Treat your ears with these brand-new audiobooks on our BorrowBox service, free to listen to with your library card! Includes titles by Lynda La Plante, Janice Hadlow, and Asako Yuzuku and more.
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New audiobooks
A Beautiful Loan
Mary Costello
My name is Anna, and for some time now, I have been trying to account for certain events in my life – my adult life, that is – which, from this vantage point of forty-five years, I often find baffling . . .
In 1985 Dublin, nineteen-year-old Anna Hughes is in thrall to Peter Gallagher, an older, worldly man. Anna is new to the city, introverted and naïve, and Peter’s experience, wide circle of friends and thirst for adventure captivate her. Her obsessive longing for him leads to marriage and, eventually, a crushing betrayal.
As Anna’s life becomes less predictable, she uncovers deeper layers of herself. Her journey gives an intimate portrait of a woman embracing herself as she is, and claiming the life she yearns for.
Perdido Street Station
China Miéville
The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own bewildering world. Humans and mutants linger in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the rivers are sluggish with unnatural effluent, and factories and foundries pound into the night.
For more than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled over a vast array of workers and artists, spies, magicians, junkies and whores. Now a stranger has come, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand, and inadvertently something unthinkable is released. Soon the city is gripped by an alien terror – and the fate of millions depends on a clutch of outcasts on the run from lawmakers and crime-lords alike.
The urban nightscape becomes a hunting ground as battles rage in the shadows of bizarre buildings. And a reckoning is due at the city’s heart, in the vast edifice of Perdido Street Station. It is too late to escape.
Hooked
Asako Yuzuki
Eriko really wouldn’t mind being savaged, if it was her best friend doing the savaging …
Eriko’s life appears perfect – devoted parents, a spotless apartment and a job in the seafood division of one of Japan’s largest trading companies. Her latest project, to reintroduce the controversial Nile perch fish into the Japanese market, is characteristically ambitious. But beneath her flawless surface she is wracked by loneliness.
Eriko becomes fascinated with a popular blog written by a housewife, Shoko. Shoko’s posts about eating convenience-store food and her untidy home are the opposite of the typical Japanese housewife’s manicured lifestyle. When Eriko tracks Shoko down at her favourite restaurant and befriends her, Shoko is at first charmed by her new companion.
But as Eriko’s obsession with Shoko deepens, her increasingly possessive behaviour starts to make Shoko suspicious. As Eriko’s carefully laid plans begin to unravel, how far will she go to hold on to the best friend that she’s ever had?
The Other Bennet Sister
Janice Hadlow
To be handsome and poor is misfortune enough; but to be both plain and penniless is a hard fate indeed.
In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary is the middle of the five Bennet girls and the plainest of them all, so what hope does she have? Prim and pious, with no redeeming features, she is unloved and seemingly unlovable.
The Other Bennet Sister, though, shows another side to Mary. An introvert in a family of extroverts; a constant disappointment to her mother who values beauty above all else; fearful of her father’s sharp tongue; with little in common with her siblings – is it any wonder she turns to books for both company and guidance? And, if she finds her life lonely or lacking, that she determines to try harder at the one thing she can be: right.
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Katabasis
R.F. Kuang
Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek. The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld.
Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick.
But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in Hell. And Alice, along with her biggest rival Peter Murdoch, is going after him.
But Hell is not as the philosophers claim, its rules are upside down, and if she’s going to get out of there alive, she and Peter will have to work together.
That’s if they can agree on anything.
Will they triumph, or kill each other trying?
The Scene of the Crime
Lynda La Plante
The husband of a prominent and infamously ruthless barrister is found in horrific condition after a robbery and brutal assault. Now in a coma, a major investigation is launched using the newly formed, experimental Metropolitan Police Serious Crime Analysis Unit.
Jessica Russell is an experienced CSI with degrees in psychology and criminology with an exceptional Masters in Investigative psychology and behaviour analysis. But Jessica’s first job as team leader of MSCAN is entirely new to her: to bring together a team of three trusted officers.
Between them, the team has dealt with every kind of murder and major crime scene – their expertise ranges from forensic DNA to blood spatter analysis, digital forensics and beyond.
Now they must piece together the complex puzzle at the heart of this brutal crime. If it was a robbery gone horrifically wrong, what was so important to have been stolen?