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Audiobooks Narrated by Richard Burnip
Browse audiobooks narrated by Richard Burnip, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
"Ingebor Bullivant, the put-upon daughter of the Bishop of Redchester, suddenly rebels and takes a week's tour to Lucerne. Constantly in the company of a ponderous German pastor, she is put into a quandary when he proposes marriage. Faced with her father's wrath on her return, she accepts Herr Dremmel with simple relief. But as a pastor's wife in East Prussia, she finds she has merely exchanged one set of rules for another..."
"Ten essays on how reading and meaningfully engaging with literature can help us live better, more purposeful lives.
How do we live fully?
How do we live successfully?
Adrift in an anchorless world, we often worry about where we are heading. What meaning can we hope to find our modern, secular life? The answer, Ben Hutchinson explains, can be found by looking to writers and thinkers to help us live more purposefully, more mindfully – more fully.
Interweaving his own (mis-)adventures with those of authors such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and Joan Didion, On Purpose proposes ten ways in which reading and writing encourage us to ask difficult questions, project our minds into the past and future, and see ourselves and others differently.
Engaging, uplifting and aphoristic, this book is for anyone who has lost their sense of direction or wishes to radically transform the way they live."
"Mark Gregory Pegg’s history of the Middle Ages opens and closes with martyrdom, the first that of a young Roman mother in a North African amphitheater in 203 and the second a French girl burned to death beside the Seine in 1431. Both Vibia Perpetua and Jeanne la Pucelle died for their Christian beliefs, yet that for which they willingly sacrificed their lives connects and separates them. Both were divinely inspired, but one believed her deity shared the universe with other gods, and the other knew that her Creator ruled heaven and earth. Between them, across the centuries, lives were shaped by the ebb and flow of the divine and the human. Here is the story of people struggling in life and in death to understand themselves and their relationship to God.
Beatrice’s Last Smile interweaves vivid portraits of such individuals to offer a sweeping and immersive story. Some are of enduring renown—Augustine, Muhammad, Charlemagne, Heloise—and others are obscure. An Egyptian youth fighting demons in the desert as the first monk; a Briton becomes a holy man after enslavement in Ireland; an emperor in Constantinople watches as rioters torch the city; an old Syrian monk advises the English on sex; the soul of a Merovingian noble flies through the night sky to heaven; an Irish warrior surfs the waves like a dolphin as he flees the Vikings; a crusader’s boots squelch with blood on the streets of Jerusalem; a troubadour sings of love; a Muslim lord expresses admiration of the Templars; a pope proclaims that Christendom encompasses alltime and space; a barefoot Franciscan friar visits the Great Khan of the Mongols; a Parisian rabbi argues for the holiness of the Talmud; and a poet laments being alive amid the horror of the Black Death. Together, they take readers from the vastness of the Roman Empire to small communities between the Mediterranean and the North Sea, from the nomads of the Asian steppes to the triumphant Church of Latin Christendom.
Beatrice’s Last Smile offers a pulsating history of the West: the passionate belief in the old gods that yields to a cosmos shaped by one; the transition from a penitential culture to a confessional one; the universal obsession with imitating Christ. The book is named for the moment in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy when his long-dead love, Beatrice, smiles one final time at Dante in paradise before turning away to look eternally upon the face of God.
Mark Gregory Pegg’s epic narrative captures a millennium within that fleeting smile, in ways that modern readers will find illuminating and haunting."
"Bestselling authors Jonathan Levi and Emma French use their unrivalled access to the secret world of police protection officers as they tell the dramatic and astonishing stories of bravery, and the decisions that can change lives in a heartbeat.
With the constant threats now posed by gangs, drugs turf wars and terrorism, the world of police protection has changed almost beyond recognition. But the story of these incredible officers is also the story of Britain's most dramatic and traumatic news events. In Bodyguard: The Real Story we meet individuals with first-hand recollection of these indelible events with powerful stories to tell."
"‘A brilliantly conceived and audacious novel from one of our most consistently intelligent and beguiling writers’ William Boyd
‘Surefooted and emotionally generous … A serious achievement’ Guardian
‘Masterful’ Telegraph
‘A revelation’ Spectator
The new novel from the Booker shortlisted author of The Northern Clemency
An order is issued. A population may not meet, or touch or speak to each other. They stay inside, and the reality of a few streets in a capital city emerges. An underground river is discovered; an urban grove of pomeloes emerges. The imagination reaches out, and makes sense of the world. By the sea, two men walk into a future of uncertain violence.
There is time now to see the human dramas within a hundred yards (an abduction, a quiet breakdown, an outbreak of violence, a young mind beginning to stretch itself); to wait for the weather to change; to understand that what lies underneath this part of the city are seasonally wet pastures and woodlands.
Written in four parts, To Battersea Park explores the strata and sediment of a single place and time. It shows what brings us together, through love, through the clashes of what we want to do and what the world wants to do with us. Set in a large crowded city where we are forbidden to approach strangers, this is about what we share: humanity, imagination, and the love that emerges from many acts of telling.
‘Electrifying … works like this… allow the imagination to roam free and wild’ Observer
‘Wise, ingenious and passionate’ TLS
‘Magnificently succeeds in excavating the sedimentary layers of a neighbourhood in lockdown to reveal – hilariously, tenderly, shockingly – how we exist both in intimacy and ignorance of those we live among’ Financial Times
‘An engrossing human drama’ The Times
‘An imaginative tour de force’ Mick Herron, author of Bad Actors
‘An utterly engrossing skein of narratives, beautifully written and often disturbing’ Lissa Evans, author of V for Victory"
"For all the horrifying statistics of the number infected by COVID-19, multiply by a factor of 20 to approximate how many worldwide are suffering stress, depression, relationship breakdown and even suicide, as a direct consequence of Coronavirus. In this straight-talking, pragmatic, but hard-hitting exposé, practising psychiatrist Raj Persaud argues for simple, yet powerful, mental strategies to immunise individuals against the panic of the pandemic. For all the lip-service played to the importance of well-being, just why have the known strongest injections of inspiration remained shielded from the public? As well as a how-to guide, the author offers some fascinating insights into just what's been going on. Trump, Boris Johnson, and senior officials like Dominic Cummings appeared to act increasingly bizarrely. Did the strain infect the inner workings of governments around the world? Did those in command go a bit ‘corona crazy’? Exactly why did the UK Health Minister Matt Hancock cry on camera? Learn how to master boredom, loss, scams, excessive hand washing, intimate relationships, chronic worry and the media hype."
"1981
Argentina is in the grip of a brutal military dictatorship.Inspector Joaqun Alzada's work in the Buenos Aires police force exposes him to the many realities of life under a repressive regime: desperate people, terrified people and - worst of all - missing people.Personally, he prefers to stay out of politics, enjoying a simple life with his wife Paula. But when his revolutionary brother Jorge is disappeared, Alzada will stop at nothing to rescue him.
TWENTY YEARS LATER...The country is in the midst of yet another devastating economic crisis and riots are building in the streets of Buenos Aires. This time Alzada is determined to keep his head down and wait patiently for his retirement. But when a dead body lands in a skip behind the morgue and a woman from one of the city's wealthiest families goes missing, Alzada is forced to confront his own involvement in one of the darkest periods in Argentinian history - a time of collective horror and personal tragedy.
“Repentance is an apt title for this very impressive debut... It is an evocative crime thriller with a likeable, self-aware protagonist, and also skillfully explores the darkest period in Argentina’s modern history.”— The Financial Times
“This is an astonishingly assured first novel, written in English by a Spanish lawyer, that is both funny and moving.” — The Sunday Times Crime Club
“Aficionados of mysteries with a hard edge will welcome Inspector Alzada.” — Publishers Weekly
“A dark political thriller guaranteed to satisfy fans of Andrea Camilleri, Donna Leon, and Leonardo Padura.” — Booklist"
"In 1995, twelve-year-old Sidney Parsons was savagely murdered by two boys his own age. No reason was ever given for this terrible crime, and the 'Demonic Duo' who killed him were imprisoned until their release in 2002, when they were given new identities and lifetime anonymity. Online journalist Scott King investigates the lead-up and aftermath of the killing, uncovering dark and fanciful stories of demonic possession, and encountering a village torn apart by this unspeakable act. But soon King himself becomes a target, with secrets from his own past dredged up and threats escalating to a terrifying level. It becomes clear that whatever drove those two boys to kill is still there, lurking, and the campaign of horror has just begun. . ."
"‘Will undoubtedly become a classic narrative of this scenically magnificent, legend-rich and geologically unique part of Scotland’ Cameron McNeish, The Herald
Rising a kilometre out of the storm-scoured waters around Scotland’s Isle of Skye is a dark battlement of pinnacles and ridgelines: the Cuillin.
Plagued by ferocious weather and built from rock that tears skin and confounds compasses, a crossing of the Cuillin is the toughest mountaineering expedition in the British Isles. But the traverse is only part of its lure. Hewn from the innards of an ancient volcano, this mountain range stands like a crown on an island drenched in intrigue. While nineteenth-century climbers flocked to the Alps, the ridge lay untrodden and unyielding. When a generation of mountaineers did come, they found a remarkable prize: the last peaks of Britain to be climbed – peaks that would be named after those who climbed them. Along the way, many others, from artists and poets to mystics and wanderers, have been lured by the Cuillin’s haunting beauty and magic. Those who have been seduced by the deadly magic of these mountains attest to the complexity of humans’ relationship with the intrigue of our wildest, most dangerous places.
The Black Ridge is a journey through the history and into the heights of the Cuillin of Skye – from the ridge’s violent birth to the tales of its pioneers, its thrills, its myths and its monsters. From a night spent in a cave beneath its highest peak to the ascent of its most infamous pinnacle, this is an adventure on foot through all seasons across the most mesmerising mountain range in Britain."
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