Special Collections
Human-Narrated Books for Adults
Description: Please enjoy this collection of Bookshare books, now with human narration! #adults
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Calling Major Tom
by David M. BarnettCALLING MAJOR TOM is a funny, uplifting tale of friendship and community about a man who has given up on the world... but discovers in the most unlikely way that it might not have given up on him.
We all know someone like Thomas. The grumpy next-door-neighbour who complains to the Residents' Committee about the state of your front lawn. The man who tuts when you don't have the correct change at the checkout. The colleague who sends an all-company email when you accidentally use the last drop of milk.
Thomas is very happy to be on his own, far away from other people and their problems. But beneath his cranky exterior lies a story and a sadness that is familiar to us all. And he's about to encounter a family who will change his view of the world.An irresistible and heart-warming tale of a very unexpected friendship, perfect for fans of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and A Man Called Ove. You'll laugh, you'll cry and you will cheer on all the curmudgeons in your life.
Read by David Thorpe(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group
The Burning Men
by Will ShindlerWhen a high-rise development in South London catches fire mid-construction, a close-knit team of fire fighters tackle the blaze. The building should be empty, but they find a man, unconscious, next to several cases of money.
The fire crew make a fateful decision; leave the man, take the money, quit the service and never speak of this again. But five years later one of them is set alight in the toilets at his own wedding. Soon after, a second is found in the burnt out remains of his Maserati, nothing but a smoking corpse.
It appears that someone knows what they did. And there are still three firemen left to go. . . DI Alex Finn and DC Mattie Paulsen are an unlikely pairing, but they need to discover who is behind these killings before the last man burns.
This is first in Will Shindler's Finn and Paulsen series - a British detective series that ranks with Mark Billingham, M.J. Arlidge, Staurt Macbride. (P) 2019 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Blackwater
by James HenryJanuary 1983, Colchester CID
A new year brings new resolutions for Detective Inspector Nicholas Lowry. With one eye on his approaching fortieth birthday, he has given up his two greatest vices: smoking, and the police boxing team. As a result, the largest remaining threat to his health is now his junior colleague's reckless driving.
If Detective Constable Daniel Kenton's orange sports convertible is symbolic of his fast track through the ranks, then his accompanying swagger, foppish hairstyle and university education only augment his uniqueness in the department. Yet regardless of this, it is not DC Kenton who is turning station heads.
WPC Jane Gabriel is the newest police recruit in Britain's oldest recorded town. Despite a familial tie to top brass, Gabriel's striking beauty and profound youth have landed her with two obstacles: a young male colleague who gives her too much attention, and an older one who acts like she's not there.
January 1983, Blackwater Estuary
A new year brings a new danger to the Essex shoreline. An illicit shipment, bound for Colchester - 100 kilograms of powder that will frantically accelerate tensions in the historic town, and leave its own murderous trace. Lowry, Kenton and Gabriel must now develop a tolerance to one another, and show their own substance, to save Britain's oldest settlement from a new, unsettling enemy.
Billie Eilish
by Billie EilishLegendary recording artist Billie Eilish walks us through personal highlights and moments from the book as she reflects on photos from her life and career - both on and off the stage - for the first time in this fascinating audio accompaniment.
Billie Eilish is a 21st-century global pop phenomenon. Uncompromising and unapologetic, between her record-breaking, award-winning music and artistry, it's no surprise that she has become one of the biggest and most loved artists of her generation.
Contains never-before-told stories and recollections from her personal life and career, from the early years to her breakout success and including memories shared by her parents, this is an audiobook like no other - in her own words, providing a truly intimate window into her journey, narrated by Billie herself.(P)2021 Hachette Audio
Big Girl, Small Town
by Michelle GallenRoutine makes Majella’s world small but change is about to make it a whole lot bigger.
*Stuff Majella knows*
-God doesn’t punish men with baldness for wearing ladies’ knickers
-Banana-flavoured condoms taste the same as nutrition shakes
-Not everyone gets a volley of gunshots over their grave as they are being lowered into the ground
*Stuff Majella doesn’t know*
-That she is autistic
-Why her ma drinks
-Where her da is
Other people find Majella odd. She keeps herself to herself, she doesn’t like gossip and she isn’t interested in knowing her neighbours’ business. But suddenly everyone in the small town in Northern Ireland where she grew up wants to know all about hers.
Since her da disappeared during the Troubles, Majella has tried to live a quiet life with her alcoholic mother. She works in the local chip shop (Monday-Saturday, Sunday off), wears the same clothes every day (overalls, too small), has the same dinner each night (fish and chips, nuked in the microwave) and binge watches Dallas (the best show ever aired on TV) from the safety of her single bed. She has no friends and no boyfriend and Majella thinks things are better that way.
But Majella’s safe and predictable existence is shattered when her grandmother dies and as much as she wants things to go back to normal, Majella comes to realise that maybe there is more to life. And it might just be that from tragedy comes Majella’s one chance at escape.
The Best of Me
by David SedarisFor more than twenty-five years, David Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space, virtually creating his own genre. A Sedaris story may seem confessional, but is also highly attuned to the world outside. It opens our eyes to what is at absurd and moving about our daily existence. And it is almost impossible to read without laughing.
Now, for the first time collected in one volume, the author brings us his funniest and most memorable work. In these stories, Sedaris shops for rare taxidermy, hitchhikes with a lady quadriplegic, and spits a lozenge into a fellow traveler's lap. He drowns a mouse in a bucket, struggles to say 'give it to me' in five languages and hand-feeds a carnivorous bird.
But if all you expect to find in Sedaris's work is the deft and sharply observed comedy for which he became renowned, you may be surprised to discover that his words bring more warmth than mockery, more fellow-feeling than derision. Nowhere is this clearer than in his writing about his loved ones. In these pages, Sedaris explores falling in love and staying together, recognizing his own aging not in the mirror but in the faces of his siblings, losing one parent and coming to terms—at long last—with the other.
Taken together, the stories in The Best of Me reveal the wonder and delight Sedaris takes in the surprises life brings him. No experience, he sees, is quite as he expected—it's often harder, more fraught and certainly weirder—but sometimes it is also much richer and more wonderful.
Basta
by Marco Van BastenTriple European Footballer of the Year. Once World Footballer of the Year. European Champion two UEFA Super Cups, European Champion with the Dutch National Team in 1988 and numerous national championships with both Ajax and AC Milan. Marco van Basten is known as one of the greatest footballers of all time, but his personal life has always remained somewhat of a mystery, until now.
Basta is the raw, honest, but above all gripping autobiography of Marco van Basten.It's the unfiltered story of his rise to fame, from being under the wing of Cruyff and experiencing life as an Ajax player to being propelled into the spotlight following Euros '88 - and scoring the greatest goal ever to win a major final - and playing for AC Milan at the peak of Italian football's popularity.
But despite countless successes, Marco van Basten experienced many low points, including losing a childhood friend, battling with pain after his numerous fluffed operations, and ultimately coming to terms with life after playing football. Basta is his story.
The Ballast Seed
by Rosie KinchenThe surprise of a second pregnancy, so soon after the birth of her first son, plunged Rosie into a despair that spiralled into deep depression. Terrified at the prospect of adding another child into her already precariously balanced life, Rosie was compelled to find a new way of living. She found herself instinctively drawn to the local parks and scraps of communal green spaces in her local south east London neighbourhood, and to therapy via tending a hidden garden deep within the city. Interlaced with her responses to the travel journals of an eccentric 19th century female botanist and adventurer, Rosie elegantly describes how these pockets of nature amidst the urban sprawl provided just enough to mend her broken spirit.
Bad Day at the Vulture Club
by Vaseem KhanIn the gripping new Baby Ganesh Agency novel, Inspector Chopra and his elephant sidekick investigate the death of one of Mumbai's wealthiest citizens, a murder with ramifications for its poorest.
The Parsees are among the oldest, most secretive and most influential communities in the city: respected, envied and sometimes feared.
When prominent industrialist Cyrus Zorabian is murdered on holy ground, his body dumped inside a Tower of Silence—where the Parsee dead are consumed by vultures—the police dismiss it as a random killing. But his daughter is unconvinced.Chopra, uneasy at entering this world of power and privilege, is soon plagued by doubts about the case.
But murder is murder. And in Mumbai, wealth and corruption go in hand in hand, inextricably linking the lives of both high and low…
(P) 2019 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Are We There Yet?
by Emily Atack"In the underrated noughties film Crossroads, Britney Spears sang the immortal words 'I'm not a girl, not yet a woman'. Cheers Brit. I too find myself getting stuck somewhere between being an overdeveloped teenager and not quite being a fully functioning adult woman. I have no idea how to back-up my iCloud, I can't drive and I'm pretty bad at stopping men with exciting beards and unbuttoned vintage shirts from taking a big old walk all over me. In fact, not a girl, not yet a woman . . . it sums up my twenties perfectly."
Emily Atack was flung to fame at just 17, as the girl-next-door character in The Inbetweeners. Almost ten years later, she won over the nation on I'm a Celebrity Get Me out of Here with her cracking impersonations, epic bravery in the Bushtucker trials and general positivity.
Now, in her first book, Emily digs deep and reveals the hilarious highs and the heart-breaking lows that rocked the years between. With astonishing courage and her trade-mark humour, she shares stories about her family, first dates (and bad dates), first loves, moments where she's hit rock bottom and how she finally came to realise that it was all going to be okay.
Are We There Yet? is a warm, honest, FUNNY book for women of any age who have ever felt they needed to look a certain way or felt uncomfortable in their own skin. It's about life, love, everything grubby and glamorous in between, and ultimately realising that you're good enough. (Also she bought a laptop specifically to write this book so you better believe it's getting down and dirty :D)
Among You Taking Notes…
by Naomi Mitchison26th September 1939. I am beginning to wonder whether the point of a place like this may be that it will keep alive certain ideas of freedom which might easily be destroyed in the course of this totalitarian war….
Born in Edinburgh, Naomi Mitchison spent most of the Second World War in the fishing village of Carradale on Kintyre, her home until her death aged 101. Her life was crowded with incident, and her attitudes to events predictably forceful, original and honest.
Throughout the war she kept a diary at the request of the research organisation Mass Observation, in which she recorded both the momentous events of the time, and also how one (albeit extraordinary) family and their friends lived, what they hoped for and what actually happened. Her diaries developed far beyond the confines of a social document.
Written with the passion of a poet combined with the intellectual curiosity of a radial thinker, they provide a unique and valuable document of the period.
All the Young Men
by Ruth Coker Burks"If I have one message with this book it's that we all have to care for one another. Today, not just in 1986. Life is about caring for each other, and I learned more about life from the dying than I ever learned from the living. It's in an elephant ride, it's in those wildflowers dancing on their way to the shared grave of two men in love, and it's in caring for that young man who just needed information without judgement."
In 1986, 26-year-old Ruth Coker Burks visits a friend in hospital when she notices that the door to one of the patient's rooms is painted red. The nurses are reluctant to enter, drawing straws to decide who will tend to the sick person inside. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. And in doing so, Ruth's own life changes forever.
As word spreads in the community that she is the only person willing to help the young men afflicted by the growing AIDS crisis, Ruth goes from being an ordinary young mother to an accidental activist. Forging deep friendships with the men she helps, Ruth works to find them housing and jobs, and then funeral homes willing to take their bodies—often in the middle of the night. She prepares and delivers meals to 'her guys,' supplementing her own income with discarded food found in the dumpsters behind supermarkets. She defies local pastors and the medical community to store rare medications for her most urgent patients, and teaches sex education to drag queens after hours at secret bars.
Emboldened by the weight of their collective pain, she fervently advocates for their safety and visibility, ultimately advising Governor Bill Clinton on the national HIV-AIDS crisis, and in doing so becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of society. Ruth kept her story a secret for years, fearful of repercussions within her deeply conservative community. But at a time when it's more important than ever to stand up for those who can't, Ruth has found the courage to have her voice—and the voices of those who were stigmatised, rejected and abandoned—heard.
All the Knowledge in the World
by Simon GarfieldThe encyclopaedia once shaped our understanding of the world. Created by thousands of scholars and the most obsessive of editors, adults cleared their shelves in the belief that wisdom was now effortlessly accessible in their living rooms. Contributions from Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Orville Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, Marie Curie and Indira Gandhi helped millions of children with their homework. But now these huge books gather dust and sell for almost nothing on eBay, and we derive our information from the internet, apparently for free. What have we lost in this transition? And how did we tell the progress of our lives in the past?
All the Knowledge in the World is a history and celebration of those who created the most ground-breaking and remarkable publishing phenomenon of any age. It tracks the story from Ancient Greece to Wikipedia, from modest single-volumes to the 11,000-volume Chinese manuscript that was too big to print. It looks at how Encyclopaedia Britannica came to dominate the industry and how an army of ingenious door-to-door salesmen sold their wares to guilt-ridden parents. It explains how encyclopaedias have reflected our changing attitudes towards sexuality, race and technology, and exposes how these ultimate bastions of trust were often riddled with errors and prejudice. With his characteristic ability to tackle the broadest of subjects in an illuminating and highly entertaining way, Simon Garfield uncovers a fascinating and important part of our past, and wonders whether the promise of complete knowledge—that most human of ambitions—will forever be beyond our grasp.
All in My Head
by Jessica MorrisAll In My Head is a memoir by a woman who in her early fifties received a life-shattering diagnosis. It is about her determined search for effective treatment, the birth of a campaign to get proper data and funding for research into glioblastoma (GBM), and finally her coming to terms with the knowledge that she has reached the end of the road.
Jessica Morris takes the reader on a whirlwind journey. How does an ordinary person who last studied biology aged sixteen negotiate with world-renowned doctors and surgeons about cutting-edge treatments she must decide between? How do you remain positive when the median statistics suggest you have only fourteen months to live? How instead do you cast those fears aside and bounce back?
All In My Head is much more than a book about GBM. It takes the reader into the life of a woman who when confronted by devastating news chooses to be strong. It is about fighting adversity with hope and finding reasons to be positive in the darkest moments.