapped in limbo at his mother's flat, a chance encounter brings Olivier back in touch with childhood friend Jeanne and her blind brother, Rodolphe. Rodolphe suggests they have dinner together, along with a homeless man he's taken in. As the wine flows, dark secrets are spilled, and there's more than just hangovers to deal with the next morning...

Brian Aldiss has announced that this book, Finches of Mars, will be his final science fiction novel. And what a way to end one of the most illustrious careers in the genre. Set on the Red Planet, it follows a group of colonists and the problems they have in setting up a new society. Life can be sustained, but new life will not prosper - the women on the planet only ever give birth to stillborn children. Exploring many of the author’s classic themes, this is a landmark novel in any genre.

One night in autumn 1944, a gunshot echoes through the alleyways of a small town in occupied Poland. An SS officer is shot dead by a young Polish Jew, Margarita Ejzenstain. In retaliation his commander orders the execution of 37 Poles - one for every year of the dead man's life. First hidden by a German couple, Margarita must then flee the brutal advance of the Soviet army with her newborn baby. So begins a thrilling panorama of intermingled destinies and events that reverberate from that single act of defiance.

India is in transition. Since the publication of Culture Smart's first guide to India in 2003, the nation has been transformed from a developing third-world country into the world's fastest growing economy. This completely new and up-to-date volume by American author Becky Stephen is unrivalled.

What is the terrible secret at the heart of The King in Yellow? The forbidden play’s second act is said to drive all those who read it mad. And the sinister text casts its shadow of dread over Robert W. Chambers’s collection of weird, supernatural stories of the same name. Threaded with elements of fantasy, science fiction, the supernatural, and gothic horror, this cult classic continues to inspire the imagination of artists - from H. P. Lovecraft to the writers of HBO’s True Detective - and delight connoisseurs of the macabre.

Ethiopia - Culture Smart! provides essential information, ensuring that you arrive at your destination aware of basic manners, common courtesies, and sensitive issues. These concise guides tell you what to expect, how to behave, and how to establish a rapport with your hosts. This inside knowledge will enable you to steer clear of embarrassing gaffes and mistakes, feel confident in unfamiliar situations, and develop trust, friendships, and successful business relationships.

Daniel Amat has left Spain and all that happened there behind him. Having just achieved a brilliant role in ancient languages at Oxford University and an even more advantageous engagement, the arrival of a letter - a demand - stamped 'Barcelona' comes like a cold hand from behind. He arrives back in that old labyrinthine and near-mythic city a few days before the great 1888 World's Fair, amid dread whispers of murders - the injuries reminiscent of an ancient curse and bearing signs of the genius 16th century anatomist Vesalius.

Risk management has become a standard part of the strategic tool kit, providing leaders with a forward-looking radar to scan the future and give early warnings of approaching threats and opportunities. However, even best-in-class organizations can falter in the face of extreme risk exposure. Special circumstances demand special responses, and extreme risk exposure needs very careful handling. Routine risk management approaches will fall short, but businesses that demonstrate high flexibility and resilience will have the competitive advantage and the ability to thrive where others fail.

A young white boy and a Zulu teen grow up together, building an extraordinary friendship as they explore the rugged Drakensberg mountains around a remote South African hotel during the apartheid era. Jock and Papin forge an indelible bond while learning to love and appreciate each other’s cultures. Despite whispers from intolerant guests, the boys are oblivious to the consequences of their friendship—until society’s impossible expectations wrench them apart, leaving bitter disappointment and soul-deep wounds that will not heal.

In The Book of Tides, William Thomson took the listener on a mesmerising journey round the coast of Britain. Now he sets out with his surfboard and tidal compass to encounter the waters of the world, charting his most extraordinary sights and experiences. These include the whirlpools of the Arctic circle, the world's biggest ever surfed wave off Portugal, the strongest whirlpool in Norway and, in Australia, the most dangerous rapids known to us.

In 2012 Lenerd Louw is living the high life on Millionaires' Row in Clifton beach, Cape Town. The successful CEO of an insurance company and part-time playboy, he appears to have it all - gorgeous women, threesomes, ecstasy and cocaine on demand. But something doesn't feel right. He tries to drown a deep inner voice urging him to change his career, life - everything - by partying harder. By the end of December 2012, a massive shift occurs. He resigns as CEO, sells all his worldly possessions, and books a one-way ticket to Lima, Peru.

18th century—England is at war with the French. The East India Company is at risk of losing its trade routes. Tom Batrick arrives in London. For the past ten years, he's worked his way up the ranks on ships patrolling Canadian waters. Now, at the request of the East India Company, he is to captain the merchant ship Warley.

Ralph Wrenn went to sea at the age of ten. Now nineteen and recently promoted, he serves as the fourth officer on the HMS Kingfisher. It masquerades as a merchant ship to capture Barbary pirate vessels. On one such mission, Ralph meets a beautiful and intriguing young woman. Now, he must contend not just with battles at sea but with a beguiling stranger who is not what she appears to be.

In the dying days of South Africa's Apartheid Era, as protests around the world call for an end to minority white rule, Cobus Steyn is on patrol with his local Commando Unit near the isolated Afrikaans village where he lives. His beloved wife Sannie and their young son are at the center of his world and his news comes from Apartheid government broadcasts and alarmist gossip.

Psychologist Mailin Bjerke is due to appear on the notorious TV show Taboo, tackling its most sensational subject yet. But she never arrives at the studio. As the police struggle to find any sign of Mailin, her sister Liss, living on the edge in Amsterdam, takes matters into her own hands. Flying home to Olso, she discovers a complex backdrop of friends and enemies where no one can be relied upon to tell the truth. Her battle is made harder by the fractured memories of a childhood where Mailin was always her protector and by the secrets she must keep hidden.

Australia is different - a vast island continent with distances so great that the capital of Western Australia is closer to Singapore than it is to Sydney. The landscape embraces magnificent tropical rainforests and deserts the size of several European states; temperate areas that sustain a flourishing wine industry, making Australia the world's fourth largest wine exporter; and a 16,000-mile coastline of breathtaking beaches. Plus its unique fauna is testament to the country's down-underness.

Claymore Straker is a fugitive with a price on his head. He's wanted by the CIA for acts of terrorism he did not commit; his best friend has just been murdered; and Rania, the woman he loves, has disappeared. Betrayed by those closest to him, he must flee the sanctuary of his safe house in Cornwall and track her down.

Claymore Straker is trying to forget a violent past. Working as an oil company engineer in the wilds of Yemen, he is hijacked at gunpoint by Islamic terrorists. Clay has a choice: help uncover the cause of a mysterious sickness afflicting the village of Al Urush, close to the company's oil-processing facility, or watch Abdulkader, his driver and close friend, die.

A bomb takes out a CIA station chief in Geneva. A serial killer strikes apparently at random across the UK. In Algeria a terrorist network that controls the illicit trade in guns, drugs, oil and cigarettes is preparing to murder a hundred US and British energy workers unless a ransom is paid. The British and American intelligence services are competing to find the kidnappers for very different reasons. One person can see how everything is linked and that both MI5 and the CIA are being manipulated as part of a grotesque marketing campaign.