Audiobooks narrated by Steven Crossley

Knave of Diamonds: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

"Mary Russell’s allegiances are tested by the reappearance of her long-lost uncle—and a tantalizing case not even Sherlock Holmes could solve. When Mary Russell was a child, she adored her black sheep Uncle Jake. But she hasn’t heard from him in many years, and she assumed that his ne’er-do-well ways had brought him to a bad end somewhere—until he presents himself at her Sussex door. Yes, Jake is back, and with a load of problems for his clever niece. Not the least of which is the reason the family rejected him in the first place: He was involved—somehow—in the infamous disappearance of the Irish Crown Jewels from an impregnable safe in Dublin Castle. It was a theft that shook a government, enraged a king, threatened the English establishment—and baffled not only the Dublin police and Scotland Yard, but Sherlock Holmes himself. And, now, Jake expects Russell to step into the middle of it all? To slip away with him, not telling Holmes what she’s up to? Knowing that the theft—unsolved, hushed-up, scandalous—must have involved Mycroft Holmes as well? Naturally, she can do nothing of the sort. Siding with her uncle, even briefly, could only place her in opposition to both her husband-partner and his secretive and powerful brother. She has to tell Jake no. On the other hand, this is Jake—her father’s kid brother, her childhood hero, the beloved and long-lost survivor of a much-diminished family. Conflicting loyalties and international secrets, blatant lies and blithe deceptions: sounds like another case for Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. The audio-exclusive short story 'Two Kids on a Grift' features Uncle Jake, Mary Russell's ne'er-do-well uncle who comes back into her life inKnave of Diamonds. Uncle Jake has made a career out of swindles and scams. So when he spots a couple of kids on the street one day fleecing passers-by in a clever game of three-card-monte, he needs to take a closer look. Why do the kids remind him so much of his niece and her brother … ?"

Laurie R. King (Author), Amy Scanlon, Jefferson Mays, Steven Crossley (Narrator)

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The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell

"The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell offers a wide-ranging reconsideration of Orwell's life and work, focusing on the extensive connections between his novels, essays, diaries, columns, letters, and reviews. Accessible to general audiences and to established scholars alike, forty-eight chapters written by an international team of Orwell specialists address familiar topics—such as Orwell's journalism, broadcasting, literary criticism, and politics—as well as less well-trodden areas of his output, such as his accounts of stupidity, kindness, and justice, and his connections with contemporaries like Jack Common, Katharine Burdekin, Wyndham Lewis, and Victor Serge. Sections on Orwell's professional activities, his main literary influences, his politics, his intellectual fixations, his literary contemporaries, and his legacies structure the book, which moves thematically and topically through the full scope of his output."

Oxford (Author), Steven Crossley (Narrator)

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The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism: A New History

"A sweeping global history of the birth of modern Greece In 1821, a diverse territory in the southern Balkans on the fringe of the Ottoman Empire was thrust into a decade of astounding mass violence. The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism traces how something new emerged from an imperial mosaic of myriad languages, religions, cultures, and localisms—the world’s first ethnic nation-state, one that was born from the destruction and the creation of whole peoples, and which set the stage for the modern age of nationalism that was to come. Yanni Kotsonis exposes the everyday chaos and brutality in the Balkan peninsula as the Ottoman regime unraveled. He follows the future Greeks on the seaways to Odesa, Alexandria, Livorno, and the Caribbean, and recovers the stories of peasants, merchants, warriors, aristocrats, and intellectuals who navigated the great empires that crisscrossed the region. Kotsonis recounts the experiences of the villagers and sailors who joined the armed battalions of the Napoleonic Wars and learned a new kind of warfare and a new practice of mass mobilization, lessons that served them well during the revolutionary decade. He describes how, as the bloody 1820s came to a close, the region’s Muslims were no more and Greece was an Orthodox Christian nation united by a shared language and a claim to an ancient past. This panoramic book shows how the Greek Revolution was a demographic upheaval more consequential than the overthrow of a ruler. Drawing on Ottoman sources together with archival evidence from Greece, Britain, France, Russia, and Switzerland, the book reframes the birth of modern Greece within the imperial history of the global nineteenth century. “In this spirited tour de force, vividly written and full of human detail, Yanni Kotsonis demonstrates how modern nationalism was forged out of the clash of old and new empires on the edge of Europe.”—Roderick Beaton, author of The Greeks: A Global History"

Yanni Kotsonis (Author), Steven Crossley (Narrator)

Audiobook

U-Boat Killer: Fighting the U-Boats in the Battle of the Atlantic

"A classic memoir from the Battle of the Atlantic Donald Macintyre’s U-Boat Killer is a unique account of the Battle of the Atlantic from the perspective of a British destroyer captain who fought through this brutal campaign. Few other books transport the reader to the deck of a convoy escort in the cold, stormy seas of the Atlantic Ocean and bring to life the terrifying conflict between the Royal Navy and the U-boats. Over the course of four unrelenting years, Captain Macintyre escaped the clutches of the German “wolf packs” and brought dozens of convoys to safety. Credited with destroying seven U-boats, Macintyre was a calculated master of combating his underwater foes and, during one savage night, captured Germany’s greatest U-boat commander, Otto Kretschmer, and sank another famous ace. His memoir, U-Boat Killer, charts the course of the Atlantic war and explores how both Allied and Axis strategies developed until the convoys were able to turn the tide of the war in 1943. This book should be essential listening for all fascinated by the longest campaign of World War II and for those who wish to learn more about the lives of the men who kept the war against the Nazis going even through the Allies’ darkest moments."

Donald Macintyre (Author), Steven Crossley (Narrator)

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Damned Un-English

"Lieutenant Gilbert Maltravers is bored. It is 1912 and he has been promoted as fast as any in his Dartmouth class and is placed in a battleship where he can confidently look forward to promotion to post captain and a battleship of his own by the time he is forty. All he needs to do is keep a smart ship, polish the brass and salute every senior officer, while wearing an expensive uniform that testifies he is one of the right sort. His father is an admiral, so very little can go wrong. He wants more than tedium from his existence, and the new submarine service will provide excitement . . . but possibly a far shorter life. If he is successful, then submarines will provide earlier promotion and a new challenge every day. Failure in the submarine service will mean the end of his career. Against the protests of his father and the head-shaking of his friends, Gilbert goes off to join the deplorably new and ungentlemanly assassins of the sea, the enemies of all the old Navy stands for."

Andrew Wareham (Author), Steven Crossley (Narrator)

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The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall

"What Shakespeare's plays can teach us about modern-day politics William Shakespeare understood power: what it is, how it works, how it is gained, and how it is lost. In The Hollow Crown, Eliot A. Cohen reveals how the battling princes of Henry IV and scheming senators of Julius Caesar can teach us to better understand power and politics today. The White House, after all, is a court—with intrigue and conflict rivaling those on the Globe's stage—as is an army, a business, or a university. And each court is full of driven characters, in all their ambition, cruelty, and humanity. Henry V's inspiring speeches reframe John F. Kennedy's appeal, Richard III's wantonness illuminates Vladimir Putin's brutality, and The Tempest's grace offers a window into the presidency of George Washington. An original and incisive perspective, The Hollow Crown shows how Shakespeare's works transform our understanding of the leaders who, for good or ill, make and rule our world."

Eliot A. Cohen (Author), Steven Crossley (Narrator)

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This Skin Was Once Mine: and Other Disturbances

"THIS SKIN WAS ONCE MINE When her father dies under mysterious circumstances, Jillian Finch finds herself grieving the man she idolized while struggling to feel comfortable in the childhood home she was sent away from nearly twenty years ago. Then Jillian discovers a dark secret that will threaten to undo everything she has ever known about her father. SEEDLING A young man’s father calls him early in the morning to say that his mother has passed away. He arrives home to find his mother’s body still in the house. Struggling to process what has happened he notices a small black wound appear on his wrist. Then he discovers his father is cursed with the same affliction. ALL THE PARTS OF YOU THAT WON’T EASILY BURN Enoch Leadbetter goes to buy a knife for his husband to use at a forthcoming dinner party. He encounters a strange shopkeeper who draws him into an intoxicating new obsession and sets him on a path towards mutilation and destruction... PRICKLE Two old men revive a cruel game with devastating consequences..."

Eric Larocca (Author), André Santana, Michael Crouch, Natalie Naudus, Steven Crossley (Narrator)

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Second Chances: Shakespeare & Freud

"A powerful exploration of the human capacity for renewal, as seen through Shakespeare and Freud In this fresh investigation, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips explore how the second chance has been an essential feature of the literary imagination and a promise so central to our existence that we try to reproduce it again and again. Innumerable stories, from the Homeric epics to the New Testament, and from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet, explore the realization or failure of second chances—outcomes that depend on accident, acts of will, or fate. Such stories let us repeatedly rehearse the experience of loss and recovery: to know the joy that comes with a renewal of love and pleasure and to face the pain that comes with realizing that some damage can never be undone. Through a series of illuminating readings, the authors show how Shakespeare was the supreme virtuoso of the second chance and Freud was its supreme interpreter. Both Shakespeare and Freud believed that we can narrate our life stories as tales of transformation, of momentous shifts, constrained by time and place but often still possible. Ranging from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter’s Tale, and from D. W. Winnicott to Marcel Proust, the authors challenge readers to imagine how, as Phillips writes, “it is the mending that matters.” “In this scintillating collaboration between our leading Shakespearean and our most trenchant interpreter of Freud, the concept of the second chance keeps gathering momentum and reach. Second Chances is intellectually nimble and emotionally wise.”—Christopher Benfey, author of A Summer of Hummingbirds"

Adam Phillips, Stephen Greenblatt (Author), Donald Corren, Steven Crossley (Narrator)

Audiobook

Amazing Grace: A Cultural History of the Beloved Hymn

"A fascinating journey through the history of one of the transatlantic world’s most popular hymns Sung in moments of personal isolation or on state occasions watched by millions, “Amazing Grace” has become an unparalleled anthem for humankind. How did a simple Christian hymn, written in a remote English vicarage in 1772, come to hold such sway in all corners of the modern world? With this short, engaging cultural history, James Walvin offers an explanation. The greatest paradox is that the author of “Amazing Grace,” John Newton, was a former Liverpool slave captain. Walvin follows the song across the Atlantic to track how it became part of the cause for abolition and galvanized decades of movements and trends in American history and popular culture. By the end of the twentieth century, “Amazing Grace” was performed in Soweto and Vanuatu, by political dissidents in China, and by Kikuyu women in Kenya. No other song has acquired such global resonance as “Amazing Grace.” Behold a compelling story of music and social change."

James Walvin (Author), Steven Crossley (Narrator)

Audiobook

The War of the Worlds

"No one would have believed that planet Earth was being watched by creatures more intelligent than humankind.But planet Earth was not only being watched – soon it would be invaded by monstrous creatures from Mars who strode about the land in great mechanical tripods, bringing death and destruction with them. What can possibly stop an invading army equipped with heat-rays and poisonous black gas, intent on wiping out the human race? This is one man’s story of that incredible invasion, from the time the first Martians land near his home town, to the destruction of London. Is this the end of human life on Earth? Baker Street Readers are retellings of literary classics in 64 pages, with illustrations. These books make classic stories available to intelligent young readers as a bridge to the full texts and to language students wanting access to other cultures."

H.G. Wells (Author), Steven Crossley (Narrator)

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Murder in the Field

"A skeleton buried on a lonely Northumberland hill? Nothing wrong with that. Garrigill was once an ancient burial ground. Archaeologist Rena Williams is here to excavate the site. She is an old friend of Arnold’s. And with his help, her team have uncovered more than a few old bones already. But never like this. The bludgeoned skull, the modern dental work … nothing about this death feels accidental. Or even all that old. Who was the dead man, and what did he know that was worth killing for? Arnold’s determined to get to the bottom of it all, but then one of his hotheaded young teammates turns up dead in a ditch. What if someone now wants Arnold dead?"

Roy Lewis (Author), Steven Crossley (Narrator)

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History's Greatest Battles: From the Battle of Marathon to D-Day

"Great battles mark history's turning points, occurring where cultures and ideologies clash. While some battles have been won by the superior force, others have been won by a sheer dogged refusal to surrender in the face of overwhelming odds. Superior weaponry has sometimes brought victory, as at Plassey, while the extraordinary generalship of a Napoleon, a Wellington, or a Marlborough has won the day on other occasions. From the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, when the vastly-outnumbered Athenian army turned back an invasion of the mighty Persian empire, up to the Vietnamese defeat of the French army at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the battles in this book demonstrate that fate is not always on the side of the big battalions."

Nigel Cawthorne (Author), Steven Crossley (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Steven Crossley