Showing results by narrator "John Lee" in All Categories

The modern audience hasn't had a chance to truly appreciate the unknowing dread that readers would have felt when reading Bram Stoker's original 1897 manuscript. Most modern productions employ campiness or sound effects to try to bring back that gothic tension, but we've tried something different. By returning to Stoker's original storytelling structure - a series of letters and journal entries voiced by Jonathan Harker, Dr. Van Helsing, and other characters - with an all-star cast of narrators, we've sought to recapture its originally intended horror and power.

On the day after Halloween, in the year 1327, four children slip away from the cathedral city of Kingsbridge. They are a thief, a bully, a boy genius, and a girl who wants to be a doctor. In the forest they see two men killed. As adults, their lives will be braided together by ambition, love, greed and revenge. They will see prosperity and famine, plague and war.

Mixing a bit of seventeenth-century French history with a great deal of invention, Alexandre Dumas tells the tale of young D'Artagnan and his musketeer comrades, Porthos, Athos, and Aramis. Together they fight to foil the schemes of the brilliant, dangerous Cardinal Richelieu, who pretends to support the king while plotting to advance his own power. Bursting with swirling swordplay, swooning romance, and unforgettable figures.

Christmas 1558, and young Ned Willard returns home to Kingsbridge to find his world has changed. The ancient stones of Kingsbridge Cathedral look down on a city torn by religious hatred. Europe is in turmoil as high principles clash bloodily with friendship, loyalty and love, and Ned soon finds himself on the opposite side from the girl he longs to marry, Margery Fitzgerald. Then Elizabeth Tudor becomes queen and all of Europe turns against England.

International number-one best seller Ken Follett returns with The Evening and the Morning, a thrilling and addictive novel from the master of historical fiction. It is 997 CE, the end of the Dark Ages, and in England one man's ambition to make his abbey a centre of learning will take the listener on an epic journey into a historical past rich with ambition and rivalry, death and birth, love and hate. Thirty years ago, Ken Follett published his most popular novel, The Pillars of the Earth, which has sold more than 27 million copies worldwide.

A huge novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women. It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London.

The once-utopian Chasm City - a domed human settlement on an otherwise inhospitable planet---has been overrun by a virus known as the Melding Plague, capable of infecting any body, organic or computerized. Now, with the entire city corrupted - from the people to the very buildings they inhabit---only the most wretched sort of existence remains. The stakes are raised when Tanner Mirabel's search brings him face to face with a centuries-old atrocity that history would rather forget.

As the decisions made in the corridors of power bring the world to the brink of oblivion, five families from across the globe are brought together in an unforgettable tale of passion and conflict during the Cold War. When Rebecca Hoffmann, a teacher in East Germany, finds herself pursued by the secret police, she discovers that she has been living a lie. Her younger brother, Walli, longs to escape across the Berlin Wall to Britain to become part of the burgeoning music scene.

1792. A tyrannical government is determined to make England a mighty commercial empire. In France, Napoleon Bonaparte begins his rise to power, and with dissent rife, France’s neighbours are on high alert. Unprecedented industrial change sweeps the land, making the lives of the workers in Kingbridge’s prosperous cloth mills a misery. Rampant modernization and dangerous new machinery are rendering jobs obsolete and tearing families apart. Now, as international conflict nears, a story of a small group of Kingsbridge people will come to define the struggle of a generation.

Dashing young Edmond Dantès has everything: a fine reputation, an appointment as captain of a ship, and the heart of a beautiful woman. But his perfect life is shattered when three jealous friends conspire to destroy him. Falsely accused of a political crime, Dantès is locked away for life in the infamous Chateau d'If prison. But it is there that Dantès learns of a vast hidden treasure.

Charlie Trumper's earliest memory is of hearing his grandfather's sales patter from behind his costermonger's barrow. When Grandpa Charlie dies, young Charlie wants nothing more than to follow in his footsteps - his burning ambition is to own a shop that will sell everything: 'The Biggest Barrow in the World'. Charlie's progress from the teeming streets of Whitechapel to the elegance of Chelsea Terrace is only a few miles as the crow flies.

Five linked families live out their destinies as the world is shaken by tyranny and war in the mid-20th century. Berlin in 1933 is in upheaval. Eleven-year-old Carla von Ulrich struggles to understand the tensions disrupting her family as Hitler strengthens his grip on Germany. Into this turmoil step her mother’s formidable friend and former British MP, Ethel Leckwith, and her student son, Lloyd, who soon learns for himself the brutal reality of Nazism.

There is a paradox. As children, most of us think we are highly creative; as adults many of us think we are not. What changes as children grow up? Organizations across the globe are competing in a world that is changing faster than ever. They say they need people who can think creatively, who are flexible and quick to adapt.

In 1581, Emilia Bassano is allowed no voice of her own. But as the Lord Chamberlain’s mistress she has access to the theatre, and finds a way to bring her work to the stage secretly. And yet, creating some of the world’s greatest dramatic masterpieces comes at a great cost: by paying a man for the use of his name, she will write her own out of history. In modern day New York, playwright Melina Green is determined to see one of her shows make the stage. After years of struggle to be recognised she has finally written again, inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor.

Over the span of 24 fascinating lectures, you'll take on the role of a history detective to discover the truth about the Persian Empire. You'll discover the key to the empire's success lay in its greatest rulers, each of whom played a critical role in shaping and strengthening a civilization we still remember today. Take this opportunity to complete your understanding of the ancient world and discover the humanity of the ancient Persians.

The year is 1992. Ka, a poet and political exile, returns to Turkey as a journalist, assigned to investigate troubling reports of suicide in the small and mysterious city of Kars on the Turkish border. The snow is falling fast as he arrives, and soon all roads are closed. There's a 'suicide epidemic' amongst young religious women forbidden to wear their headscarves.

In the 1960s, four ambitious new MPs take their seats at Westminster. Over three decades they share the turbulent passions and upheavals of the race for power with their wives and families, men and women caught up in a dramatic game for the highest stakes of all. But only one man can gain the ultimate goal - the office of Prime Minister.

Adam Scott listens to the reading of his father's will, aware that the contents can only be meagre. The Colonel, after all, had nothing to leave - except a letter he had never opened himself, a letter that can only bring further disgrace to the family name. Against his mother's advice, Adam opens the letter, and immediately realizes his life can never be the same again. The contents leave him with no choice but to follow a course his father would have described as a matter of honour.

Turkey's greatest living novelist guides us through the monuments and lost paradises, dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets, and waterways of Istanbul - the city of his birth and the home of his imagination.

It is a perfect spring day in Istanbul. Kemal, a wealthy heir, is about to become engaged to the aristocratic Sibel when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shop girl. He falls in love and finds his established world of Westernized families, opulent parties, society gossip and dining room rituals is shattered.