THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS by Chloe Gong, read by Cindy Kay - Audiobook extract

03/11/21 • 4 min

Perfect for fans of The Last Magician and Descendant of the Crane, this heart-stopping, New York Times bestselling debut is an imaginative Romeo and Juliet retelling set in 1920s Shanghai, with rival gangs and a monster in the depths of the Huangpu River. In glittering Shanghai, a monster awakens . . . A blood feud between two gangs runs the streets red, leaving the city in the grip of chaos. At its heart is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, a former flapper who has returned to assume her role as the proud heir of the Scarlet Gang - a network of criminals far above the law. Their only rivals in power are the White Flowers, who have fought the Scarlets for generations. And behind every move is their heir, Roma Montagov, Juliette's first love . . . and first betrayal. But when gangsters on both sides show signs of instability culminating in clawing their own throats out, the people start to whisper. Of a contagion, a madness. Of a monster in the shadows. As the deaths stack up, Juliette and Roma must set their guns - and grudges - aside and work together, for if they can't stop this mayhem, then there will be no city left for either to rule.

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HIGH STREET by Anna Jacobs, read by Anne Dover - Audiobook extract

The second in the heartwarming Lancashire saga series that began with SALEM STREET, by beloved author Anna Jacobs. In 1845 Annie Gibson can finally leave Salem Street. Her dreams of being able to open an elegant dressmaking salon in the High Street of Bilsden, a Lancashire mill town, have come true. And she is going to take her father and his second family with her, away from poverty, away from the Rows. But Annie has not left trouble behind. Someone is trying to undermine her business. Her family have their own ideas about what they want to do with their lives. And several men are persistently trying to win favour with the beautiful young widow - including Frederick Hallam, the mill owner, and Daniel O'Connor, her childhood friend. As Annie gets better acquainted with both, she becomes increasingly confused about her feelings. Can she really be in love And can she risk trusting any man again.

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BEYOND BAD by Chris Paley, read by Jonathan Keeble - audiobook extract

The book that does for morals what Dawkins did for God. In Beyond Bad author Chris Paley explores how morals are holding humanity back. Morality is the driving force in every story worth your time: Cinderella to Crime and Punishment; Macbeth to Breaking Bad. Morality's what we're doing when we shout at the telly, gossip about our boss or leave comments online. It's held empires together, kept soldiers marching under fire, fed the hungry, passed laws, built walls, welcomed immigrants, destroyed careers and governed our sex lives. But what if morality's all meaningless rubbish, a malfunctioning relic of our evolutionary past? This is the provocative argument that Chris makes. This isn't an attack on one set of moral codes or one way of thinking about ethics: it's a call for abolishing the whole caboodle. He uses evolutionary psychology to show how and why morality emerged - to help tribes and other small groups survive and prosper. Our morals, he says, constrain us, biases us, and pushes us in the wrong direction because we fail to understand what limited aims. The biggest challenges our species faces, whether global warming, nuclear proliferation or the rise of the robots, are pan-human. These challenges are beyond what our moral minds were designed to cope with. You can't build smartphones with stone-age axes, and you can't solve modern humanity's problems with tools that are designed to create primitive, competitive groups.