Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Contemporary Fiction

Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one can care less. Except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that has possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn - not only about their leaders, but also about their own people - stuns them to the core.

A beautifully wrought and unlikely love story, exploring the power of storytelling. The new audiobook from the acclaimed author of Birds Without Wings and Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a love story at once raw and sweetly funny, wry and heartbreakingly sad. Chris is bored, lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. In his forties, he's a stranger to the 1970s youth culture of London, a stranger to himself on the night he invites a hooker into his car.

Once it had been the great forest of Lythe - a vast and impenetrable thicket of green.And here, in the beginning, lived the Fairfaxes, grandly, at Fairfax Manor, visited once by the great Gloriana herself. But over the centuries the forest had been destroyed, replaced by Streets of Trees. The Fairfaxes have dwindled too; now they live in 'Arden' at the end of Hawthorne Close and are hardly a family at all.

The first time Annie Sweet sees 43 Stanley Road, the house is so perfect she feels almost as if it has chosen her. She longs to move in, but with her husband increasingly distant, and her daughter wrapped up in childhood, Annie is left alone to mull over the past.

It is 1887, and an unsettled London is preparing for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. For Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful, bohemian wife of a maverick politician, it is the year she plans to make her own mark on the world. But her husband's outspoken views inspire enmity as well as admiration - and the wife of a member of parliament should not be hiding the kind of secrets Maribel has buried in her past. When a notorious newspaper editor begins to take an uncommon interest in her, Maribel fears he will destroy not only her husband's career but both of their reputations.

Welcome to the Rose Harbor Inn, where every room has an inspiring new view, and every guest finds a second chance...Jo Marie has started to feel at home running the Rose Harbor Inn. Now it’s springtime, and in memory of her late husband, Paul, Jo Marie has designed a beautiful rose garden for the property and enlisted handyman Mark Taylor to help make it happen. Jo Marie and Mark don’t always see eye-to-eye but deep down, she finds great comfort in his company.

Meet Merlin. He's Lucy's bright, beautiful son - who just happens to be autistic. Since Merlin's father left them in the lurch, Lucy has made Merlin the centre of her world. Struggling with the joys and tribulations of raising her adorable yet challenging child (if only Merlin came with operating instructions), Lucy doesn't have room for any other man in her life. By the time Merlin turns 10, Lucy is seriously worried that the Pope might start ringing her up for tips on celibacy, so resolves to dip a toe back into the world of dating.

Nyx is a bel dame, a bounty hunter paid to collect the heads of deserters – by almost any means necessary. ‘Almost’ proved to be the problem. Cast out and imprisoned for breaking one rule too many, Nyx and her crew of mercenaries are all about the money. But when a dubious government deal with an alien emissary goes awry, her name is at the top of the list for a covert recovery. While the centuries-long war rages on only one thing is certain: the world’s best chance for peace rests in the hands of its most ruthless killers...

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Only This, a short, gripping story of life in wartime from Roald Dahl, the master of the shocking tale. Read by the actress Sophie Okonedo. In Only This, Roald Dahl, one of the world’s favourite authors, tells of a mother restlessly waiting for her bomber crewman son to return form a raid.

Instead of entering the world crying, like other babies, Jubilo was born with a smile on his face. He had a gift for hearing what was in people’s hearts, for listening to sand dunes sing and insects whisper. Even as a young boy, acting as an interpreter between his warring Mayan grandmother and Spanish-speaking mother, he would translate words of spite into words of respect, so that their mutual hatred turned to love. When he grew up, he put his gift to good use in his job as a humble telegraph operator

How far would you go for your family, for love, for revenge? In the winter of 1897, a trio of killers descends upon an isolated farm in upstate New York. Elspeth Howell returns home to find her family brutally murdered. The only survivor is her 12-year-old son who witnessed it all. Wounded, frightened, and with retribution in their hearts, mother and son set out into the frozen wilderness to track down the red-scarfed men who killed their loved ones in cold blood.

After five years of marriage, Cass Coyne has lost some of her boundless confidence. Her husband sees their ups and downs as normal challenges in a healthy relationship, but Cass lies awake at night wondering what you do when you need a break from your marriage. It comes as a shock to Jonathan when Cass persuades him to try a marital "intermission": a six-month separation during which they'll decide if the comfortable life they've built together is still the one they both want.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of My Sunshine Away by M. O. Walsh, read by Kirby Heybourne. One day Lindy Simpson cycles home from school and straight into a trap: Someone is lying in wait for her, a wire strung between lampposts across the path. She is raped just yards from her front door. No one sees a thing, and the perpetrator is not caught.

For years, Libby Morgan dreamed only of making partner in her competitive, high-pressure law firm. She sacrificed everything for her career - her friends, her marriage, her chance at creating a family. When her boss calls Libby into his office, she assumes it will finally be good news, but nothing can prepare her for the shocking reality: she's been let go and must rebuild her entire life… starting now. With no job prospects in sight, Libby reaches out to old friends and spends her afternoons at A Good Yarn, the local knitting store.

Tea-Bag, a young African girl, has fled a refugee camp in Spain for the promise of a new life in Sweden. Tania has made a long and dangerous journey to escape the horrors of human trafficking. Leyla has come with her family from Iran. All of them are facing different challenges in their new home. Meanwhile, celebrated poet Jesper Humlin is looking for inspiration. Harried by his mother and girlfriend, misunderstood by his publisher and tormented by his stockbroker, Jesper needs a new perspective on life.

At the end of Charles Webb's first novel, The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock rescues his beloved Elaine from a marriage made not in heaven but in California.It is now eleven years and 3,000 miles later, and the couple live in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, with their two young sons, whom they are educating at home.

It was Heather's silver wedding anniversary. But this important milestone did not mark her marriage to Tom, her often-absent airline pilot husband and father of their two teenage children. It was for her first marriage - a wildly romantic, secret affair, when she and Iain - 12 years older than her and the heir to a Scottish baronetcy - had eloped immediately after her final school speech day. She was just 16 at the time.

Devastated after a miscarriage, Claire has distanced herself from her own life, and from her husband, Rob. Unable to deal with her own reality, Claire becomes obsessed with Daisy, a woman from the past, and as she traces her life, month-by-month, she starts to notice intriguing parallels between their lives....

On a peat and heather island off the west coast of Scotland, Effie and her mother, Nora, take refuge in the large, mouldering house of their ancestors and tell each other stories. Nora, at first, recounts nothing that Effie really wants to hear. Effie tells of her life at college in Dundee. But strange things are happening. Why is Effie being followed? Is someone killing the old people? And where is the mysterious yellow dog?

Jane is 17, rebellious and beautiful. Her betrothal to Samuel Reeves, a worthy but pompous medical student, makes the two families rejoice. But Jane is unsure; she only knows she is happier with Tom, her father's lively apprentice. Her father, William Verney, is an esteemed London apothecary, glad to have established a safe future for his worrisome daughter. But his careful planning is overturned by something he cannot control: the Plague.