James Philip has 31 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 10 narrators. The most-rated is Cricket on the Beach.
Puerto Argentino: A Timeline 10/27/62 Story
Summary
This is the second of a trilogy of Timeline 10/27/62 novellas about the invasion and the occupation of the Falkland Islands in 1964. Nearly four years have gone by since the Argentine seized by force majeure the Falkland Islands Dependencies from the United Kingdom. To the Argentine Republic the archipelago, Las Malvinas, and all the other British territories taken by force of arms – South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands and the British research stations in the Antarctic – is now a part of Argentina. The situation is so calm that the officers and men of the Argentine garrison of Las Malvinas, are bringing their families out to the islands as if the conquered territories are as safe as any mainland base. As time goes by the last vestiges of British administration are being systematically erased. Stanley, the capital of Las Malvinas is now Puerto Argentino, East Falkland is Isla Soledad and all bar a handful Kelpers (the name the former Falkland Islanders by which they referred to each other) have long been exiled. The atrocities of the invasion, the scars of the fighting in April 1964 have been built over, forgotten by the new masters of Las Malvinas; nobody thinks the British are ever coming back but that does not mean that the occupiers are not forever looking over their shoulders. Yet the colonists and their families still keep coming; even though the surge of national pride – almost national rebirth – which initially followed the re-taking of the Argentine’s "lost" territories in the ocean the Junta now calls the Mar del Argentina, has long since run its course. The first visit by the US Navy since April 1964 seems to offer some hope that the international community has put the "Malvinas" issue to bed. But is everything quite what it seems? Back in 1964, in a world still struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of the October War, the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands had been a faraway thing that had happened to a couple of thousand kelpers living on a few islands in the South Atlantic, 8,000 miles from England, about which the British people in their post-October War travails, knew little and cared less. Now, complacency in Buenos Aires and the threat of further budget cuts is beginning to question the ability of the Argentine forces of Las Malvinas to defend the conquests of 1964. The British have not returned, yet. But does that mean that they well never return?
©2020 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip (P)2020 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip
Operation Anadyr
Summary
The Cuban Missiles Crisis didn't end peacefully and the '"swinging sixties" didn't happen. On Saturday, October 27, 1962, American and Soviet geopolitical brinkmanship resulted in the most terrible war in human history. The forever changed world that remained when the thermonuclear fires had burned themselves out is the world of Timeline 10/27/62. Operation Anadyr is Book One of the alternative history series, Timeline 10/27/62. Operation Anadyr is about the first hours of that alternative history of the world. It is about living through the cataclysm, and wondering how it happened. How did the unthinkable happen? How could our leaders let it happen? How does one quantify the magnitude of the disaster? And what of the survivors living with the aftermath of a world gone mad? Operation Anadyr confronts these questions. In Operation Anadyr, the anatomy of the disaster is writ plain and the men and women who survive it begin to find their voices. Why Timeline 10/27/62? Because that date is a very significant date in my life and in the lives of everybody else in the world alive today because on Saturday, October 27, 1962, World War III almost started. World War III probably wouldn't have lasted very long, because one side would have been swiftly obliterated in the first 24 hours of a cataclysm that would have left vast tracts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabited and uninhabitable for decades to come. Perhaps, a quarter of the world's population would have died in the firestorm or in the starvation and the plagues that would have ensued in the following weeks and months.
©2014 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip (P)2016 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip
A Kelper's Tale
Summary
Kelps are seaweeds which proliferate in veritable forests around the shores of the Falkland Islands. To kelp, is to harvest the same from the sea, dry it, and burn it to produce a soda ash primarily consisting of sodium carbonate with high concentrations of iodine and alkali, traditionally used in soap and glass. For as long as anybody recollected, Falkland Islanders had proudly referred to themselves as kelpers. A Kelper’s Tale is the third in the trilogy of stories-novellas about the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Island dependencies in April 1964, and its aftermath. La Argentina and Puerto Argentino tell two histories, that of the invasion and the years of occupation, and ask questions about where truth really lies. A Kelper’s Tale is one young woman’s story, told in her own words; of a drably idyllic childhood at the ends of the earth, of invasion, exile, repatriation and a growing awareness that ultimately, the first and last casualty of war is truth. Over four years have passed since the bloody events of 1964. What will the new year of 1969 bring for the peoples of the United Kingdom, the Argentine Republic, the occupiers of the Falklands Archipelago and the once British administered dependencies in the South Atlantic? The Argentine believe the time of danger, that the likelihood of an attempt to reconquer Las Malvinas has passed but perhaps, the shape of the future is written between the lines of the story of one young woman?
Public Domain (P)2020 J.P. Coldham writing as James Philip
Lord Hawke
Summary
Lord Hawke was captain of Cambridge University, Yorkshire, and England in a time when, as A.A. Thomson observed, "there were giants in the land". His era is now lost to us, shrouded by the fog of war and by economic and social revolutions that would beggar the Victorian imagination. That despite everything English cricket not only survives in its traditional form, but thrives, is in no small measure the enduring achievement of three men, three eminent Victorians who devoted the greater part of their lives to cricket, and who largely determined the form in which it has come down to later generations: W.G. Grace, Lord Harris, and Lord Hawke. Tradition has it that W.G. Grace was the ultimate exponent of the game, that Lord Harris was its foremost administrator, and that Lord Hawke was its great exporter. Of Martin Bladen Hawke, seventh Baron Hawke of Towton, Sir Pelham "Plum" Warner was to say "he was the Odysseus of cricket" and that "he was the first to preach the gospel of cricket throughout the Empire". Hawke was an indefatigable organizer and leader of tours to Australasia, North and South America, India and Ceylon, South Africa, and the West Indies. But the exportation of cricket to the dominions was the beginning, rather than the end of his unique contribution to English cricket. The true object of his life’s work was the construction and consolidation of an indestructible cricketing institution; the Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Hawke first captained Yorkshire in the Championship in 1883. Although he nominally retained the captaincy until he formally resigned in favour of E.J. Radcliffe in November 1910, he played his last county match at the end of the 1909 season. The profit and loss account of the Yorkshire captaincy in the serious business of county cricket between 1883 and 1909 tells its own story. Yorkshire won the Championship eight times under Hawke’s stewardship. He was also the man who sacked Bobby Peel, the greatest left-arm bowler of his era, and infamously declaimed "Pray God, no professional shall ever captain England", sentiments which very nearly damned him forever. A man of contradictions, strong convictions, more often than not his own worst enemy, this cricketing biography goes behind the myth of the man looking to paint a picture of one of cricket’s great men. Love or loathe him, Martin Bladen Hawke’s life was singular. Join the author on his voyage of discovery. Please note: This is the second edition of a book first published in 1990.
©2020 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip (P)2021 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip
La Argentina: A Timeline 10/27/62 Story
Summary
This is the first story of a trilogy of Timeline 10/27/62 novellas about the invasion and the occupation of the Falkland Islands in 1964 and its aftermath.... Less than 18 months have passed since the October War and the war in the South Atlantic begins.... In Buenos Aires, there were three of them: the physician doctor who hoped he might heal his divided nation, and the two generals, one the great puppeteer of his generation of officers, the other a would-be technocrat who almost but not quite knew what he was doing. And, forgotten nowadays, there was the admiral who went along with the greatest gamble in his fragile country’s history and privately, regretted ever-after. On the night of second/third April, 1964, Operation Southern Justice, the liberation of the Malvinas and the lost South Atlantic territories, entered its end game as the assault force, supported by every seaworthy ship of the Argentine Navy came ashore on the Falklands Islands, and eight hundred miles away attempted to land at Leith Harbour on South Georgia. Operation Southern Justice had been envisaged as a massive show of strength which would, almost bloodlessly awe and overwhelm the weak British forces on East Falkland and South Georgia. At the same moment, Argentine Marines were going ashore on East Falkland. Two Red Army tank armies – their entire surviving Soviet strategic reserve – was crashing into Iran, and the Russian Black Sea Fleet was moving to seize Malta, was unknown to the ruling clique in Buenos Aires. However, any sense that the liberation of the Malvinas had been timed serendipitously was soon dispelled by the events of the following hours and days. The struggle for the Malvinas was only just beginning. The second story in this trilogy, Puerto Argentino, will be released in March 2020, and the third, A Kelper's Tale, in May 2020. Taken together, the Falklands Trilogy of stories will add context to the Timeline 10/27/62 main series books Armadas (available in October 2020) and Smoke on the Water (available in April 2021).
©2020 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip (P)2020 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip
Cuba Libre
Summary
This was where it had started; and ought to have ended. Cuba... Initially, it was estimated that over 90 percent of the population of the main island - over six million men, women, and children - had died on the day of the war. In fact, although the western provinces of Cuba were devastated and the capital Havana utterly wrecked, some two million people had probably survived the US Air Force retaliatory strike, mainly because great care had been taken to avoid the US enclave at Guantanamo Bay, situated near its southeastern extremity from being inundated with radioactive fallout. Fatefully, in early 1963, the decision had been made - in great secrecy - to contract the problem of ensuring a second Castro-like regime could never again arise to the CIA and its exiled Cuban surrogates. Thereafter, distracted by other more pressing matters, the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations had tried their level best to forget all about "that goddamned island"! However, that was then, and much blood and treasure later, the still secret, dirty war for the eastern province of Oriente - known as Santiago de Cuba before 1905 - has sucked in 30,000 US infantrymen and marines to prop up Central Intelligence’s brigade of as many as 20,000 former mobsters, Batista-loyalists, and soldiers of fortune. It is 1969. The casualties are mounting, and the new man in the Oval Office, working through his in-tray has got to the file marked "Cuba: Options for Consideration". There is a great deal of unfinished business for the newly inaugurated 39th president of the United States, and "Cuba: Options for Consideration" file has briefly found its way to the top of his to-do list!
©2020 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip (P)2020 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip
Red Dawn
Summary
It is January 1964 in an alternative timeline in which the Swinging '60s never happened. A little over a year has passed since the Cuban Missile Crisis of late October 1962. Red Dawn, spawned as Josef Stalin's answer to America's atomic monopoly in the late 1940s, has fomented full-scale insurrection in Washington, DC, and almost sparked a war between the world's two remaining nuclear superpowers. But the real fury of Red Dawn - Krasnaya Zarya - is unspent, and time is running out. Now is a time for charismatic leaders to come forward....
©2015 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip (P)2019 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip
Islands of No Return
Summary
Harry's life goal was to get into the SAS. When we meet him in 1981 he is in the process of achieving his dream. No sooner has he lived one dream than he bumps into another, Sarah, the love of his life. What could go wrong? Well, quite a lot. For example, an idiot Latin American dictator might invade the Falkland Islands within months of Harry earning the right to wear the legendary winged dagger cap badge.
©2013 James P. Coldham writing as JAMES PHILIP (P)2015 James P. Coldham writing as JAMES PHILIP
Winter's Return (Guy Winter Mysteries Book 4)
Summary
Winter's Return is the fourth full length Guy Winter mystery. It is set in England in the Second World War in the third month of the devastating night Blitz which followed the defeat of the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. In Winter's Return Guy Winter returns to London, a city at once reeling under the relentless nightly bombardment, yet oddly growing ever more accustomed to the ongoing nightmare. Shunned and unwanted by Scotland Yard the Mystery Man – a sobriquet earned long before the war because he was the man the Yard turned to solve the mysteries no other man could resolve – is assigned to S Division in Hampstead. However, his exile is short-lived. Within days he and his faithful sergeant, George Ransom, are heading for the English Midlands, where on a country estate a few miles south of Coventry, Helen Chase, the nation's most famous actress has been grievously wounded in an apparent orgy of mindless violence that has claimed several other lives in the most bizarre gruesome of circumstances. Little does Guy Winter suspect that no matter how far he travels from London the ghostly echo of the Whitechapel Murders of 1888, the machinations of his former MI5 associates and the extraordinary revelations of an exotic German spy captured six weeks before in Scotland, will eventually catch up with him. But before he must confront one fate, he must confront other demons in the fires consuming Coventry, the ‘city of spires'. PLEASE BE AWARE – CLIFF-HANGER ENDING! * * * The Guy Winter Mysteries are:- Prologue: Winter's Pearl Book 1: Winter's War Book 2: Winter's Revenge Book 3: Winter's Exile Book 4: Winter's Return Book 5: Winter's Spy (Available in 2016)
©2015-2065 James P. Coldham writing as JAMES PHILIP (P)2017 James P. Coldham writing as JAMES PHILIP
Empire Day
Summary
New York - July 1976 - in a world in which New England remains the sparkling jewel in the crown of the British Empire. It is the day before Empire Day - July 4 - the day each year when the British Empire marks the brutal crushing of the rebellion dignified by the treachery of the 56 delegates to the Continental Congress who were so foolhardy as to sign the infamous Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on that day of infamy in 1776. It is nearly 200 years since George Washington was killed and his Continental Army was destroyed in the Battle of Long Island, and now New England, that most quintessentially loyal and "English" imperial fiefdom - at least in the original, or "First 13" colonies - is about to celebrate its devotion to the Crown and the Old Country, of which it still views, in the main, as the "mother country". Yet all is not roses. Since 1776, in a world of empires, the British Empire has grown and prospered until now, it stands alone as the ultimate arbiter of global war and peace. The Royal Navy has enforced the global Pax Britannia for more than a century since the World War of the 1860s established a lasting but increasingly tenuous "peace" between the great powers. Nonetheless, while elsewhere the empire may be creaking at the seams, struggling to come to terms with a growing desire for self-determination, thus far, the Pax Britannica has survived - buttressed by the commercial and industrial powerhouse of New England stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Northwest - intact for all that barely a year goes by without the outbreak of another small, colonial war somewhere.... This said, the British "Imperial System" remains the envy of its friends and enemies alike, and nowhere has it been so successful as in North America, where peace and prosperity has ruled in the vast Canadian dominions and the 29 old and recent colonies of the Commonwealth of New England for the best part of two centuries. Empire Day might not have originally been conceived as a celebration of the saving of the first British Empire, but as time has gone by, it has come to symbolize the one ineluctable truth about the empire: that New England is the rock upon which all else stands, an empire within an empire that is greater than the sum of all the other parts of the great imperium ruled from London. In past times, a troubling question has been whispered in the corridors of power in London: What would happen to the empire - and the Pax Britannica - if the British hold on New England was ever to be loosened? Generations of British politicians have always known that if the question was ever to be asked again in earnest, it has but one answer. If the New World ever discovers again a single voice supporting any kind of meaningful estrangement from the Old Country, it would surely be the end of the empire....
©2018 James Philip Coldham (P)2019 James Philip Coldham
Cricket on the Beach
Summary
Cricket on the Beach is book one of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62 - Australia. Timeline 10/27/62 is set in a world in which the Cuban Missiles Crisis went wrong and the swinging '60s never happened. The thermonuclear madness might not have reached as far south as Australasia, but in the weeks and months after the Cuban Missiles War, many more people might have succumbed to the "On the Beach" syndrome had it not been for the distraction of a unique sporting odyssey. It happened that on the day the world went mad, the English cricket team was in Perth, Western Australia, on the opening leg of its campaign to win back The Ashes. Touring under the auspices of the Marylebone Cricket Club - the MCC - and playing international, or test, matches as England, the tourists under the captaincy of that most quintessentially dashing of batsmen, Edward Ralph "Ted" Dexter, the eyes of the British and Australian sporting publics were not, on the day of World War III, fixed on an island in the Caribbean of which few knew anything, and most cared less, but upon the forthcoming titanic struggle down under. Cricket on the Beach is a cricket book; a history of the last MCC tour to Australia. The tour that began in one world and ended in another.
©2020 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip (P)2020 James P. Coldham writing as James Philip