Showing results by narrator "Kevin Spink" in All Categories

This series contains mature themes and strong language and listener discretion is advised.

Twenty years ago Joe Bennett hitchhiked the length and breadth of New Zealand. The result was A Land of Two Halves, a portrait of the country and its many contradictions that is as telling today as it was then. For as Joe says in his reintroduction to this classic road trip, the name of the All Black first five may have changed but there is still an All Black first five, the waves still thump against Hokitika beach and the debate still rages over the Treaty of Waitangi.

George Blake was the last remaining Cold War spy. As a senior officer in the British Intelligence Service who was double agent for the Soviet Union, his actions had devastating consequences for Britain. Yet he was also one of the least-known double agents, and remained unrepentant. In 1961, Blake was sentenced to 42 years imprisonment for betraying to the KGB all of the Western operations in which he was involved, and the names of hundreds of British agents working behind the Iron Curtain. This was the longest sentence for espionage ever to have been handed down by a British court

During the freezing English winter of 1962, 17-year-old Radford is sent to Goodwin Manor, a great and isolated house in country Shropshire for boys who have been ‘found by trouble’. Drawn immediately to the charismatic West, Radford soon discovers that each one of them has something to hide. Life at the Manor offers a refuge of sorts, but the onset of a deathly winter and unexpected new arrivals threaten the fragile dynamics. At once beautiful and haunting, The Everlasting Sunday is a haunting debut novel about growing up. growing wild and what it takes to survive.

England, 1961. Samuel's mother has been away for 113 days. Now it's just Samuel and Ruth, the housekeeper, alone in the once-great house. His mother is abroad, purportedly tending to her late husband's faltering business. Samuel yearns for her return but knows she must have had her reasons for leaving in the middle of the night, without saying good-bye. Although Samuel receives occasional postcards from his mother, her absence weighs heavily on his mind.