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

France, May 1940. As the German army blitzes Europe and Parisians flee their city, the chief curator of the Musee de l'Armee is ordered to take a mysterious piece of cargo out of the country. Arriving at the port of Le Havre, he learns his intended ship has been sunk, and his cargo's uncertain fate now rests on a decrepit steamer, sailing out under German fire. Decades later, a diving expedition in the English Channel leads National Underwater and Marine Agency Director Dirk Pitt to a cache of uncut diamonds on a shipwreck. No sooner than they are discovered, the diamonds are stolen.

Quentin Coldwater has lost everything. He has been cast out of the secret magical land of Fillory and now, friendless and broke, he returns to where his story began: Brakebills Preparatory College of Magic. But Quentin's past soon catches up with him.... Meanwhile, Fillory's magical barriers are failing, and barbarians from the north have invaded. To save their beloved world from extinction, Eliot and Janet, High King and Queen of Fillory, must embark on a final, dangerous quest.

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?

Twelve summers ago: Poppy and Alex meet. They hate each other and are pretty confident they'll never speak again. Eleven summers ago: they're forced to share a ride home from college, and by the end of it, a friendship is formed. And a pact: every year, one vacation together. Ten summers ago: Alex discovers his fear of flying on the way to Vancouver. Poppy holds his hand the whole way. Seven summers ago: they get far too drunk and narrowly avoid getting matching tattoos in New Orleans. Two summers ago: it all goes wrong. This summer: Poppy asks Alex to join her on one last trip.

On a remote island off the coast of Argentina, a team of elite counter-terror commandos prepare to assault a newly discovered Hezbollah hideout. What they don't expect is to be brutally ambushed themselves - slaughtered with no survivors. What they don't realise is that, on screens around the world, the enemies of the West are watching. Back in Washington, DC, the growing obstruction in the Senate has reached crippling levels, as a crucial treaty to strength NATO in Eastern Europe is inexplicably blocked.

Renowned gamester and the first to admit that he is entirely void of a romantic disposition, Max Ravenscar regards all eligible females with indifference and unconcern. But when he meets the woman his young cousin Adrian is bent on marrying - the beautiful Deborah Grantham, mistress of her aunt's gaming house - he finds that none of his experience in risk and gambling has prepared him for such a worthy opponent.

When pregnant Saffron Cutler moves into 9 Skelton Place with boyfriend Tom and sets about renovations, the last thing she expects is builders uncovering a body - two bodies, in fact. Forensics indicate the bodies have been buried at least 30 years. Nothing Saffy need worry herself over. Until the police launch a murder investigation and ask to speak to the cottage's former owner - her grandmother, Rose. Rose is in a care home, and Alzheimer's means her memory is increasingly confused. She can't help the police, but it is clear she remembers something.

In the year 2000, in the closest election in American history, Alice Blackwell's husband becomes President of the United States. Their time in the White House proves to be heady, tumultuous and controversial. In Alice Blackwell, Curtis Sittenfeld has created her most dynamic and complex heroine yet. American Wife is not a novel about politics. It is a gorgeously written novel that weaves race, class, fate and wealth into a brilliant tapestry. It is a novel in which the unexpected becomes inevitable and the pleasures and pain of intimacy and love are laid bare.

As a cassandra sangue, or blood prophet, Meg Corbyn can see the future when her skin is cut - a gift that feels more like a curse. Meg's Controller keeps her enslaved so he can have full access to her visions. But when she escapes, the only safe place Meg can hide is at the Lakeside Courtyard - a business district operated by the Others. Shape-shifter Simon Wolfgard is reluctant to hire the stranger who inquires about the Human Liaison job.

The New York Times best-selling author of The Black Jewels Trilogy transports readers to a world of magic and political unrest - where the only chance at peace requires a deadly price.... The Others freed the cassandra sangue to protect the blood prophets from exploitation, not realizing their actions would have dire consequences. Now the fragile seers are in greater danger than ever before - both from their own weaknesses and from those who seek to control their divinations for wicked purposes.

Saffy is waiting to go into an important meeting when she receives a missed call and then a text message from her best friend, Leona: Please help...come now. Of course, she races to her friend’s house. But when she arrives, she notices something strange. This message was deleted. Leona answers the door, and insists everything's fine. She doesn't know anything about the message. Six hours later, Saffy gets a knock on the door. It's the police. They’ve found a body. And Saffy was the last one to see them alive.

Dan Garvie can't move on from a thing he didn't do. Dan was only a child himself that day, but he saw the boy. He knew he needed help. But all he could do was hide – and one of the world's most notorious serial killers got away. Years later, Dan has a successful career as a criminal psychiatrist, unpicking the very darkest of human behaviour. Because, despite what he saw that day, Dan knows there's no such thing as a monster. But now his father, John, has disappeared.

Nicholas Young's grandmother Su Yi is on her deathbed. While he rushes to be by her bedside, he's not the only one. The entire Shang-Young clan has convened from all corners of the globe to stake claim on their matriarch's massive fortune. With all parties vying to inherit a trophy estate in the heart of Singapore, Nicholas' childhood home turns into a hotbed of sabotage and scandal.

I was told that being confined was to keep the bad out.... Until I realised it was about keeping me in. Midas made me forbidden and weak. Little did he know that I would find my wings and voice—which sings now. After living amongst the terrifying army of Fourth Kingdom, I find myself, once again, in strange lands and a kingdom surrounded by liars. But something has ignited within me. Something dark. Something angry. Then comes King Ravinger. And the last thing I wanted was my heart to be torn.

Sixteen-year-old Matilda is a poor Covent Garden flower girl until the day she saves the life of Tabitha, a minister's daughter. Welcomed into Tabitha's family, Matilda is offered the chance of a lifetime. She leaves behind London's slums and enters the darkest corners of New York.

Two kids meet in a hospital gaming room in 1987. One is visiting her sister, the other is recovering from a car crash. The days and months are long there. Their love of video games becomes a shared world—of joy, escape and fierce competition. But all too soon that time is over, fades from view. When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station, they are catapulted back to that moment. The spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love—making games.

Blythe Connor doesn't want history to repeat itself. Violet is her first child and she will give her daughter all the love she deserves. All the love that her own mother withheld. But firstborns are never easy. And Violet is demanding and fretful. She never smiles. Soon Blythe believes she can do no right - that something's very wrong. Either with her daughter, or herself. Her husband, Fox, says she's imagining it. But Violet's different with him. And he can't understand what Blythe suffered as a child. No one can. Blythe wants to be a good mother.

April 1950: The rusting hulk of a steam locomotive rises from the deep waters of a Montana lake. Inside is all that remains of three men who died forty-four years before. But it is not the engine nor its grisly contents that interest the people watching nearby. It is what is about to come next.... 1906: For two years, the western states of America have been suffering an extraordinary crime spree: a string of bank robberies by a single man who then cold-bloodedly murders any and all witnesses, and then vanishes without a trace....

Serena Carlow's former love now controls her future happiness. After her father's unexpected death, Serena's jilted ex-fiancé—the Marquis of Rotherham—is made the sole trustee of her wealth and marriage prospects. Eager for an escape, she moves to Bath and encounters her childhood sweetheart, the dashing Hector Kirkby—but will Rotherham approve the match? Before long, they are all entangled in a confusion of marriage and manners the likes of which Regency Bath has rarely seen.

From the night she is rescued as a baby out of the flames of a sinking ship, to the day she joins a pair of daredevil pilots looping and diving over the rugged forests of her childhood, to the thrill of flying Spitfires during the war, the life of Marian Graves has always been marked by a lust for freedom and danger. In 1950, she embarks on her life's dream - to fly a Great Circle around the globe, pole to pole. But after a crash landing, she finds herself stranded on the Antarctic ice without enough fuel.