Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Anthologies & Short Stories

Over the past decade, Simon Van Booy has been listening to people’s stories. With these personal accounts as a starting point, he has crafted a powerful collection of short fiction that takes listeners into the innermost lives of everyday people. From a family saved from ruin by a mysterious benefactor to a downtrodden boxer who shows unexpected kindness to a mugger, these tales reveal not only the precarious balance maintained between grief and happiness in our lives but also how the echoes of personal tragedy can shape us for the better.

The unabridged, digital audiobook edition of "My Lady Love, My Dove", a short, sharp, frightening story from Roald Dahl, the master of the shocking tale, read by the great Richard Griffiths. In "My Lady Love, My Dove", Roald Dahl, one of the world’s favourite authors, tells a sinister story about the darker side of human nature. Here, a game of cards between two couples is the basis for some shocking deceit.... "My Lady Love, My Dove" is taken from the short story collection Someone Like You.

A gripping narrative from the master of the race against time thriller. Have you ever been in the wrong place at the wrong time? You are hiking in the Scottish highlands with three friends when you come across a girl. She is half-naked, has been badly beaten, and she can’t speak English. She is clearly running away from someone. Do you stop to help her? Even if it means putting your friends’ lives - and your own - in terrible danger?

Building from his acclaimed anthology Tales of Two Americas, beloved writer and editor John Freeman draws together a group of our greatest writers from around the world to help us see how the environmental crisis is hitting some of the most vulnerable communities where they live. In the past five years, John Freeman, previously editor of Granta, has launched a celebrated international literary magazine, Freeman's, and compiled two acclaimed anthologies that deal with income inequality as it is experienced.

Written immediately before Ágota Kristóf's acclaimed Notebook trilogy, the works here oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. By turns harrowing and whimsical, cruel and sharply funny, Kristóf’s world shifts our gaze to a shared reality, past and present. Here exile and existential alienation are undeniable – as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading.

A charming book of linked stories with a sprinkling of cosy fantasy and a fable-like touch... The Amberglow Candy Store in the Night Alley introduces the listener to half-fox shopkeeper Kogetsu, whose magical wagashi sweets from his shop on Gloaming Lane promise to change his customers' lives for the better. We follow an array of characters from various walks of life through their encounters with Kogetsu, who himself learns some major life lessons along the way, and reveals his own backstory in the process.

From New York Times bestselling author Maisy Yates comes a collection of three novellas in the Silver Creek Romance series—together for the first time.

In Japan's recent past, Miyako suspects her mother-in-law is a murderer. She uses her secret skills as an ex-spy to investigate her, while trying to maintain a peaceful home life. And in Japan's not-too-distant future, a courier named Mito finds himself embroiled in the death of the developer of a sinister AI surveillance system.

Reimagining each of the traditional carol's gifts, and written in tribute to Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, The Twelve Days of Christmas is a collection of festive tales filled with seasonal cheer and heart-warming characters. Will the challenges and mysteries that the Viscount’s guests encounter be resolved by the night of the ball?

Mega City One it's a powder keg waiting to blow on its best day. There isn't a moment when tensions aren't running high and the City isn't ready to crack. But there's something new going on something, something bad it's a block war. It's Block Mania and no one is immune, not even the Judges. But this is all prelude to invasion. The East-Meg One Sov's have infected Mega City One with Block-Mania to throw the city into massive, bloody turf wars. There are troops on the ground, bombs are dropping and the Mega City One is on fire.

In these eight stories, Barrett takes us back to the barren backwaters of County Mayo, via Toronto, and illuminates the lives of outcasts, misfits and malcontents with an eye for the abrupt and absurd. A quiet night in the neighbourhood pub is shattered by the arrival of a sword-wielding fugitive. A funeral party teeters on the edge of this world and the next, as ghosts won't simply lay in wake. A shooting sees an everyday call-out lead a policewoman to confront the banality of her own existence.

This anthology is the latest collection of time-travel romance sci-fi short stories from prominent, award-winning sci-fi authors including Nina Allan, Carrie Vaughn and Seanan McGuire. Follow time travellers of all genders as they go backward and forward in time, sometimes to save the one they love, other times as a sacrifice and others simply because it's their job.

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?

This celebration of Chinese science fiction - 13 stories, all translated for the first time into English - represents a unique exploration of the nation's speculative fiction from the late 20th century onwards, curated and translated by critically acclaimed writer and essayist Xueting Christine Ni.

A vitally alive and ever-surprising collection of stories from the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to Be Both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet. Individually lucid and luminous, these tales resonate subtly together. In examining the distances and connections between ourselves and others, expertly inching us closer to the bone, Ali Smith's storytelling has never seemed so necessary, so moving or so joyous.

Stories for people who've grown up being told time is running out - and don't want it to.... How do you ever know the whole story? How do you ever know even part of the story? How do you find meaning when chance and coincidence could, after all, just be chance and coincidence? In a celebration of connections and missed connections, an inquiry into everything from flies and trees and books to sex, art, drunkenness and love, Smith rewrites the year's cycle into a very modern calendar.

Bringing together tales of melancholy and madness, nightmare and fantasy, this is a new collection of the most haunting German stories from the past 200 years. Macabre, dreamlike and expressing deep unconscious fears, these stories are also spiked with unsettling humour, showing stylistic daring as well as giving insight into the darkest recesses of the human condition. Peter Wortsman's powerful translations are accompanied by brief overviews of the lives of each author, and an introduction discussing the notion of 'angst' and the stories' place in the context of German history.

At first glance, the stories in Sweet and Low seem grounded in the everyday: they paint pictures of idyllic Southern landscapes, characters fulfilling their roles as students, wives, boyfriends. But they are not what they seem. In these stories, Nick White deconstructs the core qualities of Southern fiction, exposing deeply flawed and fascinating characters - promiscuous academics, aging podcasters, woodpecker assassins, and lawnmower enthusiasts, among others - all on wildly compelling quests. White's honest and provocative prose will jolt listeners awake with its urgency.

For almost seventy years, people the world over have fallen in love with Frank Capra’s classic Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life. But few of those fans know that Capra’s film was based on a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern, which came to Stern in a dream one night. Unable at first to find a publisher for his evocative tale about a man named George Pratt who ponders suicide until he receives an opportunity to see what the world would be like without him.

For the past few years Roddy Doyle has been writing stories for Metro Eireann, a newspaper started by, and aimed at, immigrants to Ireland. Each of the stories took a new slant on the immigrant experience, something of increasing relevance and importance in today’s Ireland.