Showing results by publisher "Penguin Random House Australia Audio" in Literature & Fiction

A young Anne flees Wattle Island in 1950, heartbroken and desperate to make her own way in the world. As she begins to forge a life for herself in the city, a forbidden love returns, and she is faced with a choice that could destroy all she has built. When disaster changes her life forever, starting the Wattle Island Book Club is the only thing that offers her solace.

In a little coffee shop in one of the most dangerous places on earth, five very different women come together. Sunny, the proud proprietor, who needs an ingenious plan to keep her cafe and customers safe. Yazmina, a young pregnant woman stolen from her remote village and now abandoned on Kabul's violent streets. Candace, a wealthy American who has finally left her husband for her Afghan lover. Isabel, a determined journalist with a secret that might keep her from the biggest story of her life. And Halajan, the sixty-year-old den mother, whose long-hidden love affair breaks all the rules.

Despite coming out years ago, twenty-six-year-old Sean Preston has never been one to shout his sexuality from the rooftops. When his relationship of three months comes to a humiliating end, he vows never to become emotionally attached again, falling into a cycle of hook-ups, booze and an unrelenting gym routine. The rest of Sean's life isn't panning out how he hoped either.

He fought Napoleon's army and survived. He was sent to the gallows and escaped the noose. Now he is in chains and on his way to the other side of the world. What happens next will become one of the most remarkable survival stories in history. The 19th century has just begun. The world is at war. England, ruled by a mad king, is exiling thousands of criminals to an old land that has become its newest dumping ground.

Lei Ling Wen is lonely. Bored of her demanding after-school schedule of tuition, study and violin lessons, she struggles to see eye to eye with her strict Chinese-Malaysian mother. When Lei Ling is befriended by elegant, worldly socialite Gigi Nu, she is enchanted by the realm of luxury and freedom that suddenly opens up to her. Gigi encourages Lei Ling to flout her routines and treats her to designer products and expensive meals, and soon Lei Ling finds herself caught between two lives, and increasingly at odds with her exasperated mother.

In this riveting memoir, Gilmour recounts the call-outs that summer: some dangerous, some gruesome, some downright ridiculous. And we meet fellow paramedic John who, they say, can get a laugh out of everyone except the dead. As the city heats up that summer, however, even John begins to lose his...

Psykhe has always been different. Fair as Venus, the goddess of love, and with the hard-won ability to save the lives of those of mortal blood, she is both shunned and revered. When she unwittingly provokes Venus, she and her sisters lose everything. Psykhe must find a way to make amends and support her family. Befriended by an old woman, Nokturna, Psykhe finds herself irresistibly drawn to her young friend, Ambrose. But neither is what they seem.

The darkest secrets are buried the deepest. An Unexpected Summons Meg Morrissey has just lost her job, and her partner to an overseas assignment, when she is called back to the family home of Hunters Reach in the picturesque Adelaide Hills. Her ailing grandmother, who raised her when she was...

At 38 and a quarter years old, Paris native Camille has everything she needs to be happy: a good job, a loving husband, a wonderful son. Why then does she feel as if happiness has slipped through her fingers? All she wants is to find the path to joy and fulfilment.

A grandson tries to learn the family story. But what kind of story is it? Is it a prison memoir, about the grandfather imprisoned without charge or trial by a revolutionary government? Is it an oral history of the grandmother left behind to look after the children? Or is it a love story? A...

Amid a series of personal disasters, Aliyah and her daughter, Sakina, retreat to rural NSW to make a new life. Aliyah manages to secure a run-down property and hires a farmhand, Shep, an extremely private Palestinian man and the region's imam. During a storm, she drives past the town's river and happens upon a childhood friend, Hana, who has been living a life of desperation. Aliyah takes her in and tries to navigate the indefinable relationships between both Hana and her farmhand. Tensions rise as Aliyah's devotion to Hana is strained by her growing bond with Shep.

It is 1914, and New York socialite Eliza Ferriday is thrilled to be travelling to St Petersburg with Sofya Streshnayva, a cousin of the Romanovs. The two met years ago one summer in Paris and now Eliza is embarking on the trip of a lifetime to see the splendours of Russia. But when Austria declares war on Serbia and Russia's imperial dynasty begins to fall, Eliza escapes back to America, while Sofya and her family flee to their country estate. In need of domestic help, they hire the local fortune-teller's daughter, Varinka, unknowingly bringing intense danger into their household.

Paul Kelly's songs are steeped in poetry. And now he has gathered from around the world the poems he loves - poems that have inspired and challenged him over the years, a number of which he has set to original music that is exclusive to the audiobook. This wide-ranging and deeply moving...

'Just read it. Flippin' amazing.' TRENT DALTON Martha Mullins is a misfit. Her mother is glamorous, aloof and judgemental. Her father, mostly absent. If only she had brothers and sisters with whom she might share her feelings, her confusion . Academic and shy, Martha finds herself fascinated by...

Callie March is fascinated by human absurdity, including the habits of the upper class. So when she bribes her screen-addicted teenage son to join a local rowing club, she is thrilled to discover a whole new world of odd behaviours, irrational obsessions and riverside rooting. Thrust into a support crew and a very silly uniform, Callie has inadvertently volunteered for a season of pre-dawn parenting, endless fundraising and a whole lot of pandering to insufferable dickheads. But she also finds friendship, intrigue, lust and Harry Styles, while her son finds his first (illuminating) love.

'Skilfully written, with moments of laugh-out-loud humour, Lovebirds both warmed and broke my heart in perfect measure.' Joanna Nell In their youth, lovebirds Elizabeth and Ray had to fight to be together. Their future was full of promise and, blessed with children and careers, their happiness...

Birdsville, outback Queensland: the most remote town in the world, population 110. What the people lack in numbers they make up for in community spirit. When midwife and emergency nurse Phoebe McFadden fled her family dramas at age sixteen, she thought she'd left Birdsville for good. But when her cousin Scarlet asks her to be bridesmaid in her wedding party, Phoebe knows it's time to make her way home and face the past.

Norman and Jax are a legendary comedy duo in the making, with a five-year plan to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe by the time they're 12. But then Jax dies before they even turn 12. Norman's mum, Sadie, knows she won't win Mother of the Year anytime soon, and she really doesn't know, or care, who Norman's father is. But her heart is broken when she discovers her grieving son's revised plan: 'Find Dad', and 'Get to the Edinburgh Fringe'.

By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others.

When single mum Hannah pitches a tent on the camping ground next door, homeless after being widowed, she has the opportunity to start over, and perhaps have a second chance at love with local lawyer Benjamin. With her angelic voice, Hannah may be just what the choir needs to give them a winning edge. But when Eleanor hears Hannah singing a long-forgotten lullaby, one she composed forty years before, Eleanor is thrust back into a past she buried for good reason.