Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Genre Fiction

In the run up to the biggest NASCAR race week of the year, Dr Temperance Brennan is called to a landfill site backing onto the Charlotte speedway track in North Carolina. Someone has discovered a barrel of hardened asphalt with a human hand poking through the top. With the country's press trained on Charlotte, it is up to Tempe to try to release and identify the body in the barrel.

Grandpa and Noah are sitting on a bench in a square that keeps getting smaller every day. The square is strange but also familiar, full of the odds and ends that have made up their lives: Grandpa's work desk, the stuffed dragon that Grandpa once gave to Noah, the sweet-smelling hyacinths that Grandma loved to grow in her garden. As they wait together on the bench, they tell jokes and discuss their shared love of mathematics. Grandpa recalls what it was like to fall in love with his wife, what it was like to lose her.

When Georgia Woodward lived in New York, she had a doting boyfriend and a tight-knit group of friends, but now she's living alone in San Francisco, feeling lonely and unsure of her role in the group as her best friend's wedding approaches. She knows that her ex Eli Mora is the Best Man to her Best Woman, and she is all too aware that her feelings for Eli have only grown since their breakup, but what she doesn't expect is for the Napa Valley venue to burn to the ground a week before the wedding. Or that she and Eli will simultaneously volunteer to replan the entire wedding.

London, 1945. The capital is still reeling from the war. Fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel are abandoned by their parents who leave the country on business, and are left in the dubious care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. Nathaniel is introduced to The Moth’s band of criminal misfits and is caught up in a series of teenage misadventures, from smuggling greyhounds for illegal dog racing to lovers’ trysts in abandoned buildings at night. But is this eccentric crew really what and who they claim to be? And most importantly, what happened to Nathaniel’s mother?

Joyce's first major work, written when he was only 25, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience.

Following its unforgettable characters through almost two centuries of history, from the horrors of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1865 to the aftermath of a mass shooting in the early 21st century, Wandering Stars is an indelible novel of America's war on its own people. It is also the tender, shattering story of many generations of a Native American family, struggling to find ways through displacement, addiction and pain, towards home and hope.

'The Third Man' is Graham Greene's brilliant recreation of postwar Vienna, a 'smashed dreary city' occupied by the four Allied powers. Rollo Martins, a second-rate novelist, arrives penniless to visit his friend and hero, Harry Lime. But Harry has died in suspicious circumstances and the police are closing in on his associates...'The Fallen Idol' is the chilling story of a small boy caught up in the games that adults play. Left in the care of the butler and his wife whilst his parents go on a fortnight's holiday, Philip realises too late the danger of lies and deceit.

It’s a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. They’re coming to get rich, but what they bring is trouble. Waiting for them is Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective who moved to rural Ireland looking for some peace. He’s found it, more or less – in his relationship with local woman Lena, and the bond he’s formed with tearaway teenager Trey Reddy. As the two men circle the townland with talk of a scheme to find gold in the mountainside, Cal gets ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey.

The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster. George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a 'national treasure' (his words); his wife, Beverley, a celebrated novelist; and their children, Nelson, Elizabeth, Achilles, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen. Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian jungle of the modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant.

PLAYGROUND follows four lives – a marine biologist, an artist, a schoolteacher, and an AI pioneer – that intersect on an island in French Polynesia when it is chosen as a base for seasteading, humanity’s next great adventure.

In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts asked him, 'Whom would you like to meet?' He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former solider famous for having quixotically defended an island in the Philippines for decades after World War II, unaware the fighting was over. Herzog and Onoda developed an instant rapport and would meet many times, talking for hours and together unravelling the story of Onoda's long war.

In the city of Bath, in the year 1865, an extraordinary young woman renowned for her nursing skills is convinced that some other destiny will one day show itself to her. But when she finds herself torn between a dangerous affair with a female lover and the promise of a conventional marriage to an apparently respectable doctor, her desires begin to lead her towards a future she had never imagined.

The great city of Troy is under siege as Greek heroes Achilles and Agamemnon wage bloody war over a stolen woman. In the Greek camp, another woman is watching and waiting: Briseis. She was a queen of this land until Achilles sacked her city and murdered her husband and sons. Now she is Achilles' concubine: a prize of battle. Briseis is just one among thousands of women backstage in this war - the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead - all of them voiceless in history.

1956. A celebrated Russian author is writing a book, Doctor Zhivago, which could spark dissent in the Soviet Union. The Soviets, afraid of its subversive power, ban it. But in the rest of the world it’s fast becoming a sensation. The CIA plans to use the book to tip the Cold War in its favour. Their agents are not the usual spies, however. Two typists - the charming, experienced Sally and the talented novice Irina - are charged with the mission of a lifetime: to smuggle Doctor Zhivago back into Russia by any means necessary.

Written by number one New York Times best-selling author Marieke Nijkamp, Critical Role: Vox Machina - Kith & Kin follows a brand-new story, featuring the cunning ranger Vex'ahlia and the conning rogue Vax'ildan (and, of course, Trinket) years before they meet Vox Machina. After leaving the unwelcoming refuge of Syngorn, the twins become entangled in a web spun by the Clasp, and for the first time Vex and Vax find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict that threatens the home they have carried with each other for years.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, read by Romola Garai. Two strangers arrive in a small Spanish fishing village. The older woman is suffering from mysterious paralysis, driven to seek a cure beyond the bounds of conventional medicine. Her daughter, Sofia, has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother's illness.

R is a zombie. He has no name, no memories, and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead. Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie, and she is the opposite of everything he knows - warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can't understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins.

Another day. Another death. Death du Jour. My God, how many such days would there be?' On a bitterly cold march night in Montreal, forensic anthropologiest Dr Temperance Brennan is exhuming the remains of a nun proposed for sainthood in the grounds of an old church. Just hours later, Tempe is called to the scene of an horrific arson. A young family has perished, and there seems to be no witness, no motive, no explanation.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, read by George Blagden. The tender feelgood story of a man's journey around Japan with a streetcat. Translated by Philip Gabriel, a translator of Murakami. It's not the journey that counts but who's at your side. Nana is on a road trip, but he is not sure where he is going. All that matters is that he can sit beside his beloved owner, Satoru, in the front seat of his silver van. Satoru is keen to visit three old friends from his youth, though Nana doesn’t know why, and Satoru won’t say.

Flo is sick of Tokyo. She is stuck in a rut, her translation work has dried up, and she's in a relationship that's run its course. That's until she stumbles upon a mysterious book left by a drunken passenger on the Tokyo Subway.