Showing results by narrator "Di Kay" in All Categories

I’m not supposed to fall in love with my husband. It’s not part of my plan. Forgive me. Those were the first words Santos Augustine spoke to me before we sealed an unbreakable oath. A contract signed in blood binding me to him as payment for my father’s sins.

What Seems to Be the Problem with Adam Kay and Mark Watson reveals the intriguing and hilarious ways the body can go wrong - and the amazing stories that unfold when the medical world tries to help.... In conversation with his (very health-anxious) friend, the comedian Mark Watson, best-selling doctor-turned-writer Adam Kay takes a scalpel to the bizarre past, often-surprising present and fantastical future of medicine.

Auggie wants to be an ordinary ten-year-old. He does ordinary things—eating ice cream, playing on his Xbox. He feels ordinary—inside. But ordinary kids don't make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds. Ordinary kids aren't stared at wherever they go. Born with a terrible facial abnormality, Auggie has been home-schooled by his parents his whole life. Now, for the first time, he's being sent to a real school—and he's dreading it. All he wants is to be accepted—but can he convince his new classmates that he's just like them, underneath it all?

Gideon Sable is a thief and a con man. He specializes in stealing the kind of things that can't normally be stolen. Like a ghost's clothes, or a photo from a country that never existed. He even stole his current identity. Who was he originally? Now, that would be telling. One thing's for sure though, he's not the bad guy. The people he steals from always have it coming. Gideon's planning a heist, to steal the only thing that matters from the worst man in the world. To get past his security, he's going to need a crew who can do the impossible....

Knocking on the front door, clutching my son Noah’s small hand, my heart is beating fast. When my foster mother sees me, her hands fly to her mouth in disbelief and she pulls us inside, asking the question I don’t want to answer: Why have you come back? Soon the whole town is whispering about my miraculous return, fifteen years after I vanished in the middle of the night. But not everyone is happy to see me. My oldest friend thinks I’m keeping secrets, and they aren’t wrong. We were seen arguing the night I returned. And then my friend is found dead.

The incredibly moving and uplifting new novel from the author of The Man I Think I Know. Kerry Hayes knows exactly who she is: a single mum, a cleaner and Mariah Carey's biggest fan. Noah Martineau thinks he knows who he is: a successful barrister, with a wife, daughter and big house in Primrose Hill. Strangers with nothing in common. Strangers living worlds apart. But it wasn't always this way...and Noah and Kerry are about to discover just who they really are.

Of two things I'm certain: When something sounds too good to be true, it is; and when Alexius Del Rossa makes you a deal, you run far away and never look back. Me? I didn't run. I stayed. I opened that envelope, and I accepted his offer. Why? Because my life was a mess and on a downward spiral to a big, fat nothing. And he just offered me everything in exchange for six months of my life. It was supposed to be a simple arrangement, but I learned the hard way that nothing is simple when it comes to Alexius.

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he toils willingly, trusting that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and lush wilds spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.

A woman meets her next-door neighbor and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A man, feeling jilted by an unrequited love, becomes obsessed with sorting through his neighbors' garbage in the belief that it will teach him how to better relate to people. A landlord decides to raise the rent, and his tenants hatch a plan to kill him at a team-building retreat. In 10 captivating, unnerving stories, Flowers of Mold presents a range of ordinary individuals who have found themselves left behind by an increasingly urbanized and fragmented world.

When Amber Hewerdine consults a hypnotherapist as a desperate last resort, she doesn't expect that anything much will change. She doesn't expect it to help with her chronic insomnia. And she doesn't expect to hear herself, under hypnosis, saying words that mean nothing to her: 'Kind, cruel, kind of cruel'. These are words she has seen somewhere before, if only she could remember where….

Numbers rule Dr. Mei Sharpe’s life. She has no husband, one friend, two daughters, and three random meetings with the same woman within four weeks. Once is chance, twice is coincidence, but upon the third meeting, even Mei in all her empirical rigidness must admit that perhaps the universe is giving her a nudge. A nudge that lands her directly in the path of Lieutenant Morgan Kelly—an affable, charming detective for the Sheriff Department’s brand-new cold case team working down the hall from Mei’s morgue.

Sentaro has failed. He has a criminal record, drinks too much, and his dream of becoming a writer is just a distant memory. With only the blossoming of the cherry trees to mark the passing of time, he spends his days in a tiny confectionery shop selling dorayaki, a type of pancake filled with sweet bean paste. Into his life comes Tokue, an elderly woman with disfigured hands and a troubled past. Tokue makes the best sweet bean paste Sentaro has ever tasted. She begins to teach him her craft, but as their friendship flourishes, social pressures become impossible to escape.

Eric Carter has a lot on his plate. He's hunting the Oracle of Las Vegas, a literal talking head that manipulates the future to make its prophecies come true. But it has a new trick. It can change the past, too. Now Jazz Age Los Angeles is invading the present. Long gone buildings suddenly restored, decommissioned Red Car trains appearing on paved over tracks, miles of the city changing back to orange groves. Throw in a hundred-year-old doomsday cult, time magic, and a terrifyingly powerful spell to raise the dead and it makes for a busy week.

An ancient curse. Two families bound. A forbidden love. When the Wildbloods presented their daughters to me on the night of the Tithing, they knew what was to come for the chosen girl. The crescent moon that marked Willow made her mine. I had no choice but to take her. Destiny determined our fates long before we were born, laying our roles out for us. A Sacrifice would be made. A Tithe paid. Only then would our families be free, at least until the next payment came due. I would have done my duty as Penitent. I tried.

A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully. Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.

When Eric Carter helps a friend with a deadly ritual that could determine the fate of the most powerful mage family in Los Angeles he steps into the middle of centuries-long feuds with people who make the Borgias look like the Brady Bunch. Eric's just fine with the murder, soul eaters, and death magic. He's just having trouble adjusting to being brought back from the grave. If he's not careful, somebody's going to put him right back.

On an antique map in Oxford's Bodleian Library, a faint red line threading through towns and villages between Southampton and Canterbury suggests a significant, though long-forgotten, road. Renamed the Old Way, medieval pilgrims are thought to have travelled this route to reach the celebrated shrine of Thomas Becket. Described as England's Camino, this long-distance footpath carves through one of the nation's most iconic landscapes—one that links prehistoric earthworks, abandoned monasteries, Saxon churches, ruined castles and historic seaports.

Equipped with the entirety of human knowledge, a sentient ship is launched on a last-ditch journey to find a new home for civilization. Trillions of miles. Tens of thousands of years. In the space between, the AI has plenty of time to think about life, the vastness of the universe, everything it was meant to do, and—with a perspective created but not limited by humans—what it should do.

Billy Hopkins lived happily in a tenement home in Manchester with his large Catholic family. When war came, Billy was evacuated to Blackpool, where he was starved so his rations could feed his landlady's children. On his return to Manchester, cruel blows were dealt to his family, but nothing could destroy Billy's fighting spirit. Nostalgic, sad and funny, Our Kid recalls an upbringing and an environment now vanished.

Everyone has a mental health. So we asked: what does yours mean to you? The result is extraordinary. Over 60 people have shared their stories. Powerful, funny, moving, this book is here to tell you: it's OK.