Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in City Life

Three young brothers leave Los Angeles in the dead of night for Iran, taken by their father from their mother to a country and an ancestral home they barely recognize. They return to the Valley months later, spit back into American life and changed in inexorable ways. Under the California sun, our protagonist, the youngest brother, begins to piece together a childhood shattered by his father's violence, a queer adolescence marked by a shy, secret love affair with a boy he meets on the basketball court, and his ever-changing status as a Muslim in America.

Malcolm Gephardt, handsome and gregarious long-time bartender at The Half Moon, has always dreamed of owning a bar. When his boss is finally ready to retire, Malcolm stretches to buy the place. He sees its unquantifiable magic and potential and hopes to make it a bigger success, but quickly realizes that his customers don't like change. His wife Jess is smart and confident, and has devoted herself to her law career. But after years of trying to have a baby, she's struggling to accept the idea that motherhood may not be in the cards for her.

In 1992, on his thirtieth birthday, Artie Anderson meets the man who will change his life. Artie spends his days at a tedious advertising job, finding relief in the corner of New York City he can call his own, even as the queer community is still being ravaged by HIV. But when his birthday celebration brings Artie and his friends to his favorite bar, a chance encounter with Abe, an uptight lawyer and Artie’s opposite in almost every way, pushes Artie to want, and to ask for, more for himself.

Eighteen-year-old Lizzie Vogel finds herself a new job in a dentist's surgery after answering a classified advert in the Leicester Mercury for a 'mature lady with a strong interest in dental issues'. Working for an eccentric dental surgeon who's obsessed with becoming a Freemason, Lizzie's life is uneventful until Andy Nicolello turns up one day to deliver a crown. Lizzie seizes her chance to find love and soon begins calling him her boyfriend even though they have never so much as kissed or even sat next to each other on the sofa.

In Lahore, Daru Shezad is a junior banker with a hashish habit. When his old friend Ozi moves back to Pakistan, Daru wants to be happy for him. Ozi has everything: a beautiful wife and child, an expensive foreign education - and a corrupt father who bankrolls his lavish lifestyle. As jealousy sets in, Daru's life slowly unravels. He loses his job. Starts lacing his joints with heroin. Becomes involved with a criminally minded rickshaw driver. And falls in love with Ozi's lonely wife. But how low can Daru sink? Is he guilty of the crime he finds himself on trial for?

A brutal murder. A young woman’s body is discovered with horrifying injuries, a recent newspaper cutting pinned to her clothing. A detective with everything to prove. This is her only chance to redeem herself. A serial killer with nothing to lose. He’s waited years, and his reign of terror has only just begun.... Introducing DI Eve Hunter, Hold Your Tongue is your new obsession.

All Men Want to Know traces Nina Bouraoui's blissful childhood in Algeria, a wild, sun-soaked paradise, with hazy summer afternoons spent swimming, diving and driving across the desert. Her mother is French, her father Algerian. When racial tensions begin to surface in their neighbourhood, her mother suffers an unspeakable act of violence that forces the family to flee the country.

It was a whirlwind romance. And when Drew, caught up in the moment, suggests that he and Poppy don’t tell each other anything about their past lives, that they live only for the here and now, for the future they are building together, Poppy jumps at the chance for a fresh start. But it doesn’t take long for Poppy to see that this is a two-way deal. Drew is hiding something from her. And Poppy suddenly has no idea who the man she has married really is, what he is hiding from her or what he might be capable of.

Jack Levitt – teenaged orphan and small-time criminal – lives off his wits, dividing his time between the pool halls, bars and brothels of Portland, Oregon. Billy Lancing is a young black runaway and pool hustler who falls into Jack’s orbit. After a messed-up heist lands Jack at reform school, he re-enters a world where Billy has struggled to find peace in a new middle-class life with marriage, fatherhood and a steady job. But neither man can outrun trouble for long, and they soon meet again in St Quentin Prison, trying to make sense of the hand life has dealt them.

Helen Clapp is a physics professor. She doesn't believe in pseudoscience or time travel and especially not in ghosts. So when she gets a missed call from Charlie, her closest friend from university with whom she hasn't spoken in over a year, Helen thinks there must be some mistake. Because Charlie died two days ago. Then when her young son, Jack, claims to have seen Charlie in their house just the other day, Helen begins to have doubts.

New York, 2015, a Monday in spring. Dylan, about to turn thirty-eight, walks out of a successful career in advertising, sublets her apartment and agrees to housesit for Anna, an artist she has never met. She doesn't mention these life changes to her friends, her parents back in England or to Matt, her boyfriend living on the West Coast. In Anna's loft Dylan has time to think, space to write and a chance to try on a new kind of life. When her neighbour Kate invites her to a party and introduces her to Gabe, Dylan tries on a new kind of romance.

Jessie doesn’t believe in love at first sight. Until one sunny Saturday in London, a fire alarm in Whole Foods throws her into a stranger's arms. Cal is charming and funny: their chemistry is instant. Quick-fire flirting turns into the most romantic day of Jessie’s life. But that evening they're forced apart before swapping numbers. Jessie is devastated – has she just lost the one? After weeks of searching, Cal turns up on her doorstop holding two dozen red roses. It feels like fate. The only thing is, they’re not for her…

Set in post-World War II Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks, a young, harmonica-blowing blues singer who is always writing music in his head. Torn between his friendships with fellow musicians and nightclub life and his responsibilities to his wife and child, along with the pressures of dealing with a racist America that assaults him at every turn, Manfred seeks easy answers in "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey) and in moving on.

Twenty-one-year-old Beth is in prison. The thing she did is so bad she doesn't deserve to ever feel good again. But her counsellor, Erika, won't give up on her. She asks Beth to make a list of all the good things in her life. So Beth starts to write down her story, from sharing silences with Foster Dad No. 1 to flirting in the Odeon on Orange Wednesdays to the very first time she sniffed her baby's head. But at the end of her story, Beth must confront the bad thing. What is the truth hiding behind her crime?

Eve Laing, once the muse of an infamous painter, is now - 40 years later - an artist herself. But she feels she has sacrificed her career for her family and she resents the global success of her old college roommate, now a celebrity of the international conceptual art scene. When Eve embarks on her most ambitious work yet, she takes a wrecking ball to her comfortable life, jettisoning her marriage for a beautiful young lover, a drifter half her age, who seems to share her single-minded creative vision.

Bayou transplant Odessa Dean has a lot to learn about life in Brooklyn. So far she's scored a rent free apartment in one of the nicest neighborhoods around by cat-sitting, and has a new job working at Untapped Books & Café. Hand-selling books and craft beers is easy for Odessa, but making new friends and learning how to ride the subway? Well, that might take her a little extra time. But things turn more sour than an IPA when the death of a fellow waitress goes viral, caught on camera in the background of a couple's flash-mob proposal video.

Cate is a stage designer in her early 40s, embroiled in theatre projects and the lives of her unconventional Chicago friends and lovers, when her life is suddenly overturned. Walking into her best friend's kitchen one day, she witnesses an act of violence that forces her to do something she would never have thought she could do. The bubble of her safe, bohemian world is shattered. Right After the Weather explores what happens when two worlds collide and a group of friends are confronted with their worst fears.

When Grace’s fiancé vanishes without a trace the night after proposing, her life is turned upside down. But has Nick walked out on her, or is he in danger? As Grace desperately searches for answers, it soon becomes clear that Nick wasn’t the uncomplicated man she thought she knew. And when she uncovers a hidden tragedy from his childhood, she realises an awful truth: that you can run from your past - but your secrets will always catch up with you....

Years after escaping her unbearable artworld friends in New York for a new life in London, an unnamed writer finds herself back on the Lower East Side attending a dinner party hosted by Eugene and Nicole – an artist-curator couple – and attended by their pretentious circle. It’s the evening after the funeral of their mutual friend, a failed actress, and if the narrator once loved and admired Eugene and Nicole and their important friends, she now despises them all.

Zoe, Al, Rachel, Rob, Yas and Indie. Six friends who were inseparable at university, who have all had their secret or not so secret passions for each other, their own hopes and fears. Set over one year and told from multiple perspectives, BIRTHS, DEATHS AND MARRIAGES is an era-spanning, globe-trotting novel about love, friendship, and how to stay at least relatively sane in an ever crazier world. It’s about a group of friends growing older, a pair of sometime lovers finding their way back to each other, about kindness and joy. It’s about births, deaths, marriages, and everything in between.