Literature & Fiction

Fifteen years after graduating from Harvard, five close friends on the cusp of middle age are still pursuing an elusive happiness and wondering if they’ve wasted their youthful opportunities....

Life is good for ex-SAS soldier and rescue specialist Ben Hope. He’s found love, peace and happiness at last. That is, until a man he’s never seen before sits beside him on a plane and makes him a proposal that turns his whole world upside down....

Nicole and Samantha Cooper both remember the summer day when their mother, Tina, lost control of their car - but not in quite the same way. It is only after Tina's death, almost four decades later, that the sisters are forced to reckon with the repercussions of the crash....

This time the gossip columnists have it wrong. Anthony Bridgerton hasn't just decided to marry; he's also chosen a wife....

The Greek myths are amongst the greatest stories ever told, passed down through millennia and inspiring writers and artists as varied as Shakespeare, Michelangelo, James Joyce....

Cam and Holly have a picture-perfect marriage and life: a beautiful house in the suburbs and two adorable little boys....

A spirited new version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando adapted with a distinctly queer point of view. This adaptation revels in the origin of the story as a love letter from Woolf to Vita Sackville West.... 

Arthur MacDonald, 85, is having an end-of-life crisis. His beloved, dying wife of over 60 years no longer knows who he is.... 

Surging out of the sea, the Bass Rock has for centuries watched over the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries the fates of three women are linked: to this place, to each other....

Lex Gracie doesn’t want to think about her family. She doesn’t want to think about growing up in her parents’ House of Horrors.... 

It hasn't rained in Kiewarra for two years. Tensions in the farming community become unbearable when three members of the Hadler family are discovered shot to death on their property....

On the eve of the global lockdown, Don Barlow opens the door of his old beachside cottage to find a pretty girl with pink-tipped hair, claiming to have nowhere to go....

Late in the night, 14-year-old Sam Watson steps onto a quiet overpass, climbs over the rail and looks down at the road far below. At the other end of the same bridge, an old man, Vic, smokes his last cigarette....

A Navy SEAL has nothing left to live for and everything to kill for after he discovers that the government is behind the deaths of his team in this ripped-from-the-headlines political thriller....

A new president offers hope to a country weary of conflict. He’s a young, popular, self-made visionary...but he’s also a man with a secret....

For 15 years, Lexi and Jake have played the same six numbers with their friends, the Pearsons and the Heathcotes and they’ve laughed off their disappointment when they failed to win anything more than a tenner. But then, the unthinkable happens....

California, 1949. Aloysius Archer is on his way to start a new job with a renowned private investigator in Bay Town. Feeling lucky, he stops off at a casino in Reno, where he meets an aspiring actress, Liberty Callahan....

Everyone knows that Colin Bridgerton is the most charming man in London. Penelope Featherington has secretly adored her best friend's brother for...well, it feels like forever....

It was just a random mutation - one of a billion that happen in viruses every day. But this one was different. It exploded out of Somalia and spread across the oceans before anybody thought to look up from their cell phones to see what was going on....

When The Sandman, also known as Lord Morpheus - the immortal king of dreams, stories and the imagination - is pulled from his realm and imprisoned on Earth by a nefarious cult, he languishes for decades before finally escaping....

The Midnight Library is a gloriously relatable novel about life, death and the in-between. It is about finding hope, playing chess, dumping regrets and picking the right people around you....

Read by Stephen Fry himself, Heroes harnesses the magic of ancient legends in an entertaining and modern retelling in Fry's iconic and captivating narration.... 

Mim’s husband is missing. No one knows where Ben is, but everyone wants to find him - especially The Department. And they should know, the all-seeing government body has fitted the entire population with a universal tracking chip to keep them "safe"....

In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it....

Eve, Justin, Susie and Ed have been friends since they were 18. Now in their 30s, the four are still as close as ever, Thursday pub quiz night is still sacred and Eve is still secretly in love with Ed....

In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question on what it means to love....   

Summers span decades. Winter can last a lifetime. And the struggle for the Iron Throne has begun.... 

Crazy Rich Asians is the outrageously funny debut novel about three super-rich, pedigreed Chinese families and the gossip, backbiting, and scheming that occurs when the heir to one of the most massive fortunes in Asia brings home his ABC (American-born Chinese) girlfriend to the wedding of the season. When Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she might one day marry.

Pirriwee Public is a beautiful little beachside primary school where children are taught that 'sharing is caring.' So how has the annual School Trivia Night ended in full-blown riot? Sirens are wailing. People are screaming. The principal is mortified. And one parent is dead. Was it a murder, a tragic accident or just good parents gone bad? As the parents at Pirriwee Public are about to discover, sometimes it's the little lies that turn out to be the most lethal.

The great Norse myths are woven into the fabric of our storytelling - from Tolkien, Alan Garner and Rosemary Sutcliff to Game of Thrones and Marvel Comics. They are also an inspiration for Neil Gaiman's own award-bedecked, best-selling fiction. Now he reaches back through time to the original source stories in a thrilling and vivid rendition of the great Norse tales.

It begins with absence and desire. It begins with blood and fear. It begins with a discovery of witches. Diana Bishop, a young scholar and descendant of witches, discovers a long-lost and enchanted alchemical manuscript deep in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Its reappearance summons a fantastical underworld, which she must navigate with a vampire, Matthew Clairmont. This manuscript, Ashmole 782, holds the secrets of their past...and the key to their future. 

Laurie is pretty sure love at first sight doesn't exist. After all, life isn't a scene from the movies, is it? But then, through a misted-up bus window one snowy December day, she sees a man whom she knows instantly is the one. Their eyes meet, there's a moment of pure magic...and then her bus drives away. Laurie thinks she'll never see the boy from the bus again. But at their Christmas party a year later, her best friend, Sarah, introduces her to the new love of her life. Who is, of course, the boy from the bus. 

Arthur MacDonald, 85, is having an end-of-life crisis. His beloved, dying wife of over 60 years no longer knows who he is. His older brother still has all his hair and a wife almost half his age. The man his middle-aged daughter is dating has a ponytail. His teenaged grandson wants to cook desserts for a living. And his daughter wants him to move into Silvermine retirement home. Then Arthur meets the gorgeous, radical, 80-something-year-old Robbie and learns that nobody is ever too old to fall in love all over again.

This year's shortlist of six exceptional stories each take the listener on an intense and gripping journey into the human heart. With poise, precision, and a light-footed grace, they conjure dramatically different, starkly real worlds. Hailing from Ireland, the United States and The Bahamas, the finalists of 2020 share stories on subjects as far apart as their settings, exploring among them romantic and marital discord, dark secrets, homelessness and even a high school football team; yet each one opens doors into its characters' lives in surprising and moving ways.

“I have the honour to offer up to you, thanks to the good people of Audible, a selection of some of my very favourite Wodehouse. If these stories are new to you I hope it will be the beginning of a lifelong pleasure, if some or all are familiar I hope you will welcome them like old friends.” (Stephen Fry). Audible Studios presents this brand new performance by Stephen Fry of some of his favourite Jeeves stories from P.G. Wodehouse, with an exclusive introduction. 

Leo Tolstoy's classic story of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature. Generations of readers have been enthralled by his magnificent heroine, the unhappily married Anna Karenina, and her tragic affair with dashing Count Vronsky.

The war is over; Hitler is dead - and yet his evil legacy lives on. Saffron Courtney and her beloved husband, Gerhard, only just survived the brutal conflict, but Gerhard's Nazi-supporting brother, Konrad, is still free and determined to regain power. As a dangerous game of cat and mouse develops, a plot against the couple begins to stir. One that will have ramifications throughout Europe....  

Diverse and moving, these six outstanding stories are meditations on grief and loss, love, communication and loneliness.  Each one will take the reader on a brief yet unforgettable journey into private worlds and unexpected corners of the human heart. The shortlisted stories have all been chosen for this year's Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award - the world's richest and most prestigious prize for a single short story, dubbed the 'equivalent of the Man Booker for the short story' by the Sydney Morning Herald.

Day one: The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the Earth like a neutron bomb. News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%. Week Two: Civilization has crumbled. Year Twenty: A band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. But now a new danger looms, and it threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild.

Caroline Grant is struggling to accept the end of her marriage when she receives an unexpected bequest. Her beloved great-aunt Lettie leaves her a sketchbook, three keys, and a final whisper...Venice. Caroline’s quest: to scatter Juliet “Lettie” Browning’s ashes in the city she loved and to unlock the mysteries stored away for more than 60 years. 

Known as ‘The Father of Science Fiction’, Herbert George Wells’ writing career spanned over 60 years. He was a writer of novels, short stories, nonfiction books and articles. As a young man, Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, sparking his infamous vocation as a science fiction writer. Introduced by film director and H. G. Wells fanboy Eli Roth, this collection features unabridged recordings of the novels performed by Hugh Bonneville, Jason Isaacs, Sophie Okonedo, David Tennant and Alexander Vlahos.  

Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s now famous Aubrey-Maturin novels, regarded by many as the greatest series of historical novels ever written. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship’s surgeon and an intelligence agent. It displays the qualities which have put O’Brian far ahead of any of his competitors.

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).