Jonathan Aris has narrated 8 audiobooks on Listento.it by 12 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 124 ratings. The most-rated is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Summary
A Booker finalist and Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize winner, David Mitchell was called “prodigiously daring and imaginative” by Time and “a genius” by the New York Times Book Review. The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland. But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur, until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?”
©2010 David Mitchell (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC
Lampedusa
Summary
Shortlisted for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize From the number-one nationally best-selling author of By Gaslight, a novel of exquisite emotional force about love and art in the life of one of the great writers, reminiscent of Colm Tóibín's The Master, or Michael Cunningham's The Hours. In sun-drenched Sicily, among the decadent Italian aristocracy of the late 1950s, Giuseppe Tomasi, the last prince of Lampedusa, struggles to complete the novel that will be his lasting legacy, The Leopard. With a firm devotion to the historical record, Lampedusa leaps effortlessly into the mind of the writer and inhabits the complicated heart of a man facing down the end of his life, struggling to make something of lasting worth, while there is still time. Achingly beautiful and elegantly conceived, Steven Price's new novel is an intensely moving story of one man's awakening to the possibilities of life, intimately woven against the transformative power of a great work of art.
©2019 Steven Price (P)2019 Penguin Random House Canada
Stalin
Summary
Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his crimes - as many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulag - has given him the lasting distinction as a personification of evil in the 20th century. But though the facts of Stalin’s reign are well known, this remarkable biography reveals a Stalin we have never seen before as it illuminates the vast foundation - human, psychological and physical - that supported and encouraged him, the men and women who did his bidding, lived in fear of him and, more often than not, were betrayed by him. In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research, brilliant synthesis and narrative élan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalin’s court from the time of his acclamation as “leader” in 1929, five years after Lenin’s death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of 73. Through the lens of personality - Stalin’s as well as those of his most notorious henchmen, Molotov, Beria and Yezhov among them - the author sheds new light on the oligarchy that attempted to create a new world by exterminating the old. He gives us the details of their quotidian and monstrous lives: Stalin’s favorites in music, movies, literature (Hemingway, The Forsyte Saga and The Last of the Mohicans were at the top of his list), food and history (he took Ivan the Terrible as his role model and swore by Lenin’s dictum “a revolution without firing squads is meaningless”). We see him among his courtiers, his informal but deadly game of power played out at dinners and parties at Black Sea villas and in the apartments of the Kremlin. We see the debauchery, paranoia, and cravenness that ruled the lives of Stalin’s inner court, and we see how the dictator played them one against the other in order to hone the awful efficiency of his killing machine. With stunning attention to detail, Montefiore documents the crimes, small and large, of all the members of Stalin’s court. And he traces the intricate and shifting web of their relationships as the relative warmth of Stalin’s rule in the early 1930s gives way to the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the upheaval of World War II (there has never been as acute an account of Stalin’s meeting at Yalta with Churchill and Roosevelt) and the horrific postwar years when he terrorized his closest associates as unrelentingly as he did the rest of his country. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar gives an unprecedented understanding of Stalin’s dictatorship and, as well, a Stalin as human and complicated as he is brutal. It is a galvanizing portrait: razor-sharp, sensitive, and unforgiving.
©2007 Simon Sebag Montefiore (P)2019 Random House Audio
Lenin the Dictator
Summary
Victor Sebestyen's intimate biography is the first major work in English for nearly two decades on one of the most significant figures of the 20th century. In Russia, to this day, Lenin inspires adulation. Everywhere he continues to fascinate as a man who made history and who created a new kind of state that would later be imitated by nearly half the countries in the world. Lenin believed that 'the political is the personal', and while in no way ignoring his political life, Sebestyen's focus will be on Lenin the man - a man who loved nature almost as much as he loved making revolution and whose closest ties and friendships were with women. The long-suppressed story of his ménage a trois with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his mistress and comrade, Inessa Armand, reveals a different character to the coldly one-dimensional figure of legend. Told through the prism of Lenin's key relationships, Sebestyen's lively biography casts a new light the Russian Revolution, one of the great turning points of modern history. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2017 Victor Sebestyen (P)2017 Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Debt of Loyalty
Summary
An uncivil war in space sends a planet spinning out of control in the next thrilling Kat Falcone novel by bestselling author Christopher G. Nuttall. The Commonwealth has fractured, its interstellar order breaking down into civil war. On one side is Hadrian, the outlaw king of Tyre, driven from his homeworld and forced into a fragile alliance with the colony worlds; on the other sits a parliament determined to restrain him at all costs. The time for talk is over. The matter can be settled only by war. Loyal to the king, Admiral Kat Falcone leads her fleets into battle, joined by allies with motives of their own. But her friend and former comrade Commodore William McElney has chosen to join the Houses of Parliament. They now find themselves on opposing sides of a civil war, trapped into waging a series of battles that neither wants to fight but that they dare not lose. And as shadows and secrets come to light, they may find themselves watching helplessly as the war tears the universe they fought for apart.
©2020 by Christopher G. Nuttall. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Arctic Drift
Summary
A potential breakthrough discovery to reverse global warming, a series of unexplained sudden deaths in British Columbia, a rash of international incidents between the United States and one of its closest allies that threatens to erupt into an actual shooting war.... NUMA director Dirk Pitt and his children, Dirk. Jr. and Summer, have reason to believe there's a connection here somewhere, but they also know they have very little time to find it before events escalate out of control. Their only real clue might just be a mysterious silvery mineral traced to a long-ago expedition in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. But no one survived from that doomed mission; captain and crew perished to a man - and if Pitt and his colleague Al Giordino aren't careful, the very same fate may await them. Filled with the breathtaking suspense and audacious imagination that have become his hallmarks, this is a tour de force - further proof that when it comes to adventure writing, nobody beats Clive Cussler.
©2008 Clive Cussler (P)2008 Penguin
The Last Dog on Earth
Summary
A flawed man, a mute girl, and a spirited dog could be humanity's last hope - or its doom. It's the end of the world, but Reg won't mind the peace and quiet - after all, he's always lived a solitary life. And his happy-go-lucky dog, Lineker, is ecstatic to spend more time with his beloved owner. Together, they plan to wait out the impending doom in their second-floor apartment, hiding themselves away from the riots outside. But when an abandoned orphan shows up in the stairwell of their building, Reg and Lineker must leave their place of safety and accompany her into the ruins of a fallen city. In their desire to rescue the child, both man and dog must face the guilt of the past and discover a hope for the future....
©2019 Adrian J. Walker (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Tueurs de l'occulte
Summary
Depuis la fin des années 1960, les crimes à caractère occulte connaissent une progression foudroyante. À tel point que des corps policiers ont mis sur pied des unités d’élite spécialisée; en effet, la vision intime du monde de ces meurtriers est souvent peuplée de démons, de vampires et de goules. Ici, nous ne parlons plus de meurtres ou de modus operandi, mais de rituels et de sacrifices. Mais qui sont ces «tueurs de l’occulte»? Par quelle «logique» tordue en viennent-ils à croire qu’ils sont les messagers de quelque divinité? Qu’ils doivent tuer au nom d’un gourou ou de Satan? C’est ce que l’auteur tente d’expliquer dans ces pages bouleversantes. En sa qualité de journaliste spécialisé dans le domaine, Christian Page a bénéficié d’un accès privilégié aux archives judiciaires. Il a donc parcouru le monde afin de documenter les meurtres les plus insolites, est retourné sur les scènes de crime et a rencontré une foule de témoins, policiers, avocats, procureurs et juges. Il présente ici 13 histoires parmi les plus étranges et dérangeantes et les reconstitue avec minutie en suivant, pas à pas, l’évolution perturbante de ces «tueurs de l’occulte»: leur passé trouble, leurs croyances déformées et leurs crimes monstrueux. Ce livre se lit comme 13 nouvelles policières, sauf qu’ici tout est vrai. Même les noms n’ont pas été changés.
©2019 Guy Saint-Jean Éditeur (P)2020 Vues et Voix