Showing results by narrator "Jeff Harding" in All Categories

Emma Vane blurs the line between human and plant in this short story featuring a lily that has developed a mouth and can moan. Concern is soon raised for the safety of the central protagonist, botanist Carl Brense.

The story is set in Padua and follows botanist Giacomo Rappaccini’s garden of poisonous plants. A student from the university of Padua falls for a maiden in the luscious garden, but he soon learns some troubling information about his beloved’s true nature.

A short story from the British Library Tales of the Weird collection Evil Roots. Best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, this short story by Conan Doyle preceded the famous detective by almost a decade. After an altercation, a disgruntled American storms off into the night, only to disappear mysteriously. Could a giant flytrap really be capable of engulfing an adult victim?

BBC Audio present six fantastic tales of twisted futures and times beyond tomorrow. Inspired by the pulp sci-fi of '50s America, these perfectly pitched parodies are redolent of the atomic age—when the space race was at its height, Cold War paranoia was at fever pitch and the future seemed both thrilling and terrifying.

In Our Time is an exploration of alienation, loss and war that launched Ernest Hemingway into the American public consciousness and began his career as one of American’s foremost writers.

17th September 2020 marks the centenary of the National Football League. It reaches that landmark as a behemoth, an all-encompassing conglomerate that is the most lucrative sports league in the world - and also the dominant pop culture entity in the United States. The NFL is also making considerable gains worldwide. The International Series has been heading to London since 2007 with incredible sell-outs at the four games in 2019 at Wembley and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadiums.

Shawnee chief Tecumseh was a man destined for greatness - the son of a prominent war leader, he was supposedly born under a lucky shooting star. Charismatic, intelligent, handsome, he was both a fierce warrior and a savvy politician. In the first biography of Tecumseh in more than 20 years, Peter Cozzens thoroughly revises our understanding of this great leader and his movement, arguing that his overlooked younger brother Tenskwatwa, the 'Shawnee Prophet', was a crucial partner in Tecumseh's success.

This sharp and engaging collection of essays by leading governmental scholar Cass R. Sunstein examines shifting understandings of what's normal and how those shifts account for the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the rise of gun rights, the response to COVID-19, and changing understandings of liberty. Prevailing norms include the principle of equal dignity, the idea of not treating the press as an enemy of the people, and the social unacceptability of open expressions of racial discrimination.

Over the last 500 years, life for the average human being has changed dramatically - plagues no longer wipe out entire families, and no longer do we empty our chamber pots into the street. Nope, not today. But, Western progress has shown that no matter how many dangers we neutralize, new ones emerge. Now we remain at the mercy of an invisible enemy - fear. Our well-being suffers and our imaginations are stifled.

The Nightingale House is a new beginning for widower Daniel Price and his young daughter, Caitlyn. After months of grief, this will be the place where they start their life as a family of two. But something is wrong - Daniel can’t settle. There’s an odd, cold feeling in the master bedroom, and a mysterious dripping noise that seems to move from room to room. Whispers of I can’t sleep echo through the corridors, long into the night.

'Dry Gulch Outlaws': Link Bonner has already tracked and killed two of the Carp brothers who raped and murdered his young Pawnee bride. Then when he gets word of the whereabouts of the others, he leaves Emma Fitzgerald behind him in Fort Union and heads for Yuma. But Emma has tracked him down and now intends to march straight into his heart. 'The Dark Trail to Nowhere': Lucas Santana is a freelance range detective working for both the US Marshals Service and the Pinkerton Detective Agency in the 1880s.

When the body of Mayra Cabral de Melo, a well-known stripper, is found by the side of a dusty road, detective Edgar "Lefty" Mendieta has personal reasons for bringing the culprit to justice. Mayra had no shortage of ardent, deluded and downright dangerous admirers, and Lefty himself is haunted by one steamy night he spent in her generous company. So begins an investigation that will bring him ever closer to the murderous world of the narcos, who are waging a war of bloody attrition against the Mexican state.

During the 1970s and early '80s, dozens - perhaps hundreds - of Japanese civilians were kidnapped by North Korean commandos and forced to live in 'Invitation Only Zones', high-security detention centres masked as exclusive areas on the outskirts of Pyongyang. The objective? To brainwash the abductees with the regime's ideology and train them to spy on the state's behalf.

Why is it that we read? Is it to pass time? To learn something new? To escape from reality? For Will Schwalbe, reading is a way to entertain himself but also to make sense of the world, to become a better person, and to find the answers to the big (and small) questions about how to live his life. In this delightful celebration of reading, Schwalbe invites us along on his quest for books that speak to the specific challenges of living in our modern world, with all its noise and distractions.

Black Beauty is a novel by English author Anna Sewell written around 1877. The story is told in the first person and is a fictional autobiographical memoir told from the perspective of a horse named Black Beauty. The story follows this horse's life, from his young days on an English farm with his mother, to the more dreadful years of pulling cabs in London, and ending with his happy retirement in the country.

Bruce Lee, having had access to more than one million pages of US Army documents and thousands of pages of daily top-secret messages dispatched to Tokyo from the Japanese embassy in Berlin, assembles fascinating revelations about pivotal moments in the war, including the reason Eisenhower stopped his army at the Elbe and let the Russians capture Berlin, the invasion of Europe, and the battles on the African and Eastern fronts.

South takes place in a USA ravaged by civil war. It's been 30 years since the first wind-borne viruses ended the war between North and South - and still they keep coming. Every wind brings a new and terrifying way to die. The few survivors live in constant fear, hiding from the wind - and from each other. In the harsh Southern expanse, brothers Garrett and Dyce Jackson are on the run from brutal law enforcers. They meet Vida, a lone traveler on a secret quest.

There’s something wrong next door. At least that’s what neighbours Howie Jeffries and Emily Phane both think. Howie is an accidental recluse, content with his fishing and dreams of someday sailing away on a boat. Emily couldn’t be more different: she’s irreverent, outgoing and seemingly well adjusted. But when Emily returns from college to care for her dying grandfather, Howie can’t help but notice her increasingly erratic behavior - not to mention her newfound love of nocturnal gardening.

A Western trio of renegades, outlaws and the Alaskan gold rush days of the 1890s.

From a centuries-old building on a narrow street in the heart of London, a firm known as the System, the world's most lucrative and least-known cartel, maintains a stranglehold on the world's diamonds. The company selects the stones a customer can buy and decides how much he must pay for the privilege. One dealer is tired of the game, and so he sets out to destroy the System forever.