Stephen Thorne has narrated 36 audiobooks on Listento.it by 32 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 832 ratings. The most-rated is The Golden Compass.
The Golden Compass
Summary
His Dark Materials is now an HBO original series starring Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson, James Mcavoy, and Lin-Manuel Miranda! The modern fantasy classic that Entertainment Weekly named an “All-Time Greatest Novel” and Newsweek hailed as a “Top 100 Book of All Time”. Philip Pullman takes listeners to a world where humans have animal familiars and where parallel universes are within reach. Lyra is rushing to the cold, far North, where witch clans and armored bears rule. North, where the Gobblers take the children they steal - including her friend Roger. North, where her fearsome uncle Asriel is trying to build a bridge to a parallel world. Can one small girl make a difference in such great and terrible endeavors? This is Lyra: a savage, a schemer, a liar, and as fierce and true a champion as Roger or Asriel could want. But what Lyra doesn't know is that to help one of them will be to betray the other.... A masterwork of storytelling and suspense, Philip Pullman's award-winning The Golden Compass is the first in the His Dark Materials series, which continues with The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. A Number One New York Times Best Seller Winner of the Guardian Prize for Children's Fiction Published in 40 Countries "Arguably the best juvenile fantasy novel of the past 20 years." (The Washington Post) "Very grand indeed." (The New York Times) "Pullman is quite possibly a genius." (Newsweek) Don't miss Philip Pullman's epic new trilogy set in the world of His Dark Materials, the Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage The Secret Commonwealth
©1995 Philip Pullman (P)1999 Random House, Inc.
Churchill
Summary
Brought to you by Penguin. Winston Churchill towers over every other figure in 20th-century British history. By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 1965, many thought him to be the greatest man in the world. There have been over a thousand previous biographies of Churchill. Andrew Roberts now draws on over 40 new sources, including the private diaries of King George VI, used in no previous Churchill biography, to depict him more intimately and persuasively than any of its predecessors. Masterfully narrated by Stephen Thorne, this audiobook in no way conceals Churchill's faults, and it allows the listener to appreciate his virtues and character in full: his titanic capacity for work (and drink), his ability see the big picture, his willingness to take risks and insistence on being where the action was, his good humour even in the most desperate circumstances, the breadth and strength of his friendships and his extraordinary propensity to burst into tears at unexpected moments. Above all, it shows us the wellsprings of his personality - his lifelong desire to please his father (even long after his father's death) but aristocratic disdain for the opinions of almost everyone else, his love of the British Empire, his sense of history and its connection to the present. During the Second World War, Churchill summoned a particular scientist to see him several times for technical advice. 'It was the same whenever we met', wrote the young man. 'I had a feeling of being recharged by a source of living power.' Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt's emissary, wrote, 'Wherever he was, there was a battlefront.' Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Churchill's essential partner in strategy and most severe critic in private, wrote in his diary, 'I thank God I was given such an opportunity of working alongside such a man, and of having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.'
©2018 Andrew Roberts (P)2018 Penguin Books Ltd
Napoleon the Great
Summary
Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just 20 years, from October 1795, when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. After seizing power in a coup d'état, he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the revolution had descended. In a series of dazzling battles, he reinvented the art of warfare; in peace he completely remade the laws of France, modernised her systems of education and administration, and presided over a flourishing of the beautiful Empire style in the arts. The impossibility of defeating his most persistent enemy, Great Britain, led him to make draining and ultimately fatal expeditions into Spain and Russia, where half a million Frenchmen died, and his empire began to unravel. More than any other modern biographer, Andrew Roberts conveys Napoleon's tremendous energy, both physical and intellectual, and the attractiveness of his personality even to his enemies. He has walked 53 of Napoleon's 60 battlefields and has absorbed the gigantic new French edition of Napoleon's letters, which allows a complete reevaluation of this exceptional man. He overturns many received opinions, including the myth of a great romance with Josephine: She took a lover immediately after their marriage, and, as Roberts shows, he had three times as many mistresses as he acknowledged. Of the climactic Battle of Leipzig in 1813, as the fighting closed around them, a French sergeant major wrote, "No-one who has not experienced it can have any idea of the enthusiasm that burst forth among the half-starved, exhausted soldiers when the Emperor was there in person. If all were demoralised and he appeared, his presence was like an electric shock. All shouted 'Vive l'Empereur!' and everyone charged blindly into the fire." Andrew Roberts is a biographer and historian of international renown whose books include Salisbury: Victorian Titan (winner, the Wolfson Prize for History); Masters and Commanders; and The Storm of War, which reached number two on the Sunday Times best seller list. Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Societies of Literature and Arts. He appears regularly on British television and radio and writes for the Sunday Telegraph, Spectator, Literary Review, Mail on Sunday and Daily Telegraph.
©2014 Andrew Roberts (P)2015 Audible, Ltd
Wolf of the Plains
Summary
The first book in the best-selling Conqueror series featuring Genghis Khan and his descendants. "I am the land and the bones of the hills. I am the winter." Temujin, the second son of the khan of the Wolves tribe, was only 11 when his father died in an ambush. His family were thrown out of the tribe and left alone, without food or shelter, to starve to death on the harsh Mongolian plains. It was a rough introduction to his life, to a sudden adult world, but Temujin survived, learning to combat natural and human threats. A man, a small family, without a tribe was always at risk, but he gathered other outsiders to him, creating a new tribal identity. It was during some of his worst times that the image of uniting the warring tribes and bringing the silver people together came to him. He will become the khan of the sea of grass, Genghis.
©2007 Conn Iggulden (P)2005 Oakhill Publishing Ltd
Je me souviens
Summary
À Montréal, juste avant Noël, un homme et une femme meurent le cou transpercé par ce qui semble être un instrument de torture. Auparavant, ils ont entendu la voix de Lee Harvey Oswald, l’assassin présumé du président Kennedy. Un sans-abri se jette du haut d’un édifice de la place d’Armes. Ayant séjourné à plusieurs reprises en psychiatrie, il prétendait avoir participé, avec le FLQ, à l’assassinat de Pierre Laporte. Sur le toit, avant de sauter, il laisse deux portefeuilles, ceux des victimes. Et la série de meurtres se poursuit... De retour à la section des crimes majeurs, le sergent-détective Victor Lessard mène l’enquête.
©2012, 2014 Les Éditions Goélette, Martin Michaud (première édition); Les Éditions Coup d'oeil, Martin Michaud (présente édition) (P)2018 Audible, Inc.
The Prestige
Summary
In 1878, two young stage magicians clash in the dark during the course of a fraudulent séance. From this moment on, their lives become webs of deceit and revelation as they vie to outwit and expose each other. In the course of pursuing each other's ruin, they will deploy all the deception their magician's craft can command. Their rivalry will take them to the peaks of their careers, but with terrible consequences. In the end, their legacy will be passed on for generations to descendants who must, for their sanity's sake, untangle the puzzle left to them.
©1995 Christopher Priest (P)2006 Blackstone Audio Inc.
Empire of Silver
Summary
The eagerly awaited 4th novel in the bestselling Conqueror series, continuing the life and adventures of the mighty Khan dynasty. Genghis Khan is dead, but his legend and his legacy live on. His son Ogedai has built a white city on a great plain and made a capital for the new nation. Now the armies have gathered to see which of Genghis' sons has the strength to be khan. The Mongol empire has been at peace for two years, but whoever survives will face the formidable might of their great enemy, China’s Song dynasty. The great leader Tsubodai sweeps into the west: through Russia, over the Carpathian mountains and into Hungary. The Templar knights have been broken and there is no king or army to stop him reaching France. But at the moment of Tsubodai's greatest triumph, as his furthest scouts reach the northern mountains of Italy, Tsubodai must make a decision that will change the course of history forever.
©2010 Conn Iggulden (P)2010 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
A History of Britain: Volume 1
Summary
The story of Britain from the earliest settlements in 3000 BC to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. To look back at the past is to understand the present. In this vivid account of over 4,000 years of British history, Simon Schama takes us on an epic journey which encompasses the very beginnings of the nation's identity, when the first settlers landed on Orkney. From the successes and failures of the monarchy to the daily life of a Roman soldier stationed on Hadrian's Wall, Schama gives a vivid, fascinating account of the many different stories and struggles that lie behind the growth of our island nation. Simon Schama's major BBC2 series has shown him to be one of our most original and exciting historians.
©2012 Simon Schama (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Monk's-Hood
Summary
Gervase Bonel, with his wife and servants, is a guest of Shrewsbury Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul when he is suddenly taken ill. Luckily, the Abbey boasts the services of clever and kindly Brother Cadfael, a skilled herbalist. Cadfael hurries to the man's bedside, only to be confronted by two very different surprises. In Master Bonel's wife, the good monk recognises Richildis, whom he loved many years ago before he took his vows. And Master Bonel has been fatally poisoned by a dose of deadly monk's-hood oil from Cadfael's herbarium. The Sheriff is convinced that the murderer is Richildis' son Edwin, who had reasons aplenty to hate his stepfather. But Cadfael, guided in part by his tender concern for a woman to whom he was once betrothed, is certain of her son's innocence. Using his knowledge of both herbs and the human heart, Cadfael deciphers a deadly recipe for murder....
©1980 Ellis Peters (P)2011 Hachette Digital
The Sheep-Pig
Summary
When Babe, the little orphaned piglet, is won at a fair by Farmer Hogget, he is adopted by Fly, the kind-hearted sheep-dog. Babe is determined to learn everything he can from Fly. He knows he can't be a sheep-dog. But maybe, just maybe, he might be a sheep-pig.
©1983 ©1983 Dick King-Smith (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Jude The Obscure
Summary
Exclusively from Audible Eager to escape the confines of his lower-class upbringing, Jude Fawley dreams of pursuing higher education, graduating from university and becoming a scholar. Slowly, we witness the resistance Jude is met with and, in keeping with Hardy's other works, the consequences of having dared to defy a society with long-held traditions. Thomas Hardy's last novel, Jude the Obscure, offers scathing commentary and insight into 19th century England. Widely considered Hardy's boldest and most avant-garde work, it was first published in serialised form, sending weekly shockwaves of outrage to its Victorian audiences. Despite being an able and driven young man, Jude's potential is squandered and his aspirations quashed when he relents and becomes a stonemason. Grounded by an unhappy marriage and a lack of opportunity, Jude's only escape comes in the form of his beloved cousin, Sue Bridehead. An unconventional yet extraordinary heroine, Sue becomes Jude's only chance at happiness, but in a society so unwilling to accept change, their love becomes their undoing. One of the most influential and prolific novelists and poets of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Thomas Hardy followed the naturalist movement and was greatly inspired by the works of Charles Dickens and William Wordsworth. In turn, his work enthused the likes of Robert Frost, W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin. Narrator Biography Stephen Thorne is a classically-trained radio, film, stage and television actor. He graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and has toured with The Old Vic Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company. His voice experience is extensive and he is credited with over 2000 radio broadcasts and 300 unabridged audiobooks. These include works by James Henry, Dick King-Smith, Arthur Conan-Doyle and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Stephen famously voiced the character of Aslan in the 1979 adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. His unique narration style has won him various awards in both the UK and the USA, including a Talkies Award and several Golden Earphones Awards from Audiofile Magazine. Stephen is no stranger to the screen and his television roles include Z-Cars, Death of an Expert Witness, David Copperfield, Crossroads, Last of the Summer Wine and Doctor Who. He also appeared in the 1984 film, Runaway and the 1985 film, Lollipop Dragon: The Great Christmas Race.
Public Domain (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
A Killing Frost
Summary
The discovery of two teenage girls' bodies and a video of a snuff movie showing the death of one of the victims leaves Detective Inspector Jack Frost in a race against time before the killer can strike again.
Meanwhile, someone is poisoning foodstuffs at a local supermarket chain. When the owner receives threatening demands to pay up or be put out of business, it is up to Frost to catch the blackmailer. As all leads dry up and Frost faces questions over the handling of the cases, he faces a threat to his professional life with the arrival of DCI Skinner at Denton Police Station. Is this the end for Jack Frost?
©2008 The Estate of R. D. Wingfield (P)2008 Isis Publishing Ltd
Demon Storm
Summary
With Treoir Island in shambles after a Medb attack that left the survival of the missing Belador warrior queen in question and Belador powers compromised, the Beladors have one hope for their queen's return and their own future: Evalle Kincaid, whose recent transformation has turned her into an even more formidable warrior. First Evalle has to locate Storm, the Skinwalker she's bonded with, whom she believes can find the Belador queen, but Storm stalks the witch doctor threatening Evalle's life. The hunter becomes the hunted, and Evalle must face her greatest nightmare to save Storm and the Beladors - or watch the future of mankind fall to deadly preternatural predators.
©2015 Dianna Love (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Frost at Christmas
Summary
With a healthy disregard for rules, he attracts trouble like a magnet. He has a newly assigned apprentice - the unfortunate Detective Constable Barnard - the Chief Constable’s nephew. Fresh to the provinces, just up from London in an embarrassingly flash suit, he’s ripe for Frost’s satire.
©1984 R. D. Wingfield (P)1996 Isis Publishing Ltd
A History of Britain: Volume 3
Summary
Timothy West reads the third and concluding volume of award-winning historian Simon Schama's compelling chronicle of the British Isles. Here he illuminates the period from 1776 to 2000 through a variety of historical themes, including Victorian advances in technology and industry, women's increasing role in society, and the burgeoning British Empire which promised civilisation and material betterment for all. This volume also looks at key characters from the period, including Wordsworth, Burke, Queen Victoria, Churchill, and Orwell, whilst examining some lesser-known lives, such as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman doctor, and Mary Seacole, a Jamaican nurse in the Crimea. Finally, Schama reflects on the overwhelming presence of the past in the 20th century, and the struggle of our leaders to find a way of making a different national future.
©2012 Simon Schama (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Night Frost
Summary
A serial killer is terrorizing the senior citizens of Denton, and the local police are succumbing to a flu epidemic. In uncertain charge of the investigations is Detective Inspector Jack Frost, crumpled, slapdash, and foul-mouthed as ever. Trying to cope despite inadequate backup, but there is never enough time; the unsolved crimes pile up and the vicious killings go on.
©1992 R. D. Wingfield (P)1998 Isis Publishing Ltd
First Frost
Summary
Denton, 1981. Britain is in recession, the IRA is becoming increasingly active, and the country’s on alert for an outbreak of rabies. Detective Sergeant Jack Frost is working under his mentor, DI Bert Williams, and coping badly with his increasingly strained marriage. Superintendent Stanley Mullett has been at Denton for only six months and is desperately trying to restore order within the chronically depleted ranks while refurbishing the dilapidated Eagle Lane HQ. But DI Williams is nowhere to be seen, and DI Allen has failed to return from his walking holiday. So when a 12-year-old girl goes missing from a department-store changing room, Mullett has no option but to put DS Frost in charge of the investigation.
©2011 The Estate of R. D. Wingfield (P)2011 Isis Publishing Ltd
The Elmer Treasury: Volume 3
Summary
The third volume featuring classic stories about Elmer, our favourite colourful patchwork elephant! A modern classic, Elmer the colourful patchwork elephant has been a nursery favourite since his creation in 1989 and has sold over four million copies around the world. Elmer is not your normal grey elephant - his colourful exuberance cannot be contained for long! With his trademark cheeky humour, Elmer shows us that it's OK to be different. This third audiobook collection features more of the best-selling Elmer books, including: Elmer on Stilts, Elmer, Rose and Super, Elmer and the Wind, Elmer and Snake, Elmer and the Stranger, Elmer and Grandpa Eldo, Elmer's Special Day, and Elmer and the Whales.
©2016 David Mckee (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
The Elmer Treasury: Volume 2
Summary
The second volume featuring eight classic stories about Elmer, our favourite colourful patchwork elephant! A modern classic, Elmer the colourful patchwork elephant has been a nursery favourite since his creation in 1989 and has sold over four million copies around the world. Elmer is not your normal grey elephant - his colourful exuberance cannot be contained for long! With his trademark cheeky humour, Elmer shows us that it's OK to be different. This second audiobook collection features another eight of the best-selling Elmer picture books, including: Elmer and the Big Bird, Elmer and Wilbur, Elmer and the Hippos, Elmer in the Snow, Elmer and Super El, Elmer and Butterfly, Elmer Again and Elmer and the Race.
©2016 David McKee (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Strangers
Summary
Paul Sturgis is a retired bank manager who lives alone in a dark little flat. He walks alone and dines alone, seeking out and taking pleasure in small exchanges with strangers: the cheerful Australian girl who cuts his hair, the lady at the dry cleaners. His only relative - and only acquaintance - is a widowed cousin by marriage, herself a virtual stranger, to whom he pays ritualistic visits on a Sunday afternoon. Trying to make sense of his current solitary state, and fearing that his destiny may be to die among strangers, Sturgis trawls through memories of his failed relationships and finds himself longing for companionship, or at the very least a conversation. But then a chance encounter with a stranger - a recently divorced and demanding younger woman - shakes up his routine, and when an old girlfriend appears on the scene, Sturgis is forced to make a decision about how (and with whom) he wants to spend the rest of his days.... Anita Brookner was born in South London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her 24th, Strangers, in 2009. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.
©2009 Anita Brookner (P)2014 Audible, Inc.