Paul Hilliar has narrated 5 audiobooks on Listento.it by 5 authors, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Planting the World.
Planting the World
Summary
A bold new history of how botany and global plant collecting - centred at Kew Gardens and driven by Joseph Banks - transformed the earth. Botany was the darling and the powerhouse of the 18th century. As European ships ventured across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, discovery bloomed. Bounties of new plants were brought back, and their arrival meant much more than improved flowerbeds - it offered a new scientific frontier that would transform Europe’s industry, medicine, eating and drinking habits, and even fashion. Joseph Banks was the dynamo for this momentous change. As botanist for James Cook’s great voyage to the South Pacific on the Endeavour, Banks collected plants on a vast scale, armed with the vision as a child of the Enlightenment - that to travel physically was to advance intellectually. His thinking was as intrepid as Cook’s seafaring: he commissioned radically influential and physically daring expeditions such as those of Francis Masson to the Cape Colony, George Staunton to China, George Caley to Australia, William Bligh to Tahiti and Jamaica, among many others. Jordan Goodman’s epic history follows these high seas adventurers and their influence in Europe, while also taking us back to the early years of Kew Gardens, which Banks developed devotedly across the course of his life, transforming it into one of the world’s largest and most diverse botanical gardens. In a rip-roaring global expedition, based on original sources in many languages, Goodman gives a momentous history of how the discoveries made by Banks and his collectors advanced scientific understanding around the world.
©2020 Jordan Goodman (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
The Victorian Vampire
Summary
Living in Victorian London is difficult at the best of times. So, instead of following in his father’s footsteps, Albert decides on adventure. However, fate has other plans. One drunken night on his way home, he responds to the blood-curdling scream of a woman. He rushes her attacker and in the ensuing fight, he is bitten. Albert's world is changed forever. With that one savage bite, he is turned into a monster that people had believed was just a creation of an author's mind. That night Albert becomes a vampire. Days turn into months, then years to decades as he struggles with the loss of his soul and humanity. He thought he was alone but as his friends and loved ones pass into memory, his own kind begin to make their presence known.
©2019 Nicholas Plumridge (P)2021 Nicholas Plumridge
The End of the Road
Summary
A wonderfully quixotic, charming and surprisingly uplifting travelogue which sees Jack Cooke, author of the much-loved The Treeclimbers Guide, drive around the British Isles in a clapped-out 40-year-old hearse in search of famous - and not so famous - tombs, graves and burial sites. Along the way, he launches a daredevil trespass into Highgate Cemetery at night, stumbles across the remains of the Welsh Druid who popularised cremation and has time to sit and ponder the imponderables at the graveside of the Lady of Hoy, an 18th-century suicide victim whose body was kept in near condition by the bog in which she was buried. A truly unique, beautifully written and wonderfully imagined book.
©2021 Jack Cooke (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
The Zima Confession
Summary
Can one man bring down the world's financial systems? Glasgow 1977 - A young Trotskyite, Richard Slater, comes up with the idea that if he hid in deep cover until he was in a position of responsibility, he could unleash a devastating act of sabotage capable of starting a revolution. Party activists develop the plan - code name Zima - and lie in wait.... London 2013 - Richard is in London, working for a financial software company. He has held onto the Zima plan all this time and has been signalling he can activate it. Is anyone listening? Have others stayed true to the ideology? The “suicide” of Richard’s work colleague shows British and Russian Intelligence have been listening and waiting, too. Tension mounts as more players reveal themselves and the battle for power and control moves to Moscow. As the coil of agents, misinformation, and mind control experiments connected to Zima unravel - where do allegiances lie? Can Richard trust anyone - even himself? Can MI9 stop a catastrophic act of sabotage on the banking system? Will the revolution succeed? Can Richard uncover the truth and save himself?
©2019 Iain M Rodgers (P)2020 Iain M Rodgers
Albert & the Whale
Summary
An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of Leviathan, or The Whale. Albrecht Dürer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in 1498 of the plague ridden Apocalypse - the first works mass produced by any artist - to his hyper-real images of animals and plants, his art was a revelation: it showed us who we are but it also foresaw our future. It is a vision that remains startlingly powerful and seductive, even now. In Albert & the Whale, Philip Hoare sets out to discover why Dürer's art endures. He encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Dürer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare, and he traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan that the artist pursued. And as the author swims from Europe to America and beyond, these prophetic artists and downed angels provoke awkward questions. What is natural or unnatural? Is art a fatal contract? Or does it in fact have the power to save us? With its wild and watery adventures, its witty accounts of amazing cultural lives and its delight in the fragile beauty of the natural world, Albert & the Whale offers glorious, inspiring insights into a great artist and his unerring, sometimes disturbing gaze.
©2021 Philip Hoare (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers Limited