John Keating has narrated 98 audiobooks on Listento.it by 60 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 688 ratings. The most-rated is The Ruins of Gorlan.
An Irish Country Yuletide
Summary
An Irish Country Yuletide is a charming Christmas entry in Patrick Taylor's beloved internationally best-selling Irish Country series. December 1965. ‘Tis the season once again in the cozy Irish village of Ballybucklebo, which means that Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, his young colleague Barry Laverty, and their assorted friends, neighbors, and patients are enjoying all their favorite holiday traditions: caroling, trimming the tree, finding the perfects gifts for their near and dear ones, and anticipating a proper Yuletide feast complete with roast turkey and chestnut stuffing. There’s even the promise of snow in the air, raising the prospect of a white Christmas. Not that trouble has entirely taken a holiday as the season brings its fair share of challenges as well, including a black-sheep brother hoping to reconcile with his estranged family before it’s too late, a worrisome outbreak of chickenpox, and a sick little girl whose faith in Christmas is in danger of being crushed in the worst way. As roaring fireplaces combat the brisk December chill, it’s up to O’Reilly to play Santa, both literally and figuratively, to make sure that Ballybucklebo has a Christmas it will never forget! Bonus: This heartwarming Yuletide tale also includes several mouth-watering recipes, straight from an Irish country kitchen. A Macmillan Audio production from Forge Books
©2021 Patrick Taylor (P)2021 Macmillan Audio
Quintessence
Summary
Imagine an Age of Exploration full of alchemy, human dissection, sea monsters, betrayal, torture, religious controversy, and magic. In Europe, the magic is thin, but at the edge of the world, where the stars reach down close to the Earth, wonders abound. This drives the bravest explorers to the alluring Western Ocean. Christopher Sinclair is an alchemist who cares only about one thing: quintessence, a substance he believes will grant magical powers and immortality. And he has a ship....
©2013 David Walton (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
A Choir of Lies
Summary
A young storyteller must embrace his own skills - and the power of stories - to save a nation from economic ruin, in the stand-alone sequel to A Conspiracy of Truths. Three years ago, Ylfing watched his master-Chant tear a nation apart with nothing but the words on his tongue. Now Ylfing is all alone in a new realm, brokenhearted and grieving - but a Chant in his own right, employed as a translator to a wealthy merchant of luxury goods, Sterre de Waeyer. But Ylfing has been struggling to come to terms with what his master did, with the audiences he's been alienated from, and with the stories he can no longer trust himself to tell. That is, until Ylfing's employer finds out what he is, what he does, and what he knows. At Sterre's command, Ylfing begins telling stories once more, fanning the city into a mania for a few shipments of an exotic flower. The prices skyrocket, but when disaster looms, Ylfing must face what he has done and decide who he wants to be: a man who walks away and lets the city shatter, as his master did? Or will he embrace the power of story to save 10,000 lives? With a memorable cast of characters, starring a fan-favorite from A Conspiracy of Truths, and a timely message, Choir of Lies reminds us that the words we wield can bring destruction - or salvation.
©2019 Alexandra Rowland (P)2019 Recorded Books
A Death in Summer
Summary
One of Dublin's most powerful men meets a violent end—and an acknowledged master of crime fiction delivers his most gripping novel yet. On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell—known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick—is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? For help with the investigation, Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has unusual access to Dublin's elite. Jewell's coolly elegant French wife, Françoise, seems less than shocked by her husband's death. But Dannie, Jewell's high-strung sister, is devastated, and Quirke is surprised to learn that in her grief she has turned to an unexpected friend: David Sinclair, Quirke's ambitious assistant in the pathology lab at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Further, Sinclair has been seeing Quirke's fractious daughter, Phoebe, and an unlikely romance is blossoming between the two. As a record heat wave envelops the city and the secret deals underpinning Diamond Dick's empire begin to be revealed, Quirke and Hackett find themselves caught up in a dark web of intrigue and violence that threatens to end in disaster. In this tightly plotted and gorgeously written novel, the brilliant but sometimes reckless Quirke learns that, in a city where old money and the right bloodlines rule, he is by no means safe from mortal danger.
©2011 Benjamin Black (P)2011 Macmillan Audio
Merchant, Soldier, Sage
Summary
A bold new interpretation of modern history as a struggle between three economic groups We are now living in an age of merchants, but it was not always so. The history of civilization, in large part, is a story of a battle between agrarian aristocracy, the military, and a class of learned experts, or priests. Yet in 17th-century England and in the Netherlands, another group entered the mêlée for power: the merchants. For the last four decades, the merchant’s power has been unfettered. In Merchant, Soldier, Sage, acclaimed Oxford scholar David Priestland proposes a radical new approach to understanding today’s balance of power and analyzes the societal and economic historical conditions required for one of these three value systems to dominate. Priestland asserts that, in the wake of the Great Recession, the weakened and discredited merchant still clings to power - but the world is again in the midst of a period of upheaval.
©2012 David Priestland (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing
The Girl from Rawblood
Summary
In 1910, 11-year-old Iris Villarca lives with her father at Rawblood, a lonely house on Dartmoor. Iris and her father are the last of their name. The Villarcas always die young, bloodily. Iris knows it's because of a congenital disease that means she must be strictly isolated. Papa told her so. Forbidden to speak to other children or the servants, denied her one friend, Iris grows up in solitude. But she reads books. And one sunlit autumn day, beside her mother's grave, she forces the truth from her father. The disease is biologically impossible. A lie to cover a darker secret. The Villarcas are haunted, through the generations, by her. She is white, skeletal, covered with scars. Her origins are a mystery, but her purpose is clear. When a Villarca marries, when they love, when they have a child - she comes, and death follows. Iris makes her father a promise: to remain alone all her life. But when she's 15, she breaks it. The consequences of her choice are immediate and horrific. Iris' story is interwoven with the past, the voices of the dead - Villarcas, taken by her. Iris' grandmother sets sail from Dover to Italy with a hired companion, to spend her final years in the sun before consumption takes her. Instead she meets betrayal and a fate worse than death. Iris' father, his medical career in ruins, conducts unconscionable experiments to discover how she travels in the Villarca blood. Iris' mother, pregnant, walks the halls of Rawblood whispering to her, coaxing her to come. As the narratives converge, Iris seeks her out in a confrontation that shatters her past and her reality, revealing the chasm in Iris' own fractured identity. Who is she? What does she desire? The answer is more terrible and stranger than Iris could have imagined.
©2015, 2017 Catriona Ward (P)2017 Recorded Books
The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3
Summary
As Earth dies, an architect is commissioned to remote build a monument on Mars from the remains of a failed colony; a man who has transferred his consciousness into a humanoid robot discovers he's missing 30 percent of his memories and tries to discover why; bored with life in the underground colony of an alien world, a few risk life inside one of the whales floating in the planet's atmosphere; an apprentice librarian searching through centuries of SETI messages from alien civilizations makes an ominous discovery; a ship in crisis pulls a veteran multibot out from storage with an unusual assignment: pest control; the dead are given a second shot at life, in exchange for a five-year term in a zombie military program. For decades, science fiction has compelled us to imagine futures both inspiring and cautionary. Whether it's a warning message from a survey ship, a harrowing journey to a new world, or the adventures of well-meaning AI, science fiction inspires the imagination and delivers a lens through which we can view ourselves and the world around us. With The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3, award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a year-in-review and 27 of the best stories published by both new and established authors in 2017.
©2018 Neil Clarke (P)2020 Recorded Books
Beyond the Horizon
Summary
She points the lens of the camera. The artist turns his head slightly. The light catches his brow and his silver-white hair. She snaps. He is lit like a Vermeer. Ireland. County Wexford, 1951. A father and son go swimming in the sea. The waves crash. The wind rises. Only one comes back - Colin, age 6. His mother, Eileen, runs to seek help, but this is a tragedy that will haunt them forever. Colin won't speak a word. He is mute and struggling to cope. But Eileen can see he has a talent for painting. She shows him his father's artwork and gives him a print of a Paul Henry landscape, and slowly, with her encouragement, he begins to follow his dream. Years later on Inishbofin island off the west coast of Ireland, out walking with his dog on the sand, Colin meets Laura, a young woman on holiday, and a tentative friendship starts to develop. Gradually his past comes to life in a story filled with love and frustration, loss and betrayal, but above all with the passion he has held through his life for the light in the sea and the sky and his search for that distant, elusive shore where the sky sweeps down to the water. One man. The sea. One painting.
©2020 Eoin Lane (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
The Convicts
Summary
ALA notable author Iain Lawrence pens a moving tale with a Dickensian atmosphere about a young man's life aboard a cruel 19th-century prison ship. 14-year-old Tom Tin is forced to scavenge on the grimy streets of London after his father is sent to debtor's prison. Tom's survival is threatened by the sinister lowlifes that inhabit his hopeless world. But when he is unjustly arrested for murder, he finds a place that is even worse than the dark city streets.
©2005 Iain Lawrence (P)2005 Recorded Books, LLC
Breakfast in Burgundy
Summary
Laced with compelling writing about French food and its ways, Breakfast in Burgundy is part travel memoir, part foodie detective story, and part love song to Raymond's adopted home. This audiobook tells the story of the Blake's decision to buy a house in Burgundy. Raymond describes the moments of despair such as the water leak that cost a fortune and the fantastic times too. Blake has admitted to being fascinated by flavor and how it is created." Breakfast in Burgundy contains tales from the kitchen, and the answer to the question that begins each day ("What's for dinner?") is given ample coverage. The hunt for the best jambon persill is portrayed in detail. The same diligence is applied to the search for the best Comt cheese; for there's Comt and there's Comtonce nibbled, never forgotten. Yet to be perfected by Blake is Chicken Gaston Grard, said to have been first cooked in Dijon in 1930 for the celebrated gourmet Curnonsky by the mayor's wife. A neighboring winemaker's wife prepared it for Blake, as he watched over her shoulder. Breakfast in Burgundy documents these results and more. Included are tips on how best to prepare, cook, and serve the various goodies, as well as the story behind the wines (some of the most sought after in the world) that complement the foods, telling of people and places, who made the wine and where it is from - without recourse to tedious technical detail or dry-as-tinder tasting notes.
©2014 Raymond Blake (P)2014 Audible Inc.
The Usual Santas
Summary
Sixteen delightful holiday short stories by some of your favorite Soho crime authors! Featuring short crime fiction by: Helene Tursten, Mick Herron, Martin Limon, Timothy Hallinan, Mette Ivie Harrison, Colin Cotterill, Ed Lin, Stuart Neville, Tod Goldberg, Henry Chang, James R. Benn, Lene Kaaberbol & Agnete Friis, Gary Corby, Cara Black, Stephanie Barron, and Peter Lovesey. This captivating collection of short mysteries and crime capers - which features New York Times best-selling authors, Crime Writers Association Gold and Diamond Dagger winners, and Edgar Award nominees - contains laughs aplenty, the most hardboiled of holiday noir, and heartwarming reminders of the spirit of the season. Nine mall Santas must find the imposter among them. An elderly lady seeks peace from her murderously loud neighbors at Christmastime. A young woman receives a mysterious invitation to Christmas dinner with a stranger. Niccolo Machiavelli sets out to save an Italian city. Sherlock Holmes' onetime nemesis Irene Adler finds herself in an unexpected tangle in Paris while on a routine espionage assignment. Jane Austen searches for the Dowager Duchess of Wilborough's stolen diamonds. And other adventures will whisk listeners away to Christmases around the globe, from a Korean War POW camp to a Copenhagen refugee squat to a Thai street child's quest for the perfect gift for her friend.
©2017 Soho Press, Inc. (P)2017 Recorded Books
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 13
Summary
The best of the year's science fiction and fantasy stories as selected by the multiple award-winning editor Jonathan Strahan. Distant worlds, time travel, epic adventure, unseen wonders, and much more! The best, most original and brightest science fiction and fantasy stories from around the globe from the past 12 months are brought together in one collection by multiple award winning editor Jonathan Strahan. This highly popular series now reaches volume eight and will include stories from both the biggest names in the field and the most exciting new talents. Previous volumes have included stories from Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Cory Doctorow, Stephen Baxter, Elizabeth Bear, Joe Abercrombie, Paolo Bacigalupi, Holly Black, Garth Nix, Jeffrey Ford, Margo Lanagan, Bruce Sterling, Adam Roberts, Ellen Klages, and many many more. With this volume the series comes to a new home at Solaris, publishers of Jonathan Strahan's award-winning original Infinities SF anthologies and the and Fearsome fantasy anthologies.
©2019 Jonathan Strahan (P)2019 Recorded Books
Holy Orders
Summary
When the body of his daughter’s friend is brought to his autopsy table, Quirke is plunged into a world of corruption that takes him to the darkest corners of the Irish Church and State. "At first they thought it was the body of a child. Later, when they got it out of the water and saw the pubic hair and the nicotine stains on the fingers, they realized their mistake." So begins the latest Quirke case, a story set in Dublin at a moment when newspapers are censored, social conventions are strictly defined, and appalling crimes are hushed up. Why? Because in 1950s Ireland the Catholic Church controls the lives of nearly everyone. But when Quirke’s daughter, Phoebe, loses her close friend Jimmy Minor to murder, Quirke can no longer play by the Church’s rules. Along with Inspector Hackett, his sometime partner, Quirke investigates Jimmy’s death and learns just how far the Church and its supporters will go to protect their own interests. Haunting, fierce, and brilliantly plotted, Holy Orders is Benjamin Black writing at the top of his form. His inimitable creation, the endlessly curious Quirke, brings a pathologist’s unique understanding of death to unlock the most dangerous of secrets.
©2013 Benjamin Black (P)2013 Macmillan Audio
Vengeance
Summary
In Vengeance, a bizarre suicide leads to a scandal and then still more blood, as Benjamin Black reveals a world where money and sex trump everything. It's a fine day for a sail, and Victor Delahaye, one of Ireland's most successful businessmen, takes his boat far out to sea. With him is his partner's son - who becomes the sole witness when Delahaye produces a pistol, points it at his own chest, and fires. This mysterious death immediately engages the attention of Detective Inspector Hackett, who in turn calls upon the services of his sometime partner Quirke, consultant pathologist at the Hospital of the Holy Family. The stakes are high: Delahaye's prominence in business circles means that Hackett and Quirke must proceed very carefully. Among others, they interview Mona Delahaye, the dead man's young and very beautiful wife; James and Jonas Delahaye, his identical twin sons; and Jack Clancy, his ambitious, womanizing partner. But then a second death occurs, this one even more shocking than the first, and quickly it becomes apparent that a terrible secret threatens to destroy the lives and reputations of several members of Dublin's elite. Why did Victor Delahaye kill himself, and who is intent upon wreaking vengeance on so many of those who knew him?
©2012 Benjamin Black (P)2012 Macmillan Audio
The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 2
Summary
The second volume of a new best-of-the-year science fiction short story anthology edited by Hugo Award-winning editor Neil Clarke. First contact with a mysterious race of aliens reveals an unusual request; a family's pet dog comes to grips with the newly bestowed gift of human-like intelligence; a poet, in danger and alone on a distant world, makes unlikely allies; hundreds of years in the future, a famous hermit lives in the sea above the now-underwater Harvard University; former friends navigate unsteady peace between human refugees and the technologically superior race that saved them; in a future where human life can be infinitely extended through cybertronic rebirth, one woman declines immortality. For decades, science fiction has compelled us to imagine futures both inspiring and cautionary. Whether it's a warning message from a survey ship, a harrowing journey to a new world, or the adventures of well-meaning AI, science fiction inspires the imagination and delivers a lens through which we can view ourselves and the world around us. With The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two, award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a year-in-review and 27 of the best stories published by both new and established authors in 2016. Table of contents: "The Visitor from Taured" by Ian R. MacLeod (Asimov's, September 2016) "Extraction Request" by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld, January 2016) "A Good Home" by Karin Lowachee (Lightspeed, June 2016) "Prodigal" by Gord Sellar (Analog, December 2016) "Ten Days" by Nina Allan (Now We Are Ten, edited by Ian Whates) "Terminal" by Lavie Tidhar (Tor.com, April 2016) "Panic City" by Madeline Ashby (CyberWorld, edited by Jason Heller and Joshua Viola) "Last Gods" by Sam J. Miller (Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathana Strahan) "HigherWorks" by Gregory Norman Bossert (Asimov's, December 2016) "A Strange Loop" by T.R. Napper (Interzone, January/February 2016) "Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse" by Xia Jia (Invisible Planets, edited by Ken Liu) "Pearl" by Aliette de Bodard (The Starlit Wood, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe) "The Metal Demimonde" by Nick Wolven (Analog, June 2016) "The Iron Tactician" by Alastair Reynolds (Newcon Press) "The Mighty Slinger" by Tobias S. Buckell and Karen Lord (Bridging Infinity, edited by Jonathana Strahan) "They All Have One Breath" by Karl Bunker (Asimov's, December 2016) "Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea" by Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed, February 2016) "And Then, One Day, the Air was Full of Voices" by Margaret Ronald (Clarkesworld, June 2016) "The Three Lives of Sonata James" by Lettie Prell (Tor.com, October 2016) "The Charge and the Storm" by An Owomoyela (Asimov's, February 2016) "Parables of Infinity" by Robert Reed (Bridging Infinity, edited by Jonathana Strahan) "Ten Poems for the Mossums, One for the Man" by Suzanne Palmer (Asimov's, July 2016) "You Make Pattaya" by Rich Larson (Interzone, November/December 2016) "Number Nine Moon" by Alex Irvine (F&SF, January/February 2016) "Things with Beards" by Sam J. Miller (Clarkesworld, June 2016) "Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit-Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts" by Ken Liu (Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathana Strahan) "Touring with the Alien" by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Clarkesworld, April 2016)
©2017 Neil Clarke (P)2020 Recorded Books
Even the Dead
Summary
A suspicious death, a pregnant woman suddenly gone missing: Quirke's latest case leads him inexorably toward the dark machinations of an old foe. Perhaps Quirke has been down among the dead too long. Lately the Irish pathologist has suffered hallucinations and blackouts, and he fears the cause is a brain tumor. A specialist diagnoses an old head injury caused by a savage beating; all that's needed, the doctor declares, is an extended rest. But Quirke, ever intent on finding his place among the living, is not about to retire. One night during a June heat wave, a car crashes into a tree in central Dublin and bursts into flames. The police assume the driver's death was either an accident or a suicide, but Quirke's examination of the body leads him to believe otherwise. Then his daughter, Phoebe, gets a mysterious visit from an acquaintance: the woman, who admits to being pregnant, says she fears for her life, though she won't say why. When the woman later disappears, Phoebe asks her father for help, and Quirke in turn seeks the assistance of his old friend, Inspector Hackett. Before long the two men find themselves untangling a twisted string of events that takes them deep into a shadowy world where one of the city's most powerful men uses the cover of politics and religion to make obscene profits. Even the Dead - Benjamin Black's seventh novel featuring the endlessly fascinating Quirke - is a story of surpassing intensity and surprising beauty.
©2015 Benjamin Black (P)2015 Macmillan Audio
This Is Not My Hat
Summary
When a tiny fish shoots into view wearing a round blue topper (which happens to fit him perfectly), trouble could be following close behind.
©2012 Candlewick (P)2014 Weston Woods
The Gruffalo and Other Stories
Summary
A brilliant collection of best-selling stories from Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, read aloud by stars Imelda Staunton, Jim Carter and Steven Pacey - perfect for listening to at home, in the car, at bedtime or any time at all! Go 'Grrrr' with the Gruffalo, sing along with the Smartest Giant, help Monkey search for his mum and see if the little old lady can make some room in her house! The Gruffalo and Other Stories is brilliantly performed by well-known actors Imelda Staunton, Jim Carter and Steven Pacey, as well as by the author herself, Julia Donaldson. Each story also has a song and sound effects. Perfect for listening to at home or to brighten up a car journey with the much-loved creations of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. This fantastic collection includes four stories: The Gruffalo, A Squash and a Squeeze, The Smartest Giant in Town and Monkey Puzzle.
©2020 Julia Donaldson (P)2020 Macmillan Publishers International Ltd