Showing results by narrator "Ralph Lister" in All Categories

This Psych 312 assignment just might send me off the deep end. Determining whether love at first sight really exists with Robbie Moravian as my project partner of all people? He’s the sappiest man alive, so upbeat I could scream, and clearly rooting for happy endings at every turn. How does he not learn from experience considering our own meet-cute last semester almost got us expelled? But we both need to pass this course to graduate. So we’re interviewing five random couples about their meet-cutes and relationships and spending all this time together. Which is certainly...educational.

Shogun, the classic epic novel of feudal Japan that captured the heart of a culture and the imagination of the world, is now available for the first time in serial format. Part Two contains the second half of the complete novel.

As the son of a famous general, Aravon is proud to captain his own company against his people's enemy. But the experienced veteran’s march toward glory dissolves into pain as ruthless barbarians massacre every last one of his soldiers. Burning for vengeance, he leaps at the chance to spearhead a specially trained company and pay back his tragic defeat with blood.

After Englishman John Blackthorne is lost at sea, he awakens in a place few Europeans know of and even fewer have seen—Nippon. Thrust into the closed society that is seventeenth-century Japan, a land where the line between life and death is razor-thin, Blackthorne must negotiate not only a foreign people, with unknown customs and language, but also his own definitions of morality, truth, and freedom. As internal political strife and a clash of cultures lead to seemingly inevitable conflict, Blackthorne’s loyalty and strength of character are tested by both passion and loss.

Ark Royal - the Royal Navy’s outdated space carrier - has won a smashing victory against the enigmatic aliens, capturing one of their starships and returning to Earth. Now, Admiral Theodore Smith and his crew are assigned to command a fleet charged with making a deep-penetration raid into alien territory, a fleet made up of carriers from four different nations. But with a crewman who isn't what he seems, untested pilots and international friction - and a new and dangerous alien plan - can Ted and his crew survive their mission?

Bled dry by interminable warfare, infighting and bloody confrontations with Lord Anomander Rake and his Tiste Andii, the vast, sprawling Malazan empire simmers with discontent. Even its imperial legions yearn for some respite. For Sergeant Whiskeyjack and his Bridgeburners and for Tattersail, sole surviving sorceress of the Second Legion, the aftermath of the siege of Pale should have been a time to mourn the dead. But Darujhistan, last of the Free Cities of Genabackis, still holds out - and Empress Lasseen's ambition knows no bounds.

This kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned as a vital source of shared cultural identity over the millennia.

The Bible is the central book in Western culture, yet extraordinarily there is no proper history of it. This exceptional work, by one of the world's leading Biblical scholars, provides a full account of how the different parts of the Bible came to be written; how some writings which were regarded as holy became canonical and were included in the Bible, and others were not; what the relationship is of the different parts of the Bible to each other; and how, once it became a stable text, the Bible has been disseminated and interpreted around the world.

The ravaged continent of Genabackis has given birth to a terrifying new empire: the Pannion Domin. Like a fanatical tide of corrupted blood, it seethes across the land, devouring all who fail to heed the Word of its elusive prophet, the Pannion Seer. In its path stands an uneasy alliance: Dujek Onearm's Host and the Bridgeburners, each now outlawed by the Empress­ alongside their enemies of old, including the grim forces of Warlord Caladan Brood, Anomander Rake, Son of Darkness, and his Tiste Andii, and the Rhivi people of the Plains.

Weakened by events in Darujhistan, the Malazan Empire teeters on the brink of anarchy. In the vast dominion of Seven Cities, in the Holy Desert Raraku, the seer Sha'ik gathers an army around her in preparation for the long-prophesied uprising named the Whirlwind. Unprecedented in its size and savagery, it will embroil in one of the bloodiest conflicts it has ever known: a maelstrom of fanaticism and bloodlust that will shape destinies and give birth to legends....

Seventy years ago, the interstellar supercarrier Ark Royal was the pride of the Royal Navy. But now, her weapons are outdated and her solid-state armour nothing more than a burden on her colossal hull. She floats in permanent orbit near Earth, a dumping ground for the officers and crew the Royal Navy wishes to keep out of the public eye. But when a deadly alien threat appears, the modern starships built by humanity are no match for the powerful alien weapons.

He stared at the unfamiliar watch on his wrist. Three hours ago, he had stood on English soil. Three hours ago, he had been Martin Hearne, British Intelligence agent. Now he was in Nazi-occupied Brittany, posing as Bertrand Corlay, with the Frenchman’s life reduced to headings in his memory. Hearne looked down at the faded uniform, which had once been Corlay’s, felt once more for the papers in the inside pocket. He was ready. From now on, he was one step away from death.

This is collection of 18 crime stories with a diverse range of characters and scenarios, from guilt-ridden fraudsters to lovesick murderers.

The trials: There are seventeen ways to die unless the luck of the vampire is with you. Darren Shan must pass five of these fearsome trials to prove himself to the vampire clan - or face the stakes of the Hall of Death. But Vampire Mountain holds hidden threats. Sinister, potent forces are gathering in the darkness. In this nightmarish world of bloodshed and betrayal, death may be a blessing.

In this 10th volume of John Norman's Gor series, Tarl Cabot must prove his final loyalty to the harsh and caste-bound planet known as counter-earth. "Surrender Gor," reads a message sent from the Others, a mysterious people from the worlds of steel. Either the proud rulers of Gor submit or be destroyed. Now Tarl Cabot is leaving the decadent city of Port Kar to wander in the wilds of Gor, taking up the sword to defend his rulers and enemies, the Priest-kings. For he knows that the fate of his home planet, Earth, is inextricably tied to the fate of Gor.

The Royal Navy never expected to fight a full-scale interstellar war. Everyone knew the Great Powers would never risk everything on armed conflict when there was plenty of room for everyone in outer space. But when a hostile alien force stumbles across humanity's handful of colony worlds, the Great Powers must set aside their differences and fight to preserve humanity from utter destruction.

Forged for combat, the rock trolls have no equal. They train from birth, endure brutal conditioning, and mark their skin with every kill. They have become the very flesh of war and inspire fear across the globe. Now a bounty has been issued, one that calls for the extermination of their race.

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work - over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world.

One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unravelling, receives a surprise visitor at his home. He struggles to place the dishevelled figure carrying a backpack until he recognises a friend from his student days, a brilliant man who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. As the friends begin to talk, a journey begins that is by turns exhilarating, shocking, intimate and strange.

A thriller of a war that never was - of survival in an impossible city - of surreal cataclysm. In The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville entwines true historical events and people with his daring, uniquely imaginative brand of fiction, reconfiguring history and art into something new. It's 1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer and occult disciple Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including surrealist theorist André Breton.