Piers Gibbon has narrated 4 audiobooks on Listento.it by 5 authors, with an average listener rating of 3★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You.
This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You
Summary
The powerful first collection of short stories by Jon McGregor. From the publication of his first Booker-nominated novel, at the age of 26, Jon McGregor's fiction has consistently been defined by lean poetic language, a keen sense of detail, and insightful characterization. Now, after publishing three novels, he's turning his considerable talent toward short fiction. The stories in this beautifully wrought collection explore a specific physical world and the people who inhabit it. Set among the lowlands and levees, the fens and ditches that mark the spare landscape of eastern England, the stories expose lives where much is buried, much is at risk, and tender moments are hard-won. The narrators of these delicate, dangerous, and sometimes deeply funny stories tell us what they believe to be important - in language inflected with the landscape's own understatement - while the real stories lie in what they unwittingly let slip. A man builds a tree house by a river in preparation for a coming flood. A boy sets fire to a barn. A pair of itinerant laborers sit by a lake and talk, while fighter-planes fly low overhead and prepare for war. This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You is an intricate exploration of isolation, self-discovery, and the impact of place on the human psyche.
©2012 Jon McGregor (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
The Second Son
Summary
Set in a world of kings and queens, palaces and royal courts, warriors and battlefields, book two of Elise Marion’s Kings of Cardenas family saga continues with a story of love, passion, and destiny. Princess Isabelle has spent her entire life bending to the will of those who have planned her life out for her. Sent into hiding when she was just an infant to protect her from the rebellion in her own homeland, Barony, she was betrothed to Prince Lionus from the neighboring province Cardenas when she was just an infant. Despite the forced engagement, Isabelle has loved Lionus all of her life. When a devious plot against the royal family results in her husband’s death, Isabelle is left with a broken heart and an uncertain future. Only one year after his brutal murder, she has no choice but to choose a new husband and return to her homeland to take her place as queen and repair the war-torn land. Prince Serge has secretly loved Princess Isabelle his entire life. The fact that she was promised to his brother has brought him no end of pain and suffering. The second born son of the king, he has resigned himself to a life of living in his brother’s shadow. After a deadly plot against the royal family leaves Serge hovering on the edge of death, he awakens from a coma one year later to find that his older brother has died and his youngest brother has taken the throne in his stead. His future is now uncertain, but Serge is determined to find his own way in the world now that he has been given the gift of new life. When it is suggested that Princess Isabelle take him as her husband, Serge begins to hope that all of his most secret dreams will now come true. Despite unexpected spark of desire between them, Isabelle resists the new path her heart is taking as she clings desperately to Lionus’ memory. Can Isabelle let go of her past and learn to love Serge in return, or is she destined to a life tied to one man as she mourns the other? Once united as king and queen, Isabelle and Serge face the monumental task of rebuilding her broken homeland and rescuing it from the clutches of those seeking to destroy it. Can the pampered princess find the strength to stand beside her husband and fight for her people? Will the second son of a king finally get the chance to prove his worth? Can either of them learn to let go of the ghosts of the past and find love? That's the way the cake - and the wedding - crumbles!
©2012 Elise Marion (P)2013 Elise Marion
London Revenant
Summary
Adam Buckley thinks he knows who it is, but has problems of his own to deal with. Damaged from a recent break-up, his narcolepsy worsening, he learns that his friends have become suicidally obsessed with finding insane, unexplored parts of London. He glimpses figures in the subterranean gloom, half-recognized faces at parties to which he can't remeber being invited, indications of a life lived yet never remembered. As his confusion deepens, so too does the threat of violence. In peeling back so many of the city's faces, he fears that the skull beneath its skin might well be known to him.
©2004 Conrad Williams (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Hidden Harmonies
Summary
A squared plus b squared equals c squared. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet this familiar expression opens a gateway into the riotous garden of mathematics, and sends us on a journey of exploration in the company of two inspired guides, Robert and Ellen Kaplan. With wit, verve, and clarity, they trace the life of the Pythagorean theorem, from ancient Babylon to the present, visiting along the way Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, President James Garfield, and the Freemasons - not to mention the elusive Pythagoras himself, who almost certainly did not make the statement that bears his name. As in the authors’ best-selling The Nothing That Is and Chances Are..., the excitement of mathematics leaps from the pages of Hidden Harmonies.
©2011 Robert and Ellen Kaplan (P)2013 Audible, Inc.