Showing results by narrator "Justin Avoth" in All Categories

Across the globe, millions of people are involved in the brutal, cold-blooded world of drug dealing, but only a small number make life-changing money. Only a few get to the top, make the calls, know how it all works and truly become drugs lords. And even fewer survive. I know because I am one of those drug lords. After 30 years, I've decided to retire and tell the story of how I got to the top of this tainted profession, what's involved in being a serious criminal, the tricks of the trade, the art of the deal and what it really takes to stay alive for so long.

1919. On the desolate battlefields of Northern France, the guns of the Great War are silent. Special battalions now face the dangerous task of gathering up the dead for mass burial. Captain Mackenzie, a survivor of the war, cannot yet bring himself to go home. First he must see that his fallen comrades are recovered and laid to rest.

To the outside world, suave, charming and confident doctor Marcus Valentine has it all. A loving wife, three kids, a great job. But there’s something missing, there always has been...or rather, someone.... Driving to work one morning, his mind elsewhere and not on the road, he almost mows down a female jogger on a crossing. As she runs on, Marcus is transfixed. Infatuated. She is the spitting image of a girl he was crazy about in his teens. A girl he has never been able to get out of his mind.

This superb account of the siege emphasises the crucial importance of the siege while at the same time putting it in a far wider context. While seen as a climactic battle between the West and the East, it was also much more nuanced than that – both sides had many other interests and priorities beyond Malta. Suleiman the Magnificent had conquered and subsumed regions from Hungary to the Persian Gulf; Philip II was building an empire in America and Asia.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline thunders out from the grave with this long-lost novel. Looted by the Resistance during the liberation of Paris and resurfacing only in 2020, War is a major rediscovery. It begins in the chaotic battlefields of Flanders, with Bardamu (Céline’s fictional alter ego) surrounded by corpses. Wounded and shell-shocked, he wanders in hallucination, finding refuge at a hospital in Peurdu-sur-la-Lys and striking up a friendship with a Parisian pimp – however, the war continues to drive itself under his skin and destroy him.

Nicolas Nabokov, a Russian-born composer and cultural diplomat, befriended many of the 20th century’s greatest musicians and artists. With delightful anecdotes and personal reflections, his memoir is a truly unique historical document that enriches our understanding of the Cold War’s impact on culture.

Goïmron gathers a small band of trusted companions, and they set off to find Tungdil and save Girdlegard from the mysterious Albae. But the story's only half-over. Brabandor's on the trail of something extraordinary; Rodana is trying to change her fate, and Klaey remains an unknown quantity: his lust for power is unparalleled, and he'll do anything to get it. And the most worrying question of all . . . will their quest, change Goïmron himself?

English writer Hilary Wainwright lost all trace of his young son when Lisa, his wife, was killed by the Gestapo in Paris. Several years later, an acquaintance travels to England with news that Hilary’s son may be alive in France. Doubting whether five-year-old Jean is indeed his, and determined not to feel vulnerable to love and tenderness again, Hilary travels to France to find the boy.

London, 1861: Ten-year-old Nell belongs to a crew of mudlarks who work a stretch of the Thames along the Ratcliffe Highway. An orphan since her mother died four years past, leaving Nell with only broken dreams and a pair of satin slippers in her possession, she spends her days dredging up coals, copper and pieces of iron spilled by the river barges – searching for treasure in the mud in order to appease her master, Benjamin Murdstone. But one day, Nell discovers a body on the shore. It’s not the first corpse she’s encountered, but by far the strangest.

Six lives, connected through blood and history, each rooted in the dirt of their inheritance, look to the future, and what it might hold. In 1855, Edward Feebes travels to the guano islands of South America, to investigate an irregularity in the accounts of the House of Feebes & Co. In 1912, post-mortem photographer and reluctant blackmailer Annie Connolly plots her escape from Ireland to America on board the Titanic.

The Fable of the Bees—a satirical poem, prose discussion, three essays and six dialogues completed in 1729—exposes human vices but defends them as a necessity within a wealthy society. Mandeville’s bees thrive until they start living by honesty and virtue… then they are impoverished. Mandeville did not play by the rules: he satirized the sins of society but also ridiculed the widespread hypocrisy of deploring these sins whilst reaping their benefits. He and his work were attacked for the rest of the century.

‘The sweetness of her glance—or rather, my evil star already in its ascendant and drawing me to my ruin—did not allow me to hesitate for a moment...’ So begins the story of Manon Lescaut, a tale of passion and betrayal, of delinquency and misalliance, which moves from early 18th-century Paris—with its theatres, assemblies, and gaming-houses—via prison and deportation to a tragic denouement in the treeless wastes of Louisiana. It is one of the great love stories, and also one of the most enigmatic.

In 1978 the Bulgarian author and dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated by a poisoned umbrella on Waterloo Bridge in London. His murder is the most iconic killing in almost five decades of the Cold War, and no one has ever been prosecuted for it. The Umbrella Murder reveals the real architect and hit man behind this spectacular killing: a spy code-named Piccadilly who worked for the Bulgarian secret service and the KGB, who has been hiding for more than forty years.

The study of ancient Greek history has been central to the western conception of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which each generation has reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary world, through times of revolution, conflicting ideologies and warfare. It aims to offer a new history of Greek historiography from the Enlightenment to the present, and to acknowledge the continuing spiritual importance of the ancient Greeks for European culture.

D-Day was bloody, chaotic and frequently terrifying. Its outcome was far from certain. And at its epicentre were tens of thousands of young men, many seeing their first active service. It was a single day that changed millions of lives. A critical turning point of the Second World War. Using audio interviews with British, American, Canadian and German veterans, as well as French civilians, this immersive new oral history describes what it was actually like to take part in the landings on 6 June 1944 and the weeks of ferocious fighting in Normandy that followed.

Hundreds of cycles have passed in Girdlegard since Tungdil Goldhand vanished. The dwarf Goïmron works as a gem carver in the city of Mallenias Watch. He is particularly fascinated by the old times, the great times of the five dwarf tribes, and so spends his spare time searching the markets for records and artefacts for clues about their proud history. And then Goïmron comes across an extraordinary book. The wealth of detail it contains leaves no doubt that the book must have been written by the heroic Tungdil Goldhand himself. But, impossibly, the last entry seems to be recent.

436 AD. The Burgundars are confident of destroying Rome's legions. Their forces are strong and they have beaten the Romans in battle before. But they are annihilated, their king killed, his people scattered. Their fabled treasure is lost. For Rome has new allies: the Huns, whose taste for bloodshed knows no bounds.

Under the orders of Ireheart, now High King of the dwarves, a small delegation is sent to search for Tungdil Goldhand, the true High King, who many believe dead. Against all odds, Tungdil has survived his mission to the terrifying realm of Phondrasôn. But is he truly the legendary hero of the dwarves, or an impostor at the heart of a deeper conspiracy?