Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Contemporary Fiction

Longlisted for the 2014 Dylan Thomas Prize. Mia and Lorrie Ann are lifelong friends: hard-hearted Mia and untouchably beautiful, kind Lorrie Ann. While Mia struggles with a mother who drinks, a pregnancy at 15, and younger brothers she loves but can't quite be good to, Lorrie Ann is luminous, surrounded by her close-knit family, immune to the mistakes that mar her best friend's life. Until a sudden loss catapults Lorrie Ann into tragedy: things fall apart and then fall apart further - and there is nothing Mia can do to help.

Mitford's village rector, Father Tim, is running scared. He can no longer deny (even to himself), that he's in love with his neighbor, Cynthia Coppersmith. Cynthia, after all, sees in him a man of warmth and daring, if only he'll meet her halfway. But now a wealthy widow is pursuing Father Tim with hot casseroles. And the mysterious Cousin Meg has moved into the rectory bag and baggage, not to mention uninvited.

The truth can kill you…Reuben Maitland runs the UK’s most elite crime squad, working only on the highest-profile cases, tracking down the country’s most vicious criminals. At the cutting edge – controversial, ruthless, effective – the squad have always made enemies. But now they’re in danger. A killer is using their own techniques against them. The hunters have become the hunted.Reuben must find the killer before his team is eradicated. But the more questions he asks, the more complex the answers become.

In the seemingly idyllic town of Rundle Junction, Bennie and Walter are preparing to host the wedding of their eldest daughter, Clem. A marriage ceremony at their beloved, rambling home should be the happiest of occasions, but Walter and Bennie have a secret. A new community has moved to Rundle Junction, threatening the social order and forcing Bennie and Walter to confront uncomfortable truths about the lengths they would go to to maintain harmony.

One small, faded, leather-bound journal. One photograph in a newspaper. These two seemingly small items are set to change lives forever.Just when success seems set fair for Zeph’s writer husband Nick, she discovers that he has been having an affair. Wounded and angry, she turns to her mother for support, only to discover that the past has also come back to haunt Cora, a person who always seemed utterly flawless

Mr Ahuja, Delhi’s Minister of Urban Development, has too much on his hands: 13 children and another on the way. All at sea among his sprawling, noisy brood he reaches out to Arjun, his eldest, and seemingly wisest, son. But Arjun has his own problems: how to tell the girl on the school bus that he's crazy about her? This uproarious debut follows father and son as they blunder their way over and under the flyovers of the megalopolis in a moving - and fast-moving - comic portrait of modern family life.

What Estrella knows of life comes from her mother, who has survived abandonment by her husband in a land that treats her as if she were invisible, even though she and her children pick the crops of the farms that feed its people. But within Estrella, seeds of growth and change are stirring. And in the arms of Alejo, they burst into a full, fierce flower as she tastes the joy and pain of first love. Pushed to the margins of society, she learns to fight back and is able to help the young farmworker she loves when his ambitions and very life are threatened in a harvest of death.

Maria and Emma have not seen each other since their mother's funeral two years before. Now, Emma has come to visit Maria at her house in Spain, and her presence is an unsettling intrusion on Maria's quiet and solitary life. Over six days in the seaside town together, the sisters cautiously sink into conversations recounting the years of their separate adult lives. Their walks through the quiet town and evening talks on the terrace reveal almost more than Maria can deal with, until finally, the sisters confront the unspeakable....

Newly famous actor Charlie Outlaw said too much in an interview, and now his fans have turned on him, and his girlfriend, actress Josie Lamar, has left him. He's fled to a remote island in search of anonymity, but his solitary hike into the jungle takes him into danger he never anticipated. As Charlie struggles with gaining fame, Josie struggles with its loss. The star of a cult TV show in her early 20s, Josie has spent the 20 years since searching for a role to equal that one, and feeling less and less like her character, the heroic Bronwyn Kyle.

The Coffey siblings are having a rough year. Claire has broken up with her fiancé and is hiding from her debts. Martha’s in a career crisis and even her therapist is losing patience with her. And Max, the baby of the family in his final year of college, is keeping a life-altering secret. Before long, all three of them have moved back home. But things aren’t so easy the second time around. Martha and Claire regress to fighting over the shared bathroom while their mother continues to plan Claire’s thwarted wedding.