Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in LGBTQ+

Today I sat on a bench facing the sea, the one where I waited for L to be born, and sobbed my heart out. I don't know if I'll ever recover. This note was written on 9th November 2017. As the seagulls squawked overhead and the sun dipped into the sea, Alexandra Heminsley's world was turning inside out. She'd just been told her then-husband was going to transition. The revelation threatened to shatter their brand new, still fragile, family.

It’s summer and a young man walks through the gates of a luxurious mansion in the south of France. At the dinner table, the Blakes are waiting for him: Annie, the family matriarch and world-famous singer, her inscrutable husband David and their children, Dot, aloof and rebellious, Lily, the man’s carefree university friend, and their enigmatic older brother Felix. Between sun-drenched days spent lounging by the pool and nights blurring into endless, opulent parties far from the reality of life in London, a restless attraction grows between Felix and the man.

Noah Adams’s career as a playwright is circling the drain, thanks to a scorching review of his first Broadway musical. So when a family emergency sends him back to his Podunk hometown of Plainview, Illinois, he figures he’ll hide out for a bit. But to Noah’s horror, his agent has secretly arranged for him to stage an amateur version of the career-ruining musical at the local community theater. As if trying to work with a bunch of artless amateurs wasn’t enough, Noah runs into Luke, the jerk from his high school years, everywhere he goes.

When Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals. What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker - or sexier - would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee?

Paris, 1866. When Baroness Sylvie Devereux receives a house-call from Charlotte Mothe, the sister she disowned, she fears her shady past as a spirit medium has caught up with her. But with their father ill and Charlotte unable to pay his bills, Sylvie is persuaded into one last con. Their marks are the de Jacquinots: dysfunctional aristocrats who believe they are haunted by their great aunt, brutally murdered during the French Revolution. Sylvie and Charlotte will need to deploy every trick to terrify the family out of their gold – until they experience inexplicable horrors themselves.

In 1968, into the beautiful, spare environment of remote coastal Labrador in the far north-east of Canada, a mysterious child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor girl, but both at once. Only three people share the secret – the baby’s parents, Jacinta and Treadway, and a trusted neighbour, Thomasina. Together the adults make a difficult decision: to go through surgery and raise the child as a boy named Wayne.

For Glitter Bats keys player Jane Mercer, writing music helps tune out her self-doubt from a strict upbringing. Composing also distracts from her longtime feelings for her bandmate and best friend, Keeley, who Jane can’t pursue if she wants to keep her bisexuality out of the media. But when an incompetent percussionist quits mid-recording session on one of her major solo projects, there’s only one drummer to call to make the deadline.

From the singular voices behind Tom and Lorenzo comes the ultimate guide to all-things RuPaul's Drag Race and its influence on modern LGBTQ culture. Legendary Children centers itself around the idea that not only is RuPaul's Drag Race the queerest show in the history of television, but that RuPaul and company devised a show that serves as an actual museum of queer cultural and social history, drawing on queer traditions and the work of legendary figures going back nearly a century.

The unbelievable true story of Harrison Post - the enigmatic lover of one of the richest men in 1920s Hollywood - and the battle for a family fortune.

From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself - and us - home. Each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America - and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman. Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering Black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing.

Xavier Reynolds is doing less than stellar. He just got dumped, was passed over for a prestigious fellowship, and to top it all off he's right back home in Harper's Cove, Maine (population: 9,000). The last thing he wants to do is to work as a prep chef in the kitchen of the hip new restaurant in town, The Wharf. Especially since the hot, single-father chef who owns it can’t delegate to save his life.

On a sweltering summer day in 2007, having just lost her brother to illness, Livia Manera Sambuy finds herself standing before a 1924 photograph of a stunningly elegant Indian princess at a museum in Mumbai. What's written in the caption will change her life forever. This gorgeous Punjabi princess, it's said, sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp, where she died within a year. Could it be true? And if so, how could such a sensational story have gone unnoticed?

In his last year of university, Will thought he knew everyone he cared to know. Openly gay and volunteering at an AIDS helpline at the start of the crisis, he had found community at a frightening time amongst the theatre students, writers, and visual artists. He also knew who he wanted to avoid: the jocks. Until one day Will was invited into a secret Yale society that brought opposites together. On his first day, he was faced with Chris Maxey - a physically imposing, loud, star wrestler who seemed to be uncomfortable around Will and embody everything he reviled and feared.

Paul Delamare has been roped into accompanying his old friend on a luxury cruise aboard the magnificent superyacht Mal de Mer. It’s all plain sailing until his friend’s priceless necklace is stolen, and everyone falls under suspicion. As Paul races to catch the thief, the ship begins to drift off-course, veering into the storm-lashed mid-Atlantic. Then one of the passengers is found dead in mysterious circumstances, in a pool of coffee and surrounded by cake crumbs. It’s all hands on deck to catch the killer, but Paul soon discovers guests and crew are harbouring deadly secrets.

For centuries, evidence of queer love in the ancient world was ignored or suppressed. Even today, only a few, famous narratives are widely known - yet there's a rich literary tradition of Greek and Roman love that extends far beyond this handful of stories. Here, the poet Seán Hewitt and painter Luke Edward Hall collect together, for the first time, forty of the most exhilarating queer tales in the classical canon and bring them newly to life.

This is Aijazuddin’s riotous, intelligent memoir of searching for his place between two worlds while navigating a minefield of expectations, prejudice and self-doubt. In Manboobs, Aijazuddin confidently announces himself as a sharp voice in humour with his moving, wickedly funny search for love and the bravery required to be yourself.

Billington, Texas, is a place where nothing changes. Well, almost nothing. For the first time in nearly four decades, Mary Alice Roth is not getting ready for the first day of school at Billington High. A few months into her retirement—or, district mandated exile as she calls it—Mary Alice does not know how to fill her days.

In December 1935, Zdenek Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era.

Grad student Will Dillard has largely buried memories of the summer he spent at a camp intended to "cure" homosexuality. But when he finds out a horror movie based on the camp is hitting theaters, he's forced to face his past - and his role in another camper's death. As he recounts the events surrounding his "failed rehabilitation", Will strikes out on an impromptu road trip back home to Mississippi, eventually returning to the abandoned campgrounds to solve the mysteries of that pivotal summer.

Eliot Weiner – snob, shameless opportunist, Morris dancing-obsessive – is on a mission. He has got wind of a trunk of bawdy love letters by Warren Harding, ‘the shallowest President in history’, now guarded by his octogenarian mistress on her crumbling Hollywood Hills estate. They could reignite his failing academic career – and there’s no depth to which he won’t stoop, no preposterous scheme he won’t undertake, to get at them.