Piers Paul Read has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 38 ratings. The most-rated is Alive.
Alive
Summary
On October 12, 1972, a plane carrying a team of young rugby players crashed into the remote, snow-peaked Andes. Out of the 45 original passengers and crew, only 16 made it off the mountain alive. For 10 excruciating weeks, they suffered deprivations beyond imagining, confronting nature head-on at its most furious and inhospitable. And to survive, these men and women not only had to keep their faith; they had to make an impossible decision: Should they eat the flesh of their dead friends? A remarkable story of endurance and determination, Alive is the dramatic best-selling account of one of the most harrowing quests for survival in modern times.
©2002 Piers Paul Read (P)2017 Dreamscape Media, LLC
The Dreyfus Affair
Summary
July 20, 1894: The German Military Attache in Paris, Colonel Maximillien von Schwarzkoppen received a visit from a seedy-looking middle-aged Frenchman who would not give his name. He told Schwarzkoppen that he was a French army officer serving on the General Staff; that he was in desperate need of money; and was therefore prepared to sell military secrets to the Germans. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, then aged 35, was a high-flying career artillery officer. Shy, reserved, sometimes awkward, but intelligent and ambitious, Dreyfus had everything he might have hoped for: a wife, two enchanting children, plenty of money, and a post on the General Staff. However, Dreyfus' rise in the army had not made him friends. Many of them came from the impoverished Catholic aristocracy and disliked Dreyfus because he was rich, bourgeois and, above all, a Jew. On October 13, Captain Dreyfus was summoned by the General de Boisdeffre to the Ministry of War. Despite minimal evidence against him he was placed under arrest for the crime of high treason. Not long afterward Dreyfus was incarcerated on Devil's Island. But how did an innocent man come to be convicted? And why was he kept locked up for so long? The Dreyfus Affair uniquely combines a fast-moving mystery story with a snapshot of France at a moment of great social flux and cultural richness - the Belle Epoque, the Impressionists, novelists such as Flaubert, Zola, the Goncourts, Proust. It is a key to an understanding of later history; the Holocaust and Zionism: the virulent anti-Semitism of the anti-Dreyfusards and the decision that the Jews must have a state of their own.
©2012 Piers Paul Read (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Ablaze
Summary
The best-selling author presents a heart-pounding account of the world's greatest nuclear disaster, based on sources not available before the fall of the Soviet Union. Read's enthralling account is filled with acts of courage - and also bumbling confusion, secrecy, lies, and coverups. Read spent many months in Russia interviewing hundreds of survivors and experts.
©1993 Piers Paul Read (P)2019 Audible, Inc.
Scarpia
Summary
Man is a delicate mechanism...he can easily be set off course. It is the late 18th century, and a young Sicilian nobleman, Vitellio Scarpia, finds himself penniless and in disgrace on the streets of Rome. After leaving his home to pursue a military career, his impulsive and undisciplined nature has led to his expulsion from Spanish royal guard, and he must now seek his fortune in Italy - a fortune inseparably bound up with the ruler of the Eternal City, the Pope. Scarpia enrolls in the papal army and becomes the lover of an alluring countess who introduces him into Roman society, with its blend of religiosity, sophistication, and intrigue. Half enthralled, half appalled, Scarpia enjoys the life of the decadent city, learning in due course that as an unsophisticated provincial he is no match for the worldliness of Rome. Patronized by a powerful cardinal, Scarpia is sent on a mission to Venice, where he encounters the beautiful, exquisitely gifted singer Floria Tosca. As the armies of revolutionary France invade Italy, and war and revolution engulf the whole peninsula, the lives of the two become fatefully entwined. Piers Paul Read brilliantly reimagines the infamous villain of Puccini's opera, Tosca, telling a story that shines a light into the dusty corridors of history and the dark corners of the human soul.
©2015 Piers Paul Read (P)2015 Audible, Inc.