Showing results by narrator "Allan Corduner" in All Categories

Once upon a time in an enormous forest lived a woodcutter and his wife. The woodcutter is very poor and a war rages around them, making it difficult for them to put food on the table. Yet every night, his wife prays for a child. A Jewish father rides on a train holding twin babies. His wife no longer has enough milk to feed both children. In hopes of saving them both, he wraps his daughter in a shawl and throws her into the forest. While foraging for food, the woodcutter’s wife finds a bundle, a baby girl wrapped in a shawl.

Paul Sellar is an award-winning playwright working in theatre, film and radio. This compulsive collection brings together four of his gritty, modern thrillers, set at the intersection of the murky worlds of corrupt business and criminality.

At the Hotel Balzaar, Marta’s mother rises before the sun, puts on her uniform, and instructs Marta to roam as she will but quietly. While her mother cleans rooms, Marta slips down the back staircase to the grand lobby to chat with the bellman, study the painting of an angel’s wing over the fireplace, and watch a cat chase a mouse around the face of the grandfather clock, all the while dreaming of the return of her soldier father, who has gone missing. One day, a mysterious countess with a parrot checks in, promising a story—in fact, seven stories in all, each to be told in its proper order.

Step right up! The Amusement Park is a rich, anecdotal history that begins nine centuries ago with the "pleasure gardens" of Europe and England and ends with the most elaborate modern parks in the world. It's a history told largely through the stories of the colorful, sometimes hedonistic characters who built them. And, of course, this is a full-throttle celebration of the rides, those marvels of engineering and heart-stopping thrills from an author, Stephen Silverman, whose lifelong passion for his subject shines through.

This is a book about vulnerable animals and the men who interact with them. And it's about us. Our pasts and our present, and the way we see the world. It's about the triumph of hope, our infinite capacities to endure and to love - and how we survive through the tales we tell. Most of all, it's a story of homecoming told through a gorilla called Einstein who comes to us with a remarkable secret. He can communicate with humans through sign language.

Sixteen-year-old photography enthusiast Zoey has been fascinated by the haunted, burnt-out ruins of Medwyn Mill House for as long as she can remember - so she and her best friend, Poulton, run away from home to explore them. In 1851, 17-year-old Roan arrives at the Mill House as a ward - one of three, all with something to hide from their new guardian. 1583. Hermione, a new young bride, accompanies her husband to the wilds of North Wales where he plans to build the largest water mill and mansion in the area.

As far as the public knew, Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) did not exist. After the defeat of the French Army and Britain's retreat from the Continent in June 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill created the top-secret espionage operation to "set Europe ablaze". Of the many brave men and women conscripted, two Anglo-American recruits, the Starr brothers, stood out to become legendary figures to the guerillas, assassins, and saboteurs they led.

Three elderly tailors - a trouser-maker, a coat-maker and a waistcoat-maker - have been commissioned to make a bespoke suit for an up-and-coming politician. They have worked together for decades but have only met very rarely, although increasingly, these days, at their colleagues' funerals. The suit has been designed by Mrs White, a mysterious woman whom they've never met. Mrs White has imposed very strict rules about secrecy, and all off-cuts have to be returned to her.

I must write this account, and when I have finished, I will burn it. Buried deep within the archives of a convent in medieval France is an untold story of love, loss, and wonder, and the two girls at the heart of it all. Dolssa is an upper-crust city girl with a secret lover and an uncanny gift. Branded a heretic, she’s on the run from the friar who condemned her mother to death by fire, and wants Dolssa executed, too. Botille is a matchmaker and a tavern-keeper, struggling to keep herself and her sisters on the right side of the law in their seaside town of Bajas.

When Carrie Bradshaw in the Sex and the City movie began reading the book Love Letters of Great Men, millions of women wanted to get their hands on the book. Of course, what could be more romantic than an entire book of love letters, written by men! This edition includes love letters written by Ludwig van Beethoven, Napolean Bonaparte, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Oliver Cromwell, Pierre Curie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustave Flaubert, and many more.

A dark and humid night on a London highway… a ghostly woman asking directions… and the reader is away on a tale of deceit, murder, madness, stolen identities and scheming cads, elaborate plots and outrageous coincidences, in the company of some of the most extraordinary characters in fiction. Hailed as a classic the moment it was written in 1859, The Woman in White uses a dozen different narrators to tell the tale of a man’s determination to save the woman he loves...

Anna and the Swallow Man is a stunning, literary and wholly original debut novel that tells a new WWII story. Kraków, 1939, is no place to grow up. There are a million marching soldiers and a thousand barking dogs. And Anna Lania is just seven years old when the Germans take her father and suddenly, she’s alone. Then she meets the Swallow Man. He is a mystery, strange and tall. And, like Anna's missing father, he has a gift for languages: Polish, Russian, German, Yiddish, even Bird.

From the author of Copenhagen and Noises Off. A comedy-drama about a door manufacturing company and a fateful convention in Frankfurt. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Rosalind Ayres, Allan Corduner, David Ellenstein, Julian Holloway, Peter A. Jacobs, Martin Jarvis, Robin Goodrin Nordli, James Warwick and Michael York.

Adapted from the diaries of Richard Wagner, Beethoven’s music soars in the background as a poor young composer named Richard Wagner struggles toward Vienna to meet the composer he idealizes.

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast drama by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran. Originally broadcast in the ‘Saturday Play’ slot on 8 November 2008. Wine shop owner Gerald desperately needs money: his business is failing and the landlord has raised the cost of the lease. When he inherits a watch that used to belong to wartime Nazi Joachim Von Ribbentrop he believes that his financial troubles are over. But it sparks conflict with his wife and brother, who question the ethics of the potential sale.

Shut up in a trunk by a taciturn old sea captain with a secret, five friends—a king, a wolf, a girl, a boy, and an owl—bicker, boast, and comfort one another in the dark. Individually, they dream of song and light, freedom and flight, purpose and glory, but they all agree they are part of a larger story, bound each to each by chance, bonded by the heart’s mysteries. When at last their shared fate arrives, landing them on a mantel in a blue room in the home of two little girls, the truth is more astonishing than any of them could have imagined.