Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Psychological

On a stormy night in small-town America, a couple, desperate and soaked to the skin, knock on a stranger's door. When Martha, a retired schoolteacher living a safe and conventional life, answers their knock, her world changes forever. For they are fugitives. Lynnie, a young woman with an intellectual disability, and Homan, a deaf man with only sign language to guide him, have escaped together from The School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, a brutal institution where people with disabilities are left to languish, shuttered away from the world.

Leah is in love. It should be the happiest summer of her life, but she can't help feeling lonely with Jake's attention divided between her, his ex-wife and his young son. As insomnia sets in, the walls of their new basement flat feel as if they're closing in around her. Until she meets her upstairs neighbour, Anton, who has recently moved back in after a long absence from the street. He's a sympathetic ear when Jake can't be, and even though others on the street seem strangely hostile towards him, Leah soon comes to rely on Anton and their secret conversations in the night.

Have you ever wanted to be someone else? Vanessa has always found it easy to pretend to be somebody different, somebody better. When things get tough in her real life, all she has to do is throw on some nicer clothes, adopt a new accent and she can escape. That's how it started: looking round houses she couldn't possibly afford. Harmless fun really. Until it wasn't. Because a man who lived in one of those houses is dead. And everyone thinks Vanessa killed him.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Liar's Room by Simon Lelic. Susanna Fenton has a secret. Fourteen years ago she left her identity behind, reinventing herself as a counsellor and starting a new life. It was the only way to keep her daughter safe. But everything changes when Adam Geraghty walks into her office. She's never met this young man before - so why does she feel like she knows him? Adam starts to tell her about a girl. A girl he wants to hurt. And that's when Susanna realises she was wrong. She doesn't know him. He knows her. And the girl he plans to hurt is her daughter.

Rhianne's art degree at one of the best schools in London is cut short by the predatory attentions of a tutor, who destroys her confidence in the most insidious way. She retreats home to the west country, where, with the support of her dad Dominic and step-mum Melissa, she takes a job at a small hotel while she tries to figure out what next. That turns out to be a relationship with a charismatic young chef named Callum, which starts in the adrenalin-fuelled buzz of the kitchen and soon becomes much darker.

My name is Sara Eden. My name is Sara Eden. My name is Sara Eden. My name is Sara Eden. This is all Sara Eden knows about herself. She was found at the age of 10, abandoned in a vat of water - a homemade sensory-deprivation chamber. Someone had placed her there - trapped for days in the dark, with only a cassette player taped to her head repeating again and again, 'My name is Sara Eden'. There were a handful clues: a battered cassette player, a cheap necklace, a few scraps of paper. And a Polaroid of a stranger with a handwritten note: 'Don't trust this man'.

Eighteen-year-old Emma has loving parents and a promising future ahead of her. So why, one morning, does she leave home without a trace? Her parents, Cath and Jim, are devastated. They have no idea why Emma left or even whether she is still alive. A year later, Cath and Jim are still tormented by the unanswered questions Emma left behind and clinging desperately to the hope of finding her. Meanwhile, tantalisingly close to home, Emma is also struggling with her new existence—and with the trauma that shattered her life. For all of them, reconciliation seems an impossible dream.

Dennis Monk is about to spend his first summer sober. At twenty-six he is ready to re-join sensible adult life, but just when Dennis needs stability, his uptight parents kick him out into a world of couch-surfing. Everything around him has changed and everyone he knows seems to be doing better than he is. At every street corner, former classmates, estranged drinking buddies, and prospective lovers threaten to burst the bubble of his recovery. And Dennis Monk is about to learn the difference between getting sober and staying sober in this new world.

Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura - meaning “grass pillow” - follows its nameless young artist-narrator on a meandering walking tour of the mountains. At the inn at a hot-spring resort, he has a series of mysterious encounters with Nami, the lovely young daughter of the establishment. Nami, or "beauty", is the center of this elegant novel, the still point around which the artist moves and the enigmatic subject of Soseki's word painting.

Holly Krauss lives life in a whirlwind; her husband Charlie, her business partner Meg, and her colleagues at KS Associates are left breathless by her energy. But sometimes her wild behaviour leads to reckless mistakes. Mistakes which soon leave her life spiralling out of control.

In the wake of a painful breakup and struggling to prove herself at work, Julia feels adrift. When Bryce blows into her life, he seems like the perfect anchor. Handsome, charming, secure, and confident, Bryce brings out the best in Julia, sweeping her off her feet with attention and affection while grounding her with his certainty and faith. But this is no fairy tale. Step by step, one small concession leading to another, Julia is slowly isolated from her job, her friends, and her family, until she comes to find that her dream come true is a cage. Then one day everything changes....

Kim Edwards now gives us the story of a woman's homecoming, a family secret, and the old house that holds the key to the true legacy of a family. At a crossroads in her life, Lucy Jarrett returns home from Japan, only to find herself haunted by her father's unresolved death a decade ago. Old longings stirred up by Keegan Fall, a local glass artist who was once her passionate first love, lead her into the unexpected. Late one night, as she paces the hallways of her family's rambling lakeside house, she discovers, locked in a window seat, a collection of objects that first appear to be useless curiosities, but soon reveal a deeper and more complex family past.

When Rose's daughter, Vivien, is found dead in a suspected suicide, Rose has questions nobody can answer. Wasn't Vivien living the perfect life? A caring husband, a sweet little girl of her own. But as the police investigation develops, their findings raise new questions. Did Vivien kill herself, or was she attacked? If so, who has something to hide?

Mike Engleby says things that others dare not even think. When the story opens in the 1970s, he is a university student, having survived a "traditional" school. A man devoid of scruple or self-pity, Engleby provides a disarmingly frank account of English education. Yet, beneath the disturbing surface of his observations lies an unfolding mystery of gripping power.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Swallowing Geography by Deborah Levy, read by Gabrielle Glaister. Like her namesake, Jack Kerouac, J. K. is always on the road, travelling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. From J. K.'s irreverent, ironic perspective, Levy charts a new, dizzying, end-of-the-century world of shifting boundaries and displaced peoples.

One sunny afternoon in an idyllic kingdom by the sea, a princess named Caroline pretends to sleep. When her keepers strike up a card game, Caroline sneaks into her maid’s car, turns the key, and drives right out of the palace. Alone for the first time in years, she gets on the next flight—only to land in the waiting arms of her guards. As she’s forcibly escorted back to her marble prison, something in Caroline breaks for good. It’s not her first failed attempt, and it won’t be her last. Caroline suspects that she’ll never escape. But she might find a way to be free.

When Zoe Barry walks into Professor David Connolly's office and announces that she is his daughter, he is left reeling. Suddenly his family - imperfect, flawed but working - is trying to find space for someone new. But Zoe's stories don't quite add up, and lies become indistinguishable from truths. The family struggle to make sense of whether she is a sister, a daughter, a friend, an enemy. But no one could have expected where it all might end.

Madame Bovary is at once an unsparing depiction of a woman's gradual corruption and a savagely ironic study of human shallowness and stupidity. Neither Emma, nor her lovers, nor Homais, the man of science, escapes the author's searing castigation, and it is the book's final profound irony that only Charles, Emmaï¿¿ï¿¿ï¿¿s oxlike, eternally deceived husband, emerges with a measure of human grace through his stubborn and selfless love.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Mine by Susi Fox, read by Ainslie McGlynn. You wake up alone after an emergency caesarean, desperate to see your child. But when you are shown the small infant, a terrible thought seizes you: this baby is not mine. No-one believes you. Not the nurses, your father or even your own husband. They say you're confused. Dangerous. But you're a doctor - you know how easily mistakes can be made. Or even deliberate ones. Everyone is against you; do you trust your instincts?

When Echo Blue, the most famous child star of the nineties, disappears ahead of a highly publicized television appearance on the eve of the millennium, the salacious theories instantly start swirling. Mostly, people assume Echo has gotten herself in trouble after a reckless New Year’s Eve. But Goldie Klein, an ambitious young journalist who also happens to be Echo's biggest fan, knows there must be more to the story. Why, on the eve of her big comeback, would Echo just go missing without a trace?