Review, buy Science Fiction & Fantasy: Star Wars: Last Command Vol 3 (Star Wars), Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist (Left Behind), Everville, Titus Groan (BBC Radio Collection), Borg (Star Trek: The Next Generation), The Handmaid's Tale, The Hobbit (Unabridged), Q-squared (Star Trek: The Next Generation), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5 - Unabridged Audio Cassette Set - Adult Edition), Moving Pictures (Discworld), The King Stag & the Prisoner in the Oak: King Stag and the Prisoner in the Oak (Mists of Avalon), the hobbit by j r r tolkien the acclaimed bbc radio dramatisation on 4 one hour cassettes, Entropy Effect (Star Trek), Doctor Who - The Missing Stories: Fury from the Deep. Starring Patrick Troughton (BBC Audio Collection), The Plato Papers, Balance Point (Star Wars: The New Jedi Order), Life, the Universe and Everything: Complete & Unabridged (Word for Word), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Quandary Phase (BBC Audiobooks), Web of the Romulans (Star Trek), The Gunslinger (Dark Tower)

As his fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry approaches in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 15-year-old Harry Potter is in full-blown adolescence, complete with regular outbursts of rage, a nearly debilitating crush, and the blooming of a powerful sense of rebellion. It's been yet another infuriating and boring summer with the despicable Dursleys, this time with minimal contact from our hero's non-Muggle friends from school. Harry is feeling especially edgy at the lack of news from the magic world, wondering when the freshly revived evil Lord Voldemort will strike. Returning to Hogwarts will be a relief… or will it? Book five in JK Rowling's Harry Potter series follows the darkest year yet for our young wizard, who finds himself knocked down a peg or three after the events of last year. Over the summer, gossip (usually traced back to the magic world's newspaper, the Daily Prophet) has turned Harry's tragic and heroic encounter with Voldemort at the Triwizard Tournament into an excuse to ridicule and discount the teenager. Even Professor Dumbledore, headmaster of the school, has come under scrutiny from the Ministry of Magic, which refuses to officially acknowledge the terrifying truth: that Voldemort is back. Enter a particularly loathsome new character: the toad-like and simpering ("hem, hem") Dolores Umbridge, senior undersecretary to the minister of Magic, who takes over the vacant position of defence against dark arts teacher-and in no time manages to become the high inquisitor of Hogwarts. Life isn't getting any easier for Harry Potter. With an overwhelming course load as the fifth years prepare for their examinations, devastating changes in the Gryffindor Quidditch team line-up, vivid dreams about long hallways and closed doors, and increasing pain in his lightning-shaped scar, Harry's resilience is sorely tested. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, more than any of the four previous novels in the series, is a coming-of-age story. [+]

Harry faces the thorny transition into adulthood, when adult heroes are revealed to be fallible, and matters that seemed black and white suddenly come out in shades of gray. Gone is the wide-eyed innocent, the whiz kid of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Here we have an adolescent who's sometimes sullen, often confused (especially about girls), and always self-questioning. Confronting death again, as well as a startling prophecy, Harry ends his year at Hogwarts exhausted and pensive. Readers, on the other hand, will be energised as they enter yet again the long waiting period for the next title in the marvellous magical series. -Emilie Coulter.

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Review Corgi Audio / Moving Pictures (Discworld)

Moving Pictures (Discworld) (Corgi Audio)

Authors

Terry Pratchett

Creator: Tony Robinson
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 1995-11-01
Dewey code: 813
Price: £10.99

Review Moving Pictures (Discworld) / Corgi Audio:

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Review HarperCollins Audio / The King Stag & the Prisoner in the Oak: King Stag and the Prisoner in the Oak (Mists of Avalon)

The King Stag & the Prisoner in the Oak: King Stag and the Prisoner in the Oak (Mists of Avalon) (HarperCollins Audio)

Authors

Marion Zimmer Bradley

Creator: Patricia Hodge
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 2002-04-15
Dewey code: 813
Price: £13.99

Review The King Stag & the Prisoner in the Oak: King Stag and the Prisoner in the Oak (Mists of Avalon) / HarperCollins Audio:

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the hobbit by j r r tolkien the acclaimed bbc radio dramatisation on 4 one hour cassettes (bbc enterprices ltd)

Authors

j r r tolkien

Publication date: 1988

Review the hobbit by j r r tolkien the acclaimed bbc radio dramatisation on 4 one hour cassettes / bbc enterprices ltd:

bbc radio collection audio books

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Review Star Trek / Entropy Effect (Star Trek)

Entropy Effect (Star Trek) (Star Trek)

Authors

Vonda N. McIntyre

Creator: George Takei
Publication date: 1989-06-01
Dewey code: 813
Price: £6.99

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Doctor Who - The Missing Stories: Fury from the Deep. Starring Patrick Troughton (BBC Audio Collection) (BBC Audiobooks Ltd)

Publication date: 1993-10-04
Price: £6.80

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Review HarperCollins Audio / The Plato Papers

The Plato Papers (HarperCollins Audio)

Authors

Peter Ackroyd

Creator: Simon Callow
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 1999-05-31
Price: £10.99

Review The Plato Papers / HarperCollins Audio:

London, 3700 AD. London's greatest orator, Plato, regularly delivers bravura public lectures on the long and tumultuous history of what is now a peaceful, tranquil city, secure in the certainty of its own relationship to the past. Plato's lectures are particularly fascinated with the dark and confused epoch known as The Age of Mouldwarp, stretching from 1500 to 2300AD. Plato lectures the citizens on what is still known about the extraordinary figures and customs of the period from what evidence remains. These include orations on the clown Sigmund Freud and his comic masterpiece Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, the African singer George Eliot, apparently author of the poem The Waste Land, and Charles Dickens' greatest novel, The Origin of Species. Plato elaborates on the strange rites and rituals of the Age of Mouldwarp, including the cult of webs and nets which covered and enslaved the population. But Plato also begins to dialogue with his soul in the midst of these brilliant, precise public performances. Doubt begins to creep in to Plato's thinking. Is the past really past? And are the rituals of the present so superior to those of the past. These doubts lead Plato on a fateful journey. [+]

Peter Ackroyd's Plato's Papers is an extraordinary novel, which, as with the best of Ackroyd's fiction, treads a thin line between fantasy and biography, the genre so elegantly mastered by Ackroyd in his now classic studies Dickens, T S Eliot and most recently The Life of Thomas More. The Plato Papers is a wonderfully observed satire on the ways in which historians and biographers can comically but also dangerously misrepresent the past and the arrogance which comes with philosophical certainty. A funny, wise and salutary novel. -Jerry Brotton.

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