Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Literature & Fiction

Married odd couple Arthur and Sal are totally normal. They wear sunscreen, not because the sun can kill them, but because even the undead need a skincare regimen. They eat garlic whenever they want, though it gives Sal indigestion. They can talk to creatures of the night, but only the raccoons that rifle through their garbage. Really, they don’t bite… except into delicious baked goods. Ready to settle down and stay out of trouble, the two have opened a bed & breakfast in the idyllic, if not-so-paranormal-friendly, town of Trident Falls, Oregon.

After 12 years of marriage and two kids, Merit has begun to feel like a stranger in her own life. She loves her husband and sons, but she desperately needs something more than sippy cups and monthly sex. So, she returns to her career at Jager + Brandt, where a brilliant and beautiful Danish architect named Jane decides to overlook the “break” in Merit’s résumé and give her a shot.

The narrator of Middle Spoon appears to be living the dream: He has a doting husband, two precocious children, all the comforts of a quiet bourgeois life—and a sexy younger boyfriend to accompany him to farmers markets and cocktail parties. But when his boyfriend abruptly dumps him, he spirals into heartbreak for the first time and must confront a world still struggling to understand polyamorous relationships. Faced with the judgment of friends and the sting of rejection, he’s left to wonder if sharing a life with both his family and his lover could ever truly be possible.

All Men Want to Know traces Nina Bouraoui's blissful childhood in Algeria, a wild, sun-soaked paradise, with hazy summer afternoons spent swimming, diving and driving across the desert. Her mother is French, her father Algerian. When racial tensions begin to surface in their neighbourhood, her mother suffers an unspeakable act of violence that forces the family to flee the country.

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.

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.

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.

Introvert Gina Mulley is determined to become a tattoo artist, and to find somewhere she belongs in her conventional Long Island town. But this is 1985, when tattooing is still a gritty, male-dominated fringe culture, and Gina’s whimsical style is far from the norm. Luck is on her side: Gina’s older brother Dominic owns a tattoo shop, and he reluctantly grants her one year to prove herself.

It is summer 1956 when 15-year-old Bridget first meets Isabella. In their conservative Connecticut town, Isabella is a breath of fresh air. She is worldly, alluring and brazen: an enigma. When they receive an offer to study at the Academy in Italy, Bridget is thrilled. This is her ticket to Europe and - better still - a chance to spend nine whole months with her glamorous and unpredictable best friend. There, lodged in a convent of nuns who have taken a vow of silence, the two girls move towards a passionate but fragile intimacy.

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.

Lucy Carmichael is jilted at the altar. But no matter. Her loving and kind family never liked her explorer fiancé anyway. Instead of moping or falling into her supportive family’s arms, however, Lucy abandons their suburban home. Heading for the country, she takes up a teaching position in the industrial town of Ravonsbridge. There, she finds solace in her work, in her new (rather gossipy) colleagues – and rediscovers her sensible young self. But if Lucy has, despite everything, kept her head – where lies her heart?

‘Down among the women. What a place to be!’ So says Wanda, a former radical who left her husband and raised her daughter Scarlet to be as liberated as she. But twenty-year-old Scarlet, with an abortion already behind her, is about to discover real liberation – as a single mother in Fifties’ London. Yet Scarlet’s not alone. Meet her friends: Sylvia, the born victim; respectable Jocelyn, willingly trapped in a dull, bourgeois marriage; Audrey, bristling to break free of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant – and very doomed.

Steph Harper is on the run. When she was five, her mother ran – with Steph and her younger sister in tow – from an abusive husband into the arms of a small Cherokee community, where she hoped they might finally belong. But Steph soon sets her sights as far away as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing interfere with her dream to become an astronaut, and ultimately, to go to the moon.

Up-and-coming stage actress Margaret Shoard has just taken a bow as Lady Macbeth, the role she has always believed was destined for her. At home, she plays wife to her best friend Wesley, even if she doesn’t hold his sole attention romantically. After a public breakdown threatens all she holds dear, Margaret’s doctor prescribes her uppers—just a little help to get through the days.

Ellen is tired of being overshadowed at work. Tired of watching less competent, entitled suits take the promotions she’s earned. But when one of them pushes her too far, things take a murderous turn. And it turns out the darker Ellen goes, the shinier her future starts to look. Business can be murder, but it turns out murder can also be good business for Ellen.

An elite vampire university in Scotland has opened it's doors to humans for the first time. But there is one pupul very different from the rest ... Rebecca Charity. Vampire hunter. She is searching for the Book of Blood and Roses, a compendium of ways to kill vampires. But when Rebecca arrives, she finds someone unexpected.

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.

Intelligent but isolated recent physics graduate Annie Fisk feels an undeniable pull toward space. Her childhood memories dimmed by loss, she has left behind her home, her family, and her first love in pursuit of intellectual fulfillment. When she finally lands a job as a NASA secretary during the Apollo 11 mission, the work is everything she dreamed, and while she feels a budding attraction to one of the engineers, she can’t get distracted. Not now.

At age 16, Fahad hopes to spend the summer with his mother in London. His father, Rafik, has other plans: hauling his son to Abad, the family's feudal estate. Rafik wants to toughen up his sensitive boy, to teach him about power, duty, family—to make him a man. He enlists Ali, a local teenager, in this project, hoping his presence will prove instructive. Instead, over the course of one hot indolent season, attraction blooms between the two boys, and Fahad finds himself seduced by the wildness of the land and its inhabitants.

One romantic hopeful had greeted Lester Fabian Brathwaite on a dating app with this gem: “You into race play?” Being young, queer, gifted, and Black, Lester has found that his best tool for navigating American life is gallows humor. If you don’t laugh, you cry—or, you summon your inner rage. With biting wit, Lester’s book Rage interrogates all the ways that systemic racism and homophobia have shaped our society. All to pose that proverbial question: Can a gurl live?