Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Contemporary Fiction

Artist, Hassie Day and her sister, Margot, buy a rambling, run-down Jacobean house in Hope Wenlock on the Welsh Marches. While Margot continues her London life in high finance, Hassie is left alone to work the large, long-neglected garden. She is befriended by eccentric, sharp-tongued Miss Foot, who recommends Murat, an Albanian migrant, out of place in the village, to help Hassie in the garden. As Hassie works in the garden alongside Murat, she begins to ruminate on her past life, her hostile mother, her diffident father and the sibling rivalry that tainted her childhood.

The incredible new novel and brand new world from the international bestselling author of the Wool trilogy. The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes. Here in this land of howling wind and infernal sand, four siblings find themselves scattered and lost. Palmer has never been the same since his father walked out twelve years ago. His elder sister, Vic, is trying to run away from the past; his younger brothers, Connor and Rob, are risking their lives to embrace it.

Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award. Winner of the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award. Forty years in the future. The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. There are the posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the Northside Rises and the eerie bogs of Big Nothin' that the city really lives.

It’s 2:15 a.m., and you’re in bed alone and you’re woken by the phone.Your eyes are wide and your body tense before it has completed so much as a single ring. And as you wake, in the tiny moment between sleep and consciousness, you know already that something is wrong.Only someone bad would call at such an hour. Or someone good, but with bad news, which would probably be worse.You lie there in the darkness and wait for the answer machine to kick in.

'To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti and not even this one we live in – who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?' Darling and her friends live in a shanty called Paradise, which of course is no such thing. It isn’t all bad, though. There’s mischief and adventure, games of Find bin Laden, stealing guavas, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices.

A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a purchase she hadn't bargained for. One moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy's humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger at every turn. Witnesses to Tracy's Faustian exchange in the Merrion Centre in Leeds are Tilly, an elderly actress teetering on the brink of her own disaster, and Jackson Brodie, who has returned to his home county in search of someone else's roots.

Annie's put fifteen years into safe, slightly obsessive Duncan, and now she'd like her money back, please. It's time to move on. But she lives in Gooleness, the north's answer to a question nobody asked. Is she really going to find real, proper, fell-it-deep-down-in-your-boots love on a damp and windy seafront? Or perhaps she should follow her heart and pursue Tucker, the reclusive American rock star, who keeps emailing her his smart advice. But between Annie and her second chance lie a few obstacles.

If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah thought, she would be more careful not to trudge through muddy fields. It is wash-day for the housemaids at Longbourn House, and Sarah's hands are chapped and bleeding. Domestic life below stairs, ruled tenderly and forcefully by Mrs Hill the housekeeper, is about to be disturbed by the arrival of a new footman smelling of the sea, and bearing secrets.

Joan’s voice is almost a whisper. ‘Nobody talked about what they did during the war. We all knew we weren’t allowed to.’ Joan Stanley has a secret. She is a loving mother, a doting grandmother, and leads a quiet, unremarkable life in the suburbs. Then one morning there is a knock on the door, and suddenly the past she has been so keen to hide for the last fifty years threatens to overturn her comfortable world. Cambridge University in 1937 is awash with ideas and idealists

Tory Brennan - great niece of Dr Temperance Brennan - and the Virals return for their most terrifying adventure yet. Life appears peaceful on Loggerhead Island – rescued from financial disaster, the research institute is flourishing once more. But the tranquillity is quickly shattered when Tory Brennan and her technophile gang discover a mysterious box buried in the ground.

From the best-selling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Spot of Bother comes a superb book about family and secrets. Angela and her brother, Richard, have spent 20 years avoiding each other. Now, after the death of their mother, they bring their families together for a holiday in a rented house on the Welsh border. Four adults and four children. Seven days of shared meals, log fires, card games, and wet walks. But in the quiet and stillness of the valley, ghosts begin to rise up. The parents Richard thought he had. The parents Angela thought she had. Past and present lovers. Friends, enemies, victims, saviours.

Barrytown, Dublin, has something to sing about. The Commitments are spreading the gospel of the soul. Ably managed by Jimmy Rabitte, brilliantly coached by Joel 'The Lips' Fagan, their twin assault on Motown and Barrytown takes them by leaps and bounds from Paris Hall to immortality on vinyl. But can The Commitments live up to their name?

The terrifying new Hammer novella by Minette Walters, best-selling author of The Sculptress and The Scold's Bridle. Muna’s fortunes changed for the better on the day that Mr and Mrs Songoli’s younger son failed to come home from school. Before then her bedroom was a dark, windowless cellar, her activities confined to cooking and cleaning. She’d grown used to being maltreated by the Songoli family, to being a slave.

At St Oswald’s, a long-established boys’ grammar school in the north of England, a new year has just begun. For the staff and boys of the school, a wind of unwelcome change is blowing. Suits, paperwork and Information Technology rule the world; and Roy Straitley, the eccentric veteran Latin master, is finally – reluctantly – contemplating retirement. But beneath the little rivalries, petty disputes and everyday crises of the school, a darker undercurrent stirs.

Autumn 1940, World War Two: Bombs are raining down, destroying the cities of Britain. The evacuations begin, and soon children are being taken to the country for safety. Teacher Eve Parkins is in charge of one such group. The children are scared and Eve does her best to calm them, but the truth is that she too is haunted by a personal tragedy she cannot put behind her. Their destination is Eel Marsh House. Desolate and forlorn, it is situated on a causeway and is sinking into the treacherous tidal marshes that surround it. Far from home and with no alternative, Eve and the children move in.

Can you ever forget your first love? Liberty Evans hasn’t.She has a beautiful daughter, a successful career as an actress, and she’s married to one of Hollywood’s most powerful directors.But behind the glamour, things are not what they seem. Her daughter Brooke is turning into a spoiled teenager, her husband controls everything she does, and Liberty longs for Cory, the man she loved before she became famous. Unable to live a lie any more, Liberty returns to England with a reluctant Brooke, to start a new life.

Jasper Jones has come to my window. I don't know why, but he has. Maybe he's in trouble. Maybe he doesn't have anywhere else to go.Late on a hot summer night at the tail end of 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a precocious and bookish boy of thirteen, is startled by a knock on his window. His visitor is Jasper Jones. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant figure of danger and intrigue for Charlie.

In astonishing new masterpiece from the Nobel and twice Booker Prize-winning author of Disgrace and Summertime. After crossing oceans, a man and a boy – both strangers to each other – arrive in a new land. David, the boy, has lost his mother and Simón vows to look after him. In this strange new country they are assigned a new name, a new birthday, a new life.Knowing nothing of their surroundings, nor the language or customs, they are determined to find David’s mother.

Rafe Khatchadorian, the hero of the bestselling Middle School series, is ready for a fun summer at camp – until he finds out it’s a summer school camp! Luckily, Rafe easily makes friends with his troublemaking cabin mates and bunkmate, a boy nicknamed Booger Eater, who puts up with endless teasing from the other kids. Rafe soon realises there’s more to a person than a nickname, though, and Booger Eater might be the kind of friend you want on your side when the boys from the Cool Cabin attack. This fourth book in the massively popular Middle School.

The worst has happened. On the eve of their return to Blighty, Brigg and his fellow National Servicemen find themselves sentenced to another six months in Panglin Barracks. Many of the surviving characters from The Virgin Soldiers live again in these pages: dogged Tasker, the odious Sergeant Wellbeloved, the vulnerable Colonel Bromley Pickering and the comically touching Juicy Lucy.