Victoria Riley has narrated 8 audiobooks on Listento.it by 20 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 34 ratings. The most-rated is Start Your Engines.
Start Your Engines
Summary
Brought to you by Penguin. You don’t get biceps like Briggs by giving up when the going gets tough.... CrossFit superstar Sam Briggs, a.k.a. ‘The Engine’, is a true hero in the sport, with a level of endurance unparalleled in the game. This is the story of how she got to the top and battled with everything she had to stay there. Sam’s memoir takes in the whole story, from being kicked out of ballet lessons as a child but being accepted on the boys’ sports teams, to working as a firefighter in West Yorkshire for 10 years, tackling dangerous and adrenaline-fueled situations on a daily basis and to taking up CrossFit at the comparatively ancient age of 27. Sam tells of what it took to become champion a mere three years later and after a year out with a broken patella. Despite the numerous setbacks and debilitating injuries that have plagued her in the years that followed, when most other athletes would have thrown in the towel, Sam has fought and continues to fight, to be the very best that she can be. Start Your Engines is the story of how, with a combination of grit, training and dogged motivation, it’s never too late to achieve your dreams.
©2020 Sam Briggs (P)2020 Penguin Audio
The Nutcracker
Summary
New York Times best-selling artist Susan Jeffers has created a Nutcracker unlike any that has gone before, with a lovely spare text based on the ballet. This is the perfect gift to share with children before they see The Nutcracker. Everyone who has seen the ballet will cherish it - as will anyone who enjoys stories where love triumphs. Come, take a front-row seat. The world's most beloved holiday fairy tale is about to begin.
©2007 Susan Jeffers (P)2014 HarperCollins Publishers
You Must Be Very Intelligent
Summary
When Karin enters a high-ranked university to start her PhD she is brimming with hope and positively overflowing with grit determination to prove she is worthy. After all, she knows that only the extraordinarily learned and the astonishingly intelligent ever hold chairs and professorships. She knows researchers are idealists yearning to enrich the stock of human knowledge. She knows university is the apotheosis of civilised culture... She knows very little...
©2019 Karin Bodewits (P)2019 Karin Bodewits
Rational Creatures: Stirrings of Feminism in the Hearts of Jane Austen's Fine Ladies
Summary
“But I hate to hear you talking so, like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days.” (Persuasion, Jane Austen) Jane Austen: True romantic or rational creature? Her novels transport us back to the Regency, a time when well-mannered gentlemen and finely-bred ladies fell in love as they danced at balls and rode in carriages. Yet her heroines, such as Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Elliot, and Elinor Dashwood, were no swooning, fainthearted damsels in distress. Austen’s novels are timeless classics because of their biting wit, honest social commentary - because she wrote of strong women who were ahead of their day. True to their principles and beliefs, they fought through hypocrisy and broke social boundaries to find their happily-ever-after. In the third romance anthology of The Quill Collective series, 16 celebrated Austenesque authors write the untold histories of Austen’s heroines, brave adventuresses, shy maidens, talkative spinsters, and naughty matrons. Peek around the curtain and discover what made Lady Susan so wicked, Mary Crawford so capricious, and Hettie Bates so in need of Emma Woodhouse’s pity. Rational Creatures is a collection of humorous, poignant, and engaging short stories set in Georgian England that complement and pay homage to Austen’s great works and great ladies who were, perhaps, the first feminists in an era that was not quite ready for feminism. “Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will become good wives; - that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.” (Mary Wollstonecraft) Stories by: Elizabeth Adams, Nicole Clarkston, Karen M Cox, J. Marie Croft, Amy D’Orazio, Jenetta James, Jessie Lewis, KaraLynne Mackrory, Lona Manning, Christina Morland, Beau North, Sophia Rose, Anngela Schroeder, Joana Starnes, Brooke West, and Caitlin Williams Edited by Christina Boyd Foreword by Devoney Looser Full list of authors includes Brooke West.
©2018 Christina Boyd (P)2019 Christina Boyd
99 Red Balloons
Summary
Two girls go missing, decades apart. What would you do if one was your daughter? Eight-year-old Grace is last seen in a sweetshop. Her mother, Emma, is living a nightmare. But as her loved ones rally around her, cracks begin to emerge. What are the emails sent between her husband and her sister? Why does her mother take so long to join the search? And is there more to the disappearance of her daughter than meets the eye? Meanwhile, ageing widow Maggie Taylor sees a familiar face in the newspaper. A face that jolts her from the pain of her existence into a spiralling obsession with another girl - the first girl who disappeared.... This is a gripping psychological thriller with a killer twist that will take your breath away.
©2017 Elisabeth Carpenter (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers
A Painter in Penang
Summary
Sixteen-year-old Jasmine Barrington hates everything about living in Kenya and longs to return to the island of Penang in British colonial Malaya where she was born. Expulsion from her Nairobi convent school offers a welcome escape - the chance to stay with her parents’ friends, Mary and Reggie Hyde-Underwood, on their Penang rubber estate. But this is 1948, and communist insurgents are embarking on a reign of terror in what becomes the Malayan Emergency. Jasmine goes through testing experiences - confronting heartache, a shocking past secret and danger. Throughout it all, the one constant in her life is her passion for painting. From the international best-selling and award-winning author of The Pearl of Penang, this is a dramatic coming of age story, set against the backdrop of a tropical paradise torn apart by Civil War.
©2020 Clare Flynn (P)2020 Clare Flynn
Prisoner from Penang
Summary
A vivid and moving story of sacrifice, hope, and humanity. From the best-selling author of The Pearl of Penang. After Penang is attacked by the Japanese at the end of 1941, Mary Helston believes Singapore will be a safe haven. But within weeks, the supposedly invincible British stronghold is on the brink of collapse to the advancing enemy. Mary and her mother are captured at sea as they try to escape and are interned on the islands of Sumatra. Imprisoned with them is Veronica Leighton, the one person on the planet Mary has reason to loathe with a passion. As the motley band of women struggle to adapt to captivity, relationships and friendships are tested. When starvation, lack of medication, and the spread of disease worsen, each woman must draw on every ounce of strength in their battle for survival.
©2020 Clare Flynn (P)2020 Clare Flynn
The Pearl of Penang
Summary
"Following the death of my wife, I am in need of support and companionship. I am prepared to make you an offer of marriage." Evie Fraser, paid companion to a crotchety spinster, seems destined for a lonely life. Then, out of the blue, a marriage proposal arrives by post. She met the handsome Douglas Barrington just once - at his wedding - but never forgot him. Now widowed, plantation owner Douglas offers her a new life on the lush, exotic island of Penang. How can Evie resist? But what are Barrington’s motives in marrying Evie when he barely knows her, and why is he so hostile and moody? Evie soon finds herself pitched against Douglas on the one hand and the shallow, often spiteful world of the expatriate British on the other. Has she made the biggest mistake of her life? Flynn’s 10th novel explores love, marriage, the impact of war, and the challenges of displacement, this time in a tropical paradise, as the threat of the Japanese empire looms closer.
©2019 Clare Flynn (P)2020 Clare Flynn