Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios for Bloomsbury" in Genre Fiction

Meet the Patel-Joneses - Babo, Sian, Mayuri, and Bean - in their little house with orange and black gates next door to the Punjab Women's Association in Madras. Babo grew up here, but he and Sian, his cream-skinned Welsh love, met in London. Babo's parents disapproved. And then they disapproved unless the couple moved back to Madras. So here they are.

2011: When Madeleine loses her job as a lecturer, she decides to leave her riverside flat in cobbled Stew Lane, where history never feels far away, and move to Apricot Place. Yet here too, in this quiet Walworth cul-de-sac, she senses the past encroaching: a shifting in the atmosphere, a current of unseen life. 1851: and Joseph Benson has been employed by Henry Mayhew to help research his articles on the working classes. A family man with mouths to feed, Joseph is tasked with coaxing testimony from prostitutes.

Jonathan is a private investigator in a decaying Eastern European city, consumed by his work and his failing marriage. Approached one day by an elderly couple, he is presented with a faded photograph of their daughter, missing for nearly two decades. Troubled by the image of the little girl, who was the same age when she vanished as his own daughter is now - he is compelled to find her.

From best-selling, award-winning author Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), a gutsy, exciting novel that looks honestly at the erotic impulses of an all-too-typical young man. Cole is a boy in high school. He runs cross country, he sketches, he jokes around with friends. But none of this quite matters next to the allure of sex. 'Let me put it this way,' he says. 'Draw a number line, with zero is you never think about sex and ten is it's all you think about, and while you are drawing the line, I am thinking about sex.'

As night falls in Delhi, a mother spins tales from her past for her sleeping daughter. Her now grown-up child is a puzzle with a million pieces whom she hopes, through her words and her love, to somehow make whole again. Meanwhile, as the last train from Rajiv Chowk Station pulls away, a young man rides the metro and dreams of murder. In another corner of the city, a newborn wrapped in a blood-red towel lies on the steps of an orphanage as his mother walks away.

It is the early 1950s. A nameless man is found on the steps of the hospital in Iasi, Romania. He is deaf and mute, but a young nurse named Safta recognizes him from the past and brings him paper and pencils so that he might draw. Gradually, memories appear on the page: The man is Augustin, the cook's son at the manor house at Poiana, where Safta was the privileged daughter.

Bandy Dorner, home from Vietnam, awakes with his car mired in a canal, his cabin reduced to ashes, and his pregnant wife preparing to leave town with her lover. Within moments, a cop lies bleeding in the road. Eighteen years later, Bandy's son - a stranger bearing his name - returns to the town, where the memory of his father's crime still hangs thick. When an accident brings the family - paroled father, widowed mother, injured son - back together, the three must confront their past, and struggle against their fate.

As comic as it is deeply moving, Holy Lands chronicles several months in the lives of an estranged family of colourful eccentrics. Harry Rosenmerck is an ageing Jewish cardiologist who has left his thriving medical practice in New York - to raise pigs in Israel. His ex-wife, Monique, ruminates about their once happy marriage even as she quietly battles an aggressive illness. Their son, David, an earnest and successful playwright, has vowed to reconnect with his father since coming out. Annabelle, their daughter, finds herself unmoored in Paris in the aftermath of a breakup.

The Songs follows Iz Herzl, famed political activist and protest singer, who has always told his children that it is the future not the past they should concentrate on. Now, at 80, an almost forgotten figure, estranged from everyone who has ever loved him, his refusal to look back on his extraordinary life leaves his teenage children, the brilliant Rose and her ailing younger brother, Huddie, adrift in myths and uncertainty that cause them to retreat into a secret world of their own.

>It looked like any other carnival, but of course it wasn't. The boy saw it from the car window, the tops of the large trailer rides over the parked trains by the railway tracks. His parents were driving towards the new mall and he was looking forward to that too, but the tracery of lights above the gloomy trains caught his imagination...Andy walks into Burleigh's Amazing Hall of Mirrors, and then he walks right into the mirror, becomes a reflection. Another boy, a boy who is not Andy, goes home with Andy's parents.

Magdalena has an unsettling gift. She sees writing on the body of everyone she meets - names, dates, details both banal and profound - and her only relief from the onslaught of information is to take off her glasses and let the world recede. Mercifully, her own skin is blank. When she meets Neil, she is intrigued to see her name on his cheek. He's in Paris for the summer, studying a medieval pilgrimage to the rocky coast of Spain, where the body of Saint Jacques was said to have washed ashore, covered in scallop shells.

When Skip Granger, the assistant coach for the Washington Redskins, first sees Jesse Smoke, she is on the beach in Belize. And she has just thrown a regulation football a mile. Granger knows that Smoke's talent is unprecedented for a woman and nearly unparalleled among men.

Tanya Tania is a story about two young women coming of age in two countries that are coming of age. Tanya Talati in Karachi and Tania Ghosh in Bombay, daughters of college best friends, write to each other of what cannot be said to anyone else: a mother who has gone from quiet to silent, sex that has become a weapon, a servant with unforgettably soft hands and a country beginning to play with religion.

On a searing summer Friday, Eddie Chapman has been stuck for hours in a traffic jam. There are accidents along the highway, but ambulances and police are conspicuously absent. When he decides to abandon his car and run home, he sees that the trees along the edge of a stream have been burnt, and the water in the streambed is gone. Something is very wrong. When he arrives home, the power is out, and there is no running water. The pipes everywhere, it seems, have gone dry.

Ellie Taber's final year at university is hurtling to a close at alarming speed. Defeated by her philosophy dissertation and uncertain as to why she can't quite commit to her faultlessly supportive boyfriend, she is disenchanted with university life. Charlie, on the other hand, is determined to use his final year to become the man he was always meant to be. He plans to play the field, do just enough work to secure his degree, finally develop his brilliant business idea and basically have an awesome time. They are both in for a surprise.

Jerusalem, 1920: in an already fractured city, 11-year-old Prudence feels the tension rising as her architect father launches an ambitious and wildly eccentric plan to redesign the Holy City by importing English parks to the desert. Prue, known as the 'little witness', eavesdrops underneath the tables of tearooms and behind the curtains of the dance halls of the city's elite, watching everything but rarely being watched herself.

Charlie, a curious boy with a dangerous Dictaphone habit, eavesdrops on the eccentric guests of the Mirage Hotel as the African nation of Bwalo prepares for the annual appearance of its Glorious Leader Tafumo. Sean, an Irishman who's given his heart (and the best part of his liver) to Bwalo, struggles to write the great African novel - if only his crazed fiancée and fierce thirst would stop distracting him.

Renuka Sharma is a dutiful wife, mother, and daughter-in-law holding the fort in a modest rental in Delhi while her husband tries to rack up savings in Dubai. Working as a receptionist and committed to finding a place for her family in the new Indian dream of air-conditioned malls and high-paid jobs at multinationals, life is going as planned until the day she strikes up a conversation with an uncommonly self-possessed stranger at a Metro station.

Mumbai has emptied under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation; gangs of marauding Hindu and Muslim thugs rove the desolate streets; yet Sarita can think of only one thing: buying the last pomegranate that remains in perhaps the entire city. She is convinced that the fruit holds the key to reuniting her with her physicist husband, Karun, who has been mysteriously missing for more than a fortnight. Searching for his own lover in the midst of this turmoil is Jaz - cocky, handsome, and glib.

Us Conductors is the story of the man who created the most magical musical instrument in the world, the theremin. It's a tale of electricity and espionage, jazz and kung-fu, Harlem and Siberia, and the way even doomed love can keep you alive. Locked in a cabin aboard a ship bearing him back to Russia and away from the love of his life, Lev Sergeyvich Termen begins to type his story: a tale of electricity, romance, and the invention of the world's strangest instrument, the theremin.