Narrator

John Lee

John Lee
  • A cogent, comprehensive, and sweeping account of Napoleon’s dismantling of the French Revolution, giving new insight into this critical period of French history.

    The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book William Doyle describes how he did so, beginning with the three large issues that had destabilized revolutionary France: war, religion, and monarchy. Doyle shows how, as First Consul of the Republic, Napoleon resolved these issues: first by winning the war, then by forging peace with the Church, and finally by making himself a monarch. Napoleon at Peace ends by discussing Napoleon’s one great failure—his attempt to restore the colonial empire destroyed by war and slave rebellion. By the time this endeavor was abandoned, the fragile peace with Great Britain had broken down, and the Napoleonic wars had begun.

  • When the recently orphaned Anne Beddingfield moves to London to live with her late father’s solicitor and his wife, she is ready for adventure to find her, and find her it most certainly does.

    While waiting for the tube after a failed job interview, Anne witnesses a man fall off the Underground platform onto the rails. The police determine the man’s death to be “accidental.” But the examining doctor fortuitously leaves behind a rather curious note on his way out of the station, and Anne makes the life-altering decision to investigate this “accidental” death on her own. Suddenly, Anne finds herself ensnared in a dangerous plot involving missing diamonds, a murdered ballerina, and even an attempt on her own life.

    The Man in the Brown Suit also features the first appearance of Colonel Race, a friend of Agatha Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot, and an excellent investigator in his own right. To save herself and solve this mystery, Anne must work with Colonel Race and journey all the way to Africa. Together, they are determined to crack the case and unmask the killer, an international criminal mastermind known only as “the Colonel,” once and for all.

  • Discover the many faces of Arsène Lupin as you’ve never seen them before in this original compilation from Skyboat Media and Blackstone Publishing.

    Arsène Lupin boldly makes a name for himself in “Madame Imbert’s Safe” as he attempts to steal from a couple who may be hiding more than just money, and flaunts his keen eye as he traces a cold case in “The Queen’s Necklace.” In “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin,” passengers onboard a transatlantic steamer fear for their valuables when the captain announces that Arsène Lupin has snuck onto the ship … and he could be disguised as anyone. In “Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late,” Lupin goes head-to-head with Holmes, but someone from Lupin’s past may get in the way.

    Just when it seems like Lupin is in a criminal league all his own, Herlock Sholmes appears. Similar to the famous English detective (but, owing to the complaints of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, possessing an entirely different name), Sholmes travels to Paris to solve the case of the stolen blue diamond. Monsieur Lupin must employ all his ingenuity to avoid arrest and protect his reputation as the greatest thief the world has ever known. With daring escapes and intricate heists, this compilation showcases Lupin at his most cunning—and his most outrageous

    Full contents: Introduction by Alison Belle Bews • “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin” • “The Escape of Arsène Lupin” • “Madame Imbert’s Safe” • “The Black Pearl” • “Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late” • “The Queen’s Necklace” • “Lottery Ticket No. 514” • “The Blue Diamond” • “Herlock Sholmes Opens Hostilities” • “Light in the Darkness” • “An Abduction” • “The Second Arrest of Arsène Lupin”

  • A historical sci-fi tale of the Land of the Blue Mountains 

    Best known for his masterpiece of horror, Dracula, Bram Stoker wrote a number of other novels and many short stories, all with supernatural themes or filled with a physical terror reminiscent of Poe. First published in 1909, The Lady of the Shroud is an engrossing concoction of an epic steampunk adventure, military tale, and science fiction romance. 

    Old Roger Melton has died, leaving behind one of the greatest fortunes in Europe. His arrogant relative Ernest Melton expects to be the heir, but, much to the family’s surprise, Roger leaves his vast estate to his obscure young nephew, Rupert Sent Leger. But Rupert’s newfound wealth comes with strange conditions attached, one of which is that he must inhabit the old castle of Vissarion in the remote Balkan nation known as the Land of the Blue Mountains. 

    Rupert, an intrepid adventurer, agrees and travels to Vissarion with his Aunt Janet, who possesses the occult power of Second Sight. But all is not as it seems at Vissarion. Rupert finds himself visited by a ghostly woman clothed in a burial shroud who sleeps in a tomb. Haunted by her strange beauty, he declares his love and they wed in an Orthodox ceremony conducted by candlelight. As a newly married couple, their trials and adventures continue. From sea battles with mechanical crabs and flying machines to insidious court plotters and spies, the newlyweds battle all manner of foe in their quest to free their country and become the ruling Voivodes of Vissarion, the Land of the Blue Mountains. 

  • This masterful collection of seventeen classic mystery stories, dating from 1837 to 1914, traces the earliest history of popular detective fiction.

    Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossus―but it was not always so. Edgar Allan Poe’s French detective Dupin, the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” preceded Holmes’s deductive reasoning by more than forty years with his “tales of ratiocination.” In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes’ adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poe―and to Émile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur Lecoq debuted in France twenty years earlier.

    If “Rue Morgue” was the first true detective story in English, the title of the first full-length detective novel is more hotly contested. Two books by Wilkie Collins―The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868)―are often given that honor, with the latter showing many of the features that came to identify the genre: a locked-room murder in an English country house; bungling local detectives outmatched by a brilliant amateur detective; a large cast of suspects and a plethora of red herrings; and a final twist before the truth is revealed. Others point to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1861) or Aurora Floyd (1862), and others still to The Notting Hill Mystery (1862–3) by the pseudonymous “Charles Felix.”

    As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages―of hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called “cozy” murders in Britain―the legacy of Sherlock Holmes, with his fierce devotion to science and logic, gave way to street smarts on the one hand and social insight on the other―but even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required the intelligence and clear-sightedness that characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured here.

  • A new translation picking up twenty years after the conclusion of The Three Musketeers and continuing the adventures of the valiant d’Artagnan and his three loyal friends

    The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas’s most famous and enduring novel, completed its serial publication in the summer of 1844, and by the time of its book publication at the end of that year, readers were already demanding a sequel. They got it starting in January 1845, when the first chapters of Twenty Years After began to appear―but it wasn’t quite what they were expecting.

    When Twenty Years After opens it is 1648: the Red Sphinx, Cardinal Richelieu, is dead, France is ruled by a regency in the grip of civil war, and across the English Channel the monarchy of King Charles I hangs by a thread. As d’Artagnan will find, these are problems that can’t be solved with a sword thrust. In Twenty Years After, the musketeers confront maturity and face its greatest challenge: sometimes, you fail. It’s in how the four comrades respond to failure, and rise above it, that we begin to see the true characters of Dumas’s great heroes.

    A true literary achievement, Twenty Years After is long overdue for a modern reassessment―and a new translation. As an added inducement, Lawrence Ellsworth has discovered a “lost” chapter that was overlooked in the novel’s original publication, and is included in none of the available English translations to date―until now.

    Dumas’s rousing sequel to The Three Musketeers continues in Blood Royal, the second half of what Dumas originally published as Twenty Years After.

  • It was a summer of glorious triumph for the mighty Roman Republic. Her invincible legions had brought all foreign enemies to their knees. But in Rome there was no peace. The streets were flooded with the blood of murdered citizens, and there were rumors of more atrocities to come. Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger was convinced a conspiracy existed to overthrow the government, a sinister cabal that could only be destroyed from within. But admission into the traitorous society of evil carried a grim price: the life of Decius' closest friend—and maybe his own.

    The author's masterful writing and impeccable faithfulness to historical fact join together to create a grippingly suspenseful tale of murder and conspiracy in Ancient Rome.

  • Blackmail, corruption, treachery, murder—the glory that was Rome

  • For the first time in English in over a century comes a new translation of the forgotten sequel to Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, continuing the dramatic tale of Cardinal Richelieu and his implacable enemies.

    In 1844, Alexandre Dumas published The Three Musketeers, a novel so famous and still so popular today that it scarcely needs introduction. Shortly thereafter he wrote a sequel, Twenty Years After, that resumed the adventures of his swashbuckling heroes.

    Later, toward the end of his career, Dumas wrote The Red Sphinx, another direct sequel to The Three Musketeers that begins not twenty years later but a mere twenty days afterward. The Red Sphinx picks up right where the The Three Musketeers left off, continuing the stories of Cardinal Richelieu, Queen Anne, and King Louis XIII―and introducing a charming new hero, the Comte de Moret, a real historical figure from the period. A young cavalier newly arrived in Paris, Moret is an illegitimate son of the former king and thus half-brother to King Louis. The French Court seethes with intrigue as king, queen, and cardinal all vie for power, and young Moret soon finds himself up to his handsome neck in conspiracy, danger―and passionate romance.

    Dumas wrote seventy-five chapters of The Red Sphinx for serial publication but never finished it, and so the novel languished for almost a century before its first book publication in France in 1946. While Dumas never completed the book, he had earlier written a separate novella, The Dove, that recounted the final adventures of Moret and Cardinal Richelieu.

    Now for the first time, in one cohesive narrative, The Red Sphinx and The Dove make a complete and satisfying story line―a rip-roaring novel of historical adventure, heretofore unknown to English-language readers, by the great Alexandre Dumas, king of the swashbucklers.

  • “I presume we need make no Apology for giving the Name of a History to the following Sheets, though they contain nothing but the Actions of a Parcel of Robbers.” —from the book

    This work was published in 1724 under the pseudonym Captain Charles Johnson by an unknown British author, usually assumed to be Daniel DeFoe. This work is the prime source for the biographies of many well-known pirates of that era and shaped the popular notions about pirates of the day. Included are Blackbeard, Black Bart, Jolly Roger, Anne Bonny (a.k.a. Anne Bonn), Edward Teach, Henry Avery, Mary Read, and many more.

  • The vibrant retelling of the central Greek myths by acclaimed novelist John Spurling, author of The Ten Thousand Things, winner of the 2015 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

    The classical Greek intellectual tradition pervades nearly every aspect of our modern Western civilization. Our logic and science, our philosophy, politics, literature, architecture, and art are all indebted to the ancient inhabitants of the small mountainous Mediterranean country. And the powerful myths of the Greeks, refined by Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, and the great Greek dramatists, still resonate at the core of our culture.

    Taking as his starting point many of the famous tourist sites in the Peloponnese, where the stories are set, John Spurling freshly imagines key narratives from the Greek canon, including tales of the doomed house of Atreus (notably Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks at Troy, murdered by his wife in his palace bathroom); of the god Apollo; goddess Athene; Theseus, scourge of the Minotaur; the Twelve Labors of Heracles; and Perseus, rescuer of Andromeda.

    In this vibrant, gripping, and often grisly retelling of the Greek myths, stories of murder, power, revenge, love, and traumatic family relationships are made new again for our time with wit and relish by a gifted author. Spurling has added scene, dialogue, and context, while always staying true to the spirit of the original myth.

  • A gripping tale of war, adventure, horror, and romance, Shardik is a remarkable exploration of mankind’s universal desire for divine incarnation.

    Richard Adams’ Watership Down was a #1 New York Times bestseller, a stunning work of the imagination, and an acknowledged modern classic. In Shardik, Adams sets a different yet equally compelling tale in a far-off fantasy world. Shardik is a fantasy of tragic character, centered on the long-awaited reincarnation of the gigantic bear Shardik and his appearance among the half-barbaric Ortelgan people. Mighty, ferocious, and unpredictable, Shardik changes the life of every person in the story. His advent commences a momentous chain of events.

    Kelderek the hunter, who loves and trusts the great bear, is swept up by destiny to become first devotee and then prophet, then victorious soldier, then ruler of an empire and priest-king of Lord Shardik―Messenger of God―only to discover ever-deeper layers of meaning implicit in his passionate belief in the bear’s divinity.

  • Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

    Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick it obscures the sun.

    The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander … and when that happens, it casually spams Earth's networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden apple.

    So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there's Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors.

    The Rapture of the Nerds is a brilliant collaboration by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, two of the defining personalities of post-cyberpunk science fiction.

  • With "incantatory prose" that "sweeps over the reader like a dream" (Philadelphia Inquirer), Hoffman follows her celebrated bestseller The Probable Future with an evocative work that traces the lives of the various occupants of an old Massachusetts house over a span of two hundred years.

    In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet: Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots arrives to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family after family's lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House.

    These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home.

    From the writer that Time has said tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader's heart" comes a glorious travelogue through time and fate, through loss and love and survival. Welcome to Blackbird House.

  • A great new collection of classic short fiction, brilliantly read by a selection of narrators

    This recording includes the following stories:

    • “The Lightening-Rod Man” by Herman Melville

    • “One of the Missing” by Ambrose Bierce

    • “The Leopard Man’s Story” by Jack London

    • “Tennessee’s Partner” by Bret Harte

    • “The New Catacomb” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

    • “A Pair of Silk Stockings” by Kate Chopin

    • “My Watch” and “The Widow’s Protest” by Mark Twain

    • “An Ideal Family” by Kate Mansfield

    • “A Painful Case” by James Joyce

    • “Small Fry” by Anton Chekhov

    • “The Road from Colonus” by E. M. Forster

    • “Silhouettes” by Jerome K Jerome

    • “The Voice of the City” by O. Henry

    • “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

    • “The Diamond Mine” by Willa Cather

    • “The Man with the Golden Brain” by Alphonse Daudet

    • “Morella” by Edgar Allan Poe

    • “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant

    • “The Portrait” by Edith Wharton

    • “The Philosopher in the Apple Orchard” by Anthony Hope

    • “Monkey Nuts” by D. H. Lawrence

  • Joseph Conrad’s multilayered masterpiece tells of one nation’s violent revolution and one hero’s moral degeneration. Conrad convincingly invents an entire country, Costaguana, and sets it afire as warlords compete for power and a fortune in silver.

    Señor Gould, adamant that his silver should not become spoil for his enemies, entrusts it to his faithful longshoreman, Nostromo, a local hero of sorts whom Señor Gould believes to be incorruptible. Nostromo accepts the mission as an opportunity to increase his own fame. But when his exploit fails to win him the rewards he had hoped for, he is consumed by a corrupting resentment.

    Nostromo, relevant both as literature and as a brilliant social study, ambitiously brings to life Latin American history and the politics of an underdeveloped country. 

  • Joyce’s experimental masterpiece set a new standard for modernist fiction, pushing the English language past all previous thresholds in its quest to capture a day in the life of an Everyman in turn-of-the-century Dublin. Obliquely borrowing characters and situations from Homer’s Odyssey, Joyce takes us on an internal odyssey along the current of thoughts, impressions, and experiences that make up the adventure of living an average day. As his characters stroll, eat, ruminate, and argue through the streets of Dublin, Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness narrative artfully weaves events, emotions, and memories in a free flow of imagery and associations. Full of literary references, parody, and uncensored vulgarity, Ulysses has been considered controversial and challenging but always brilliant and rewarding.

  • When Walter Hartright encounters a solitary, terrified, beautiful woman dressed in white on a moonlit night in London, he feels impelled to solve the mystery of her distress. Full of secrets, locked rooms, lost memories, and surprise revelations, The Woman in White features heroine Marian Halcombe and drawing-master Walter Hartright as sleuthing partners pitted against the diabolical Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde.

    This gothic psychological thriller, a mesmerizing tale of murder, intrigue, madness, and mistaken identity, has gripped the imaginations of readers since its first publication in 1860. The breathtaking tension of Collins’ narrative created a new literary genre of suspense fiction, which profoundly shaped the course of English popular writing.

  • Jack London’s tales are more than epics of hardship and survival—they are morality plays in which good wins over evil.

    In the desolate, frozen wilds of northwest Canada, a wolf cub finds himself the sole survivor of his litter. Son of Kiche, half-wolf, half-dog, and the ageing wolf One Eye, he is thrust into a savage world where each day renews the struggle of survival. It is a lonely but noble life—until the day he is captured by dog-driving men. The cruel mistreatment he bears in this new life of slavery teaches him to hate.

    Only one man sees beyond the rage of White Fang to his intelligence and dignity. Only one has the courage to offer the killer a new life. But can his kindness reach the heart of White Fang?

  • Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his most brilliant achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strange beauty, daring experimentation, and epic scope. The book’s subject matter ranges from the heady heights of literature and love to the gritty realism of violence and death as it explores how humans make sense of senseless events. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, writers and cops, pursuing their own separate yet interrelated quests for meaning: an enigmatic Prussian novelist who disappears from the public eye after the death of his lover; a group of literary critics who bond through their shared love of the novelist’s works; an African American journalist sent to Mexico on a sports beat in the wake of his mother’s death; and a Spanish professor and widowed father whose mind is beginning to lose its grip on reality. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa, a fictional Juárez on the US-Mexico border, where the serial killings of hundreds of young working class women remain unsolved.

  • Shipwrecked and cast ashore on an uninhabited island, Robinson Crusoe ingeniously carves out a solitary, primitive existence for twenty-four years. Eventually, he meets a young native whom he saves from death at the hands of cannibals. He calls him Friday and makes him his companion and servant. Crusoe and Friday share in a variety of adventures, including a fierce battle with cannibals that culminates in the heroes recapturing a mutinous ship and returning to England.

    Based partly on the real-life experiences of Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, Defoe’s novel of human endurance in an exotic, faraway land exerts a timeless appeal and has taken its rightful place among the great works of Western civilization.

  • Now a television miniseries directed by Bille August and starring Sam Claflin 

    Dashing young Edmond Dantes has everything: a fine reputation, an appointment as captain of a ship, and the heart of a beautiful woman. But his perfect life is shattered when three jealous friends conspire to destroy him.

    Falsely accused of a political crime, Edmond Dantes is locked away for life in the infamous prison at the French Chateau d’If. But it is there that he learns of a vast hidden treasure.

    After fourteen years of hopeless imprisonment, Dantes makes his daring escape and follows his secret map to untold fortune. Disguised now as the mysterious and powerful Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond seeks out his enemies—and nothing will stand in the way of his just revenge.

    Filled with thrilling episodes of betrayal, romance, and revenge, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the greatest adventure stories ever written.

  • Jack London’s masterpiece describing the timeless bonds between man, dog, and wilderness

    Buck, half St. Bernard and half Scotch shepherd, is a bold-spirited dog living the good life in the Santa Clara Valley. But when a treacherous act of betrayal results in his kidnapping, he is stripped from his comfortable life on the California estate and thrust into the rugged terrain of the Yukon, where he is made a sled dog. Strong dogs are in high demand as the Klondike gold rush rages on, and Buck must battle the bitter cold and savage lawlessness of man and beast, striving to serve the man who shows him kindness. Can he rise to the challenges he faces and once again become the master of his realm?

  • Jack London’s adventurous nature, intuitive feeling for animal life, and superb storytelling skills give his tales a striking vitality and force. Thrilling action and a sense of justice characterize the classic stories in this collection.

    White Fang

    In the desolate, frozen wilds of northwest Canada, a lone wolf fights the heroic daily fight for life in the wild. But after he is captured and cruelly abused by men, he becomes a force of pure rage. Only one man sees inside the killer to his intelligence and nobility. But can his kindness touch White Fang?

    The Call of the Wild

    A bold-spirited dog named Buck is stripped from his comfortable life on a California estate and thrust into the rugged terrain of the Klondike. There he is made a sled dog and battles to become his team’s leader, as well as the devoted servant of John Thornton, a man who shows him kindness amid the savage lawlessness of man and beast.

  • The film The Way Back, starring Colin Farrell and Ed Harris, is based on this amazing true story.

    Twenty-six-year-old cavalry officer Slavomir Rawicz was captured by the Red Army in 1939 during the German-Soviet partition of Poland and sent to the Siberian Gulag. In the spring of 1941, he escaped with six of his fellow prisoners, including one American. Thus began their astonishing trek to freedom.

    With no map or compass but only an ax head, a homemade knife, and a week’s supply of food, the compatriots spent a year making their way on foot to British India, through four thousand miles of the most forbidding terrain on earth. They braved the Himalayas, the desolate Siberian tundra, icy rivers, and the great Gobi Desert, always a hair’s breadth from death. Finally returning home, Rawicz reenlisted in the Polish army to fight the Germans.

    This is his story.