Showing results by narrator "Rupert Degas" in All Categories

Billie B Brown’s best friend, Jack, finally gets to be the star of the show in the second collection of stories from the popular Hey Jack! series. Featuring 'The New Friend', 'The Worst Sleepover', 'The Lost Reindeer', 'The Circus Lesson' and 'The Bumpy Ride'.

Titus Awakes is the fourth and last novel in the Gormenghast series and was finished by Peake’s widow, Maeve Gilmore. In this last novel, Titus has left the world of Gormenghast behind, but he remains haunted by memories of his former life. Journeying from snow-covered mountains to archipelagos strewn with coral reefs, he awakens his senses but fails to conquer his aching sense of solitude.

Thirteen-year-old Ben Tracey is looking forward to spending the summer in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where his father has been hired to examine the valuable mineral Coltan that's being mined there. They soon realise that the people living in the village near the mine are frightened and it doesn't take long for Ben and his father to discover why: behind the door of every hut there is at least one person dying or seriously ill, and no one seems to be doing anything to help.

The California desert. A four-year-old boy disappears, plunging his parents into the public hell of a media witch-hunt. But the desert is inexplicable and miraculous, and the family's fate is bound up with that of all those who have travelled before them through this brutally powerful landscape. Multilayered and a compulsively readable, Gods Without Men is a heartfelt exploration of our search for pattern and meaning in a random and chaotic universe.

Titus Groan has fled the rambling, ruined and ruinous castle of Gormenghast, desperate for a view of the world beyond. But he wasn’t prepared for this! Satellites, death-rays, sinister policemen and underworld outcasts live in a nightmarish contemporary city that feels like something by Wells, Burroughs or Philip K. Dick. Threatened and lost, he begins to miss the home he left; but surely he won’t be tempted back?

In the much-anticipated fourth Julius Zebra book, Grapple with the Greeks!, demigod Heracles promises Julius and his chums a great reward if they can help him to find the lost Golden Apple. On this madcap new adventure, our unlikely heroes will confront the Minotaur in the labyrinth and trick a 100-headed dragon at the Garden of Hesperides, and a dramatic visit to King Midas leads to a daring rescue attempt in the depths of the Underworld. But what will the ever-watchful gods on Mount Olympus have to say about their antics? A hugely enjoyable addition to this internationally popular series.

A spirited yoga teacher teams up with a dark horse partner (determined to right wrongs); and together they seek closure on the sudden and mysterious death of a friend.

Leif is not unlucky. Yes, he does split his trousers at least once a week. And yes, he's always tripping up. But he's determined to become a true Viking hero, just like his father. Can he unravel the riddles of a witch to find a magical shard of rock that has fallen from a shooting star and wield its magical powers? He will have to journey deep into the heart of polar bear country, outwitting all kinds of mythological creatures along the way.

It’s 1932, a time of crisis and doubt. Returning home on a luxury ocean liner after months abroad, Rowland Sinclair and his companions dine with a suffragette, a Bishop and a retired World Prophet. The Church encounters less orthodox religion in the Aquitania’s chandeliered ballroom, where men of God rub shoulders with mystics in dinner suits. The elegant atmosphere on board is charged with tension, but civility prevails...until people start to die.

Albert Maltz’s novel captures the racial tension of America and the failure of the American dream. As time ticks along with indifference, the inmates of Washington’s District Jail now spend their lives numbed by a daily routine behind bars, shut out of society. Each prisoner has a story: some are charged with assault, murder and manslaughter, others with forgery, robbery and larceny; others still were simply born to certain parents at a certain time in a certain country.

A palmist’s prediction leads to murder; an enigmatic woman’s lifestyle is a mystery to be solved; a ghost tries to frighten the new tenants of his home; a man has discovered the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets; a millionaire wants to be painted as a pauper. Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories is a collection of fascinating short stories which are subversive as well as entertaining.

Best known for his masterpiece of horror, Dracula, Bram Stoker wrote a number of other novels and many short stories, all on supernatural themes or filled with a physical terror reminiscent of Poe. "Dracula’s Guest" was originally part of the great novel, but was excised and published separately. Some of these stories, such as "The Squaw", "The Judge’s House" and "The Burial of the Rats", rank very high among classic tales of the macabre.

The Ragpicker—a man, bonded into a mysterious 'secondskin' that has prolonged his life after the digital apocalypse—wanders the lush, deserted Earth, haunted by failing avatars and fragmented texts. He’s searching for traces of his long-dead husband but his journey is interrupted by a girl, Ysmany, fleeing her remote village in order to save a baby orphaned by a military-grade secondskin, ‘The Server,’ the fanatical ruler of their town. Together they cross the flourishing, treacherous landscape towards sanctuary.

Billie B Brown's best friend, Jack, finally gets to be the star of the show in this first collection of five stories from the popular Hey Jack! series. Join Jack in his first collection of crazy adventures - he might be shy, but he shines in his school musical, builds excellent Lego castles and even makes his own robot costumes out of cardboard boxes!

With a horse between his thighs and a weapon in his grip, the dashing Brigadier Etienne Gerard, Colonel of the Hussars of Conflans, gallops through the Napoleonic campaigns on secret missions for his beloved Emperor and his country. He encounters danger and hair-breadth escapes but never loses his bravado, his eye for a pretty girl, his boastfulness, or his enormous vanity. Gerard is Conan Doyle’s most lovable character.

Having walked into the middle of the real reason the Hen Harriers are being shot down, Ben and Annie are captured as intruders and taken to a secure unit on a deserted area of the camp. These birds are just helpless victims in a much bigger operation - they attract too many visitors to the area and there's a top-secret piece of warfare technology being developed that needs to be kept quiet. If this weapon gets into the wrong hands it could have catastrophic worldwide effects.

This is a story from the Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories collection.

For nearly 14 years, Rowland has tried to forget, but now the past has returned. A newly discovered gun casts light on a family secret long kept...a murder the Sinclairs would prefer stayed unsolved. As old wounds tear open, the dogged loyalty of Rowland’s inappropriate companions is all that stands between him and the consequences of a brutal murder...one he simply failed to mention.

Billie B Brown’s best friend Jack is the star of the show in the third collection of stories from the popular Hey Jack! series.

The Parade's End tetralogy privileges not the conflict of World War I itself, but the impact the war had on its participants and upon society writ large. It is often referred to as one of the greatest 20th century novels, and one of the best depictions of war in literature.