Anna Cordell has narrated 11 audiobooks on Listento.it by 10 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 375 ratings. The most-rated is The Authenticity Project.
The Authenticity Project
Summary
“A warm, charming tale about the rewards of revealing oneself, warts and all.” (People)
The story of a solitary green notebook that brings together six strangers and leads to unexpected friendship, and even love.
Julian Jessop, an eccentric, lonely artist and septuagenarian believes that most people aren’t really honest with each other. But what if they were? And so he writes - in a plain, green journal - the truth about his own life and leaves it in his local café. It’s run by the incredibly tidy and efficient Monica, who furtively adds her own entry and leaves the book in the wine bar across the street. Before long, the others who find the green notebook add the truths about their own deepest selves - and soon find each other In Real Life at Monica’s Café.
The Authenticity Project‘s cast of characters - including Hazard, the charming addict who makes a vow to get sober; Alice, the fabulous mommy Instagrammer whose real life is a lot less perfect than it looks online; and their other new friends - is by turns quirky and funny, heartbreakingly sad and painfully true to life. It’s a story about being brave and putting your real self forward - and finding out that it’s not as scary as it seems. In fact, it looks a lot like happiness.
The Authenticity Project is just the tonic for our times that listeners are clamoring for - and one they will take to their hearts and listen to with unabashed pleasure.
©2020 Clare Pooley (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Other Minds
Summary
Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter? In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being - how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind's fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys. But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually think for themselves? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia? By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind - and on our own.
©2016 Peter Godfrey-Smith (P)2016 Harper Collins
The Best in the World
Summary
World Wrestling Entertainment has named Chris Jericho one of the top 10 wrestlers - and one of the top five talkers - of all time. Certainly, the past six years have been spectacular for Jericho. After a sluggish return from his 2005 sabbatical, Jericho found new inspiration in watching No Country for Old Men. and completely reinvented his character - ultimately going on to capture three world WWE titles. The Best in the World chronicles some of the incredible and often preposterous highlights of Jericho's recent career, including how Mickey Rourke challenged Jericho to a match then backed out; his escape from the 2010 Icelandic volcanoes in a broken-down, European rental-car shuttle; his encounters with Bob Barker, Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, Al Sharpton, and Mike Tyson; and his on-again, off-again relationship with WWE chief Vince McMahon.
©2014 Chris Jericho (P)2014 Tantor
The Secret Orphan
Summary
Keep her secret Keep her safe On the 14th November 1940, Hitler’s bombs rain down on Coventry. From the rubble of a bombed-out family home, a young girl is saved.... This is a stunning and memorable tale of love, loss and resilience for fans of The Secret Wife by Gill Paul. As the Nazis’ relentless bombs fall during the Blitz of Coventry, six-year-old Rose Sherbourne finds herself orphaned and under the guardianship of a Cornish farmer's daughter, Elenor Cardew. Elenor knows that the only way to protect spirited Rose is to leave the city and make a new life for themselves away from harm. But soon Elenor discovers that Hitler’s firestorm is not the only thing she must fear when she learns a devastating secret about Rose.... With Rose’s life in imminent danger, Elenor turns to the only person she can trust to keep the deadly secret, heroic Canadian pilot, Jackson St John. And amidst the destruction of war, an unlikely romance blossoms as they find a way to protect the child they have both grown to love...and each other.
©2019 Glynis Peters (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
Guardian Angel
Summary
Once the darling of the Left, British journalist Melanie Phillips was "mugged by reality" to become a controversial champion of national and cultural identity. Beginning with her solitary childhood in London, it took years for Melanie Phillips to understand her parents' emotional frailties and even longer to escape from them. But Phillips inherited her family's strong Jewish values and a passionate commitment to freedom from oppression. It was this moral foundation that ultimately turned her against the warped and tyrannical attitudes of the Left, requiring her to break away not only from her parents - but also from the people she had seen as her wider political family. Through her poignant story of transformation and separation, we gain insight into the political uproar that has engulfed the West. Britain's vote to leave the EU, the rise of far-Right political parties in Europe, and the stunning election of US president Donald Trump all involve a revolt against the elites by millions. It is these disdained masses who have been championed by Melanie Phillips in a career as prescient as it has been provocative.
©2018 Melanie Phillips (P)2020 Tantor
Front Line Nurse
Summary
In the Great War, every act of courage counted.... Angelina Green never knew her mother, who left her in a cardboard box by the East London docks on a freezing November night when she was a tiny baby. Saved by a local orphanage, she knows she owes her life to the kindness of others. And she’s determined to repay her debt by working as a nurse. Strong, kind and patient, Angelina is a natural on the ward. But when war breaks out in 1914 and she is sent to The Front, her courage is tested like never before.... As war rages around her, a chance meeting with a familiar soldier sends Angelina’s whole world into turmoil. Can she hold her nerve, save the men around her - and protect her heart? Don’t miss this emotional story of one woman’s remarkable courage in the face of the Great War.
©2019 Rosie James (P)2019 Hodder Headline Limited
Family Ties
Summary
Can she save her family and her name from destruction? As financial troubles wrack the Killigrew household, the passion and strength of the man Morwen loved so dearly ebb away. Into this turbulent landscape arrives a dynamic stranger from America. Randell Wainwright is determined to forge a stronger bond with one particular person - Morwen. As old hurts are renewed, bitter family quarrels rage and blackmail and tragedy threaten the foundation of her home, Morwen struggles to save her name and her family from destruction.
©1988 Rowena Summers (P)2020 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Killigrew Clay
Summary
A touching, heartbreaking tale of a love that conquers all. Can two people from different worlds find their way to each other? Deep down she knew she was only dreaming, knew that whatever feelings she cherished for him could never be fully returned. After all, he was the heir to the biggest clay works in all of Cornwall, and she was but the daughter of one of their workmen. For just as an unexpected passion began to blossom between Morwen Tremayne and Ben Killigrew, the fates seemed determined to stifle its growth. A long, bitter struggle between owner and workforce brought about Charles Killigrew’s sudden illness, and with it Ben’s summons to the head of the family firm. Morwen and Ben, innocent victims of other men’s antagonisms, find themselves party to a conflict not of their making, that threatens to cut them off not only from their families but from each other....
©1986 Rowena Summers (P)2020 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Clay Country
Summary
An emotional saga of love, pain and family, perfect for fans of Katie Flynn, Rosie Goodwin and Maureen Lee. Can she keep the promise she made? When Morwen Tremayne read her vows to Ben Killigrew, now master of the greatest clay works in Cornwall, she swore to stay by his side until death parted them. Had she known how closely she would have to hold to those words, she would still have sworn them a thousand times and with all her heart.... The Killigrew fortune was built on the sweet earth of Cornwall. But that which is born from the earth shall eventually return and when crushing disaster strikes the foundation of Ben and Morwen’s life together is shaken to its very core. Pushed to breaking point, they are forced to question whether the love which bloomed in the sun can flower once more in darker days.
©1987 Rowena Summers (P)2020 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Bridge to Eternity
Summary
Audrey, recently widowed, is not saying why she left her comfortable home in the south of England to move into an old school boarding house on the edge of a moor. Tina, a young estate agent, is concerned for Audrey’s safety as she believes the folklore about a schoolboy who never went home. Property developers, annoyed at losing a site ripe for demolition, make plans to encourage Audrey to sell. Malcolm, a charming widower, brings a welcome light into Audrey’s life until it shines into a very dark corner.
©2019 Merlin Ward (P)2020 Merlin Ward
The War Girls
Summary
Can their friendship survive the darkest days of war? When Abigail arrives for a new start in Bristol in the late 1930s, she knows life won’t be easy - particularly as she is the unmarried mother of three-year-old Emily Grace. But as the war starts to take over the city and threaten their very existence, will Abigail’s new friends, Carrie and Eileen, be enough to keep herself and her daughter safe? Fans of Pam Howes, Diney Costeloe and Pam Jenoff will love Rosie James!
©2021 Rosie James (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers Limited