A razor-sharp analysis of the increasing – and terrifying – parallels between Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia, from the former BBC Moscow Correspondent and Sunday Times bestselling author Martin Sixsmith.Long Live the King.Since his re-election as US president, Donald Trump has made good on things he only dreamed of accomplishing in his first term. He has smashed constitutional constraints, trampled on free speech, suborned the ...

Meet maverick British detective DI Skelgill... "mad, bad and just a little bit cozy."WHEN A HIGH-FLYING ADMAN is stabbed to death on a company weekend in the English Lake District, local detective Daniel Skelgill finds himself wrenched from his rural Cumbrian comfort zone.As the investigation unfolds, DI Skelgill is led a merry dance between London and Edinburgh, at every turn confronted by uncooperative suspects – colleagues, wife and lovers of the deceased – each of whom ...

Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey’s wonderfully witty and Wildean quartet of biographies, stands out as one of the most radical and groundbreaking works of its genre. With relentless precision, Strachey explores the lives of four exemplars of the Victorian age: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon, irreverently bringing to light the flaws, strengths, ambitions and hypocrisies of these treasured legends. The combination of thrilling and imaginative narr...

British history is a rollercoaster ride of power struggles and family intrigues, imperial conquest and class struggles, plagues and religious wars—and it’s all in this audiobook. That, plus the liveliest cast of characters found anywhere outside of the King James Bible. Whether you confuse your Tudors with your Stuarts, or wouldn’t know Catherine Parr from Catherine Howard, this is the perfect guide for you. From Stonehenge to Hadrian’s Wall, the Magna Carta to mad King George, the Battle ...

Oliver Twist is a poor orphan in a cruel society. Maltreated from birth, he escapes only to become an accidental member of a gang of pickpockets and robbers. Briefly rescued, he is then kidnapped as part of a plot to defraud him of his inheritance, and his prospects seem as bleak as his surroundings. But one member of the gang won’t let hope die whatever the cost. Charles Dickens transformed this dark fable on the Poor Laws into one of the bestloved books in English, filling it with brilli...

1935: Cal Jardine is a soldier of fortune. Forced to leave Hamburg, he is recruited by a secretive British committee to smuggle guns to Abyssinia. But first Jardine must procure the weapons from Romania. Taken to the Horn of Africa, the arms are then transported over a harsh landscape into the hands of the Ethiopian Army. On his travels Jardine acquires more baggage than he anticipated, including a beautiful, but difficult American female in search of her archaeologist mother, a determined...

In a forgotten valley on the Devon-Somerset border, the seasons unfold, marked only by the rituals of the farming calendar. Twelve-year-old Leopold Sercombe skips school to help his father, a carter. Skinny and pale, Leo dreams of a job on the estate's stud farm. He is breaking a colt for his father when a boy dressed in a Homburg, breeches and riding boots appears. Peering under the stranger's hat, he discovers Miss Charlotte, the Master's daughter. And so begins a frie...

"We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom."From the sweeping grandeur of War and Peace to the heartbreaking intricacies of Anna Karenina, and the powerful exploration of redemption and social justice of Resurrection, Leo Tolstoy: The Complete Novels contains unabridged recordings of the major novels by one of literature's greatest storytellers.The titles included in this collection are:

These five chilling nineteenth-century ghost stories from both sides of the Atlantic include some of the best in the genre. Bierce is well-known, but To Let by B. M. Croker and The Upper Berth provide moments to tingle the spine, as does An Account of Some Strange Disturbances by Le Fanu. This collection, which is further enhanced by suitably chilling music, was originally released under the title Classic Chilling Tales III.

Collected by the author over many years, these stories from the yoga and Zen traditions are the flint and steel that strike a spark that lights up the mind with insights that one should ponder daily to bring to light ever deeper meaning. They may be similar in intent to Zen koans - but they are rather different in content.In many Zen koans, someone says or does something extraordinarily inappropriate, which catches your attention just because it's extraordinary - but afterwards the...

While many accounts of the Buddha’s life mix legend and history, this compelling new biography discriminates between fact and fiction to reveal Gautama, the remarkable human being behind the myth, and sheds new light on his teachings.Plunging us into the noises, smells and jostling streets of Gautama’s world, Vishvapani Blomfield brings the Buddha to life as a passionate and determined individual - a strikingly modern figure who rejected contemporary beliefs and found his own answe...

In Three Fires, award-winning author Denise Mina re-imagines the 'Bonfire of the Vanities', a series of fires lit throughout Florence at the end of the fifteenth century - inspired by the fanatical Girolamo Savonarola.Girolamo Savonarola was a Dominican friar living in Florence at the tail end of the fifteenth century. An anti-corruption campaigner his hellfire preaching increasingly spilled over into tirades against all luxuries that tempted people towards sin. These sermons led t...