Showing results by narrator "David McGowan" in All Categories

David McGowan takes us through the business, science, and the unexplained elements of death. Sharing stories that are poignant, humorous, and educational in turn, David explores the unique approach of Irish culture when it comes to grief and death and seeks to demystify the process of dying and what happens to the body afterward.

Norman is an idealistic, Beethoven-loving revolutionary. Max is a boring but cheerful timeshare salesman who won't stop talking. Fellow passengers on a flight to the Moon, they're thrown together to become reluctant companions after the lunar shuttle's toilet cubicle explodes, crash-landing them both on the desert sands of a distant alien planet. They are rescued by the friendly Oblivions, who could not be more delighted to see them.

Nine short pieces of fiction constructed around 170 years of North American history and interspersed at intervals by fourteen poems. The first story is a fictional account of the first European to reach the Pacific coast of Canada. Following are fictional pictures of the winners and losers who became builders of North America and thus, eventually, all winners and though they didn’t know it or want it, builders of what exists today.

In Swansden, it seems like the men and women of the Post Office must make their own fun. From following mystic runes on a fantasy journey and competing in a little light professional competitive cycling, to fighting the Tuareg in a fort in Africa after joining the French Foreign Legion and engaging the Jupiter aliens in an amateur musical, via climbing Mount Everest and attempting to record a Christmas Number One - Brian, Derek and Sue will just have to make sure all the boring stuff like sorting and handing out the post is actually done at some point.

Roy Hitchcock is a provincial hack journalist and inveterate daydreamer. When he meets his former English teacher at his old school’s prize-giving ceremony, his private fantasies run wild and he sets out to capture her heart. Unfortunately, his attempts to get in Miss Callaghan’s good books constantly backfire – and the more he apologises, the less impressed she is. There’s also another major obstacle in his path, in the macho form of Jane’s current lover, media hero Chad Mann.

There is more than bad weather for Hank James to contend with as he rides in search of the land of his dreams and the woman of his heart. Portis Martin, manager of a large cattle company, has no use for the small homesteaders that have begun to pepper the area…and he isn’t afraid of using every dirty trick he knows to run them out.

The year is 1885. Hank James has been in Canada several months panning gold from a stream near Roswell, British Columbia. When he hears a prizefight will be held in town, he attends, along with everyone for miles around. With a little help from the fight referee, he wins big betting on the fight. Having realized that the life of a miner isn’t nearly as romantic or rewarding as he expected, and with advice from the policeman who helped him win money on the fight, Hank goes to Farwell to haul freight with pack horses for contractors building the transcontinental railroad.

Thomas Brash is trying to escape but knows he never will. No thinking person can escape from their past. Pursuing him is the memory of the family he lost to cholera. Perhaps he believes that traveling alone in a wild, dangerous land will end all his memories; there is no doubt he wishes to be alone. Whatever his intentions, the appearance of Frank Clement and the circumstances of that meeting upset those plans.