Showing results by narrator "Sandra Duncan" in All Categories

In Rise Like Lions, Booker Prize winning writer Ben Okri has compiled a collection of poems that celebrate the many voices of politics, from polemics and rallying cries to lyrics and meditations. Many of these poems have resonated with readers over lifetimes and through generations, from William Blake to Marvin Gaye. In exploring the impact political poems have on ideas, vision, protest, change and truth, Okri demonstrates how the need for this strand of poetry is as great as it has ever been, and its inspiration just as powerful.

John visits his ageing mother, Mary, in her nursing home by the sea, and mourns the slow fading of her mind. Hoping to shore up her receding memory, he prompts her with songs, photographs, and questions from their shared past, taking her back to the 1940s, when she was a young woman and he a child in a small Cumbrian town. But as he rekindles her memories, it is her own mother she longs for - and John finds himself delving further back, into the secrets and silences of Mary's fractured childhood, and the unsung sorrows of her thwarted yet spirited mother, Grace.

Black Rainbow is the powerful first-person story of one woman's struggle with depression and how she managed to recover from it through the power of poetry. In 1997, Oxford graduate, working mother, and Times journalist Rachel Kelly went from feeling mildly anxious to being completely unable to function within the space of just three days.

In this version of London, there is a small, private clinic. Behind its layers of security, procedures are taking place on poor, robust teenagers from northern estates in exchange for thousands of pounds - procedures that will bring the wealthy dead back to life in these young, supple bodies for 14 days. It's an opportunity for wrongs to be righted, for fathers to meet grandsons, for scientists to see their work completed. Old wine in new bottles. But at what cost?

On a June night, Paula, a successful art dealer, lies awake. Mike, her husband of 25 years, is asleep beside her. In nearby rooms, their twin teenage children, Nick and Kate, sleep, too. The next day, Paula knows, will define all their lives. As dawn approaches, Paula recalls the years before and after her children were born. Her story is both a celebration of love possessed and a moving acknowledgement of the fear of loss, of the fragility on which even our most inward sense of who we are can rest.

The publishing house of John Murray was founded in Fleet Street in 1768 and remained a family firm over seven generations. Published to coincide with this remarkable achievement' and in the anniversary year, Dear Mr Murray is a collection of some of the best letters from the hundreds of thousands held in the John Murray Archive. They reveal not only the story of some of the most interesting and influential books in history but also the remarkable friendships - as well as occasional animosities - between author and publisher as well as readers, editors, printers and illustrators.

On 29 May, 1953, the summit of Mount Everest was finally reached. The achievement brought fame and honours to many involved - except the man who made the ascent possible. Now, for the first time, drawing upon previously unseen diaries and letters, rare archive material and interviews, Everest - The First Ascent tells the remarkable story of Griffith Pugh, the forgotten team member whose scientific breakthroughs ensured the world’s highest mountain could be climbed.

For 40 years, Willy Chapman has struck a strange but steadfast bargain between the two poles of his life: his beautiful but emotionally damaged wife and the sweet shop he runs on a South London high street. Devoted to each, he has maintained a delicate, precarious balance. Now, on a hot summer’s day, he attempts to settle his final accounts and reach an understanding with a third, disruptive element in his reckoning: his angry, unforgiving daughter.

"Housekeeper or housewife?" the soldier asks Silvana as she and eight-year-old Aurek board the ship that will take them from Poland to England at the end of the war, to Janusz, her husband. But she isn’t sure any longer that she is a wife of any kind or whether she has a house. After living wild in the forests for years, carrying a terrible secret, all Silvana knows is that she and Aurek are survivors. In Ipswich, Janusz is getting ready for the arrival of the wife and son he hasn't seen in six years. After fleeing Poland and the war that left him a deserter, he has found his family a house.

This is a story about a woman. And the truck driver who mistook her for a prostitute. The old man she robbed and the hunters who smuggled her across the border. The woman whose name she stole, the wife who turned a blind eye. This is the story of a mother searching for her child. This is a story you cannot stop thinking about.

In 1922, Christian, a young artist, travels to Weimar to begin his studies at the Bauhaus, where the avant-garde confronts conservative elements around it. With postwar Germany in turmoil, while the Bauhaus attempts to explore radical ways of thinking and living, Christian finds that love will change him forever. And in 1970s London Duncan uses his inheritance to establish the country's first gay bookshop in the face of opposition from the neighbours and victimisation by the police.

When Lily moves into Marcus' flat, she is intrigued by signs of his recently departed ex-lover. A single dress left hanging in the wardrobe, a mysterious mark on the wall, the lingering odour of jasmine. Who was this woman? And what exactly were the circumstances of her sudden disappearance? It doesn't take long for Lily's curiosity to grow into an all-pervading obsession.

'I still have that recurring fear of something happening to me before I see you again, and before I can tell you myself just how much and how often I've realised during the last few months that I love you completely and to the exclusion of all others. Remember that, because if there wasn't you, my darling Mary, the world would seem very empty and meaningless.' Mary was only 21 when she met and fell in love with the privately educated 19-year-old David in 1938.

For Eve, Irene, Betty, and Rosemary, working at the exclusive Heyworth's department store in Cambridge is a dream come true. Once the girls step inside the elegant building, the hardships of their own lives are temporarily forgotten. Serving a variety of customers, from glamorous gypsy queens to royalty and the city's fashionable elite, the store is a place where these young women can forge successful careers under the ever-watchful eye of flamboyant owner Mr Heyworth.

Introducing Interviewing by William Seymour - the winning short story of the Bookseller Futurebook audio original competition 2019. When a young job applicant is overwhelmed with anxiety attacks about an impending interview, his world seems about to implode. Worse still, the calm voice of reason in his head is no help at all...Chosen for its unique writing approach and fascinating prose, Interviewing is a piece of writing that is enhanced by a fresh, forward approach to the audio format.

It was Charles I's love for his queen, Henrietta Maria, that plummeted England into the darkness of the Civil Wars, but it was the love and loyalty of another man that sustained her through days of betrayal, destitution, and death.

Tall and brave, Harry Jermyn is captivated by the witty French princess, just 14 years old when she sails with him to Dover, queen of a land she has never seen, of a people whose language she cannot speak, who despise her for her faith - and wife of a king she has never met.

Pilgrim State is a stunning memoir which tells the story of Dorothy Walker - equal parts beautiful, headstrong, brave, and tragic. Her life is lovingly recreated by her daughter, Jacqueline, in homage to the remarkable woman she was.