Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Coming of Age

When Andrée joins her school, Sylvie is immediately fascinated. Andrée is small for her age, but walks with the confidence of an adult. Under her red coat, she hides terrible burn scars, and when she imagines beautiful things, she gets goosebumps. Secretly Sylvie believes that Andrée is a prodigy about whom books will be written. The girls become close. They talk for hours about equality, justice, war and religion; they lose respect for their teachers; they build a world of their own. But they can't stay like this forever.

Best friends Eleanor and Fin are inseparable. They are convinced that it will always be this way. But to be sure, they make a pact to keep their lives intertwined. And of course, they'll get married if they're both 35 and single. Eleanor and Fin haven't spoken in 15 years. They live on different continents, but more than an ocean separates them. Everything has changed since the last time they met. So, when newly single Fin reappears, there's no way they can keep their promise. Is there?

Artemisia Gentileschi dreams of becoming a great artist. Motherless, she grows up among a family of painters - men and boys. She knows she is more talented than her brothers, but she cannot choose her own future. She wants to experience the world, but she belongs to her father and will belong to a husband. As Artemisia patiently goes from lesson to lesson, perfecting her craft, she also paints in private, recreating the women who inspire her, away from her father's eyes. Until a mysterious tutor enters her life.

From the author of the beloved Hum If You Don't Know the Words comes a rich, unforgettable story of three unique women in post-Apartheid South Africa who are brought together in their darkest time and discover the ways that love can transcend the strictest of boundaries.

Thirteen-year-old Byron needs to get away and doesn't care how. Sick of being beaten up by lads for 'talkin' like a poof' after school. Sick of dad - the weightlifting, womanising Gaz - and Mam, who selfishly pissed off to Turkey. Sick of the people who shuffle about Hucknall like the living dead, going on about kitchens they're too skint to do up and marriages they're too scared to leave. It's a new millennium, Madonna's Music is top of the charts and there's a whole world to explore - and Byron's happy to beg, steal and skank onto a rollercoaster ride of hedonism.

In the relentless summer heat, four abruptly orphaned children retreat into a shadowy, isolated world, and find their own strange and unsettling ways of fending for themselves…

On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students’ party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and Moira accepts despite Evelyn’s misgivings. As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them.

Cleveland, Ohio, 2003. A young man is just a college freshman when he meets Emily. They share a passion for Edward Albee and ecstasy and fall hard and fast in love. But soon Emily has to move home to Elba, New York, and he flunks out of school and joins the army. Desperate to keep their relationship alive, they marry before he ships out to Iraq. But as an army medic, he is unprepared for the grisly reality that awaits him.

Amy is more than one disastrous night of drunken revenge on her boss/ex-boyfriend’s Audi—the night that tanked her rising TV producer career and led to a hasty move to London for a fresh start. She is thirty years of awesomeness. At least, that’s what Amy tells herself every morning before trekking to her mediocre job making trailers at a failing British TV channel. Two years later, she’s finally starting to believe it. But then, in a twisted turn of fate, the ex-boyfriend who wrecked her life is hired as her new boss and past and present are about to epically, hilariously collide.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson, read by Helen Lloyd and Lars Knudsen. When Tina Hopgood writes a letter of regret to a man she has never met, she doesn’t expect a reply. When Anders Larsen, a lonely museum curator, answers it, nor does he. They’re both searching for something, they just don’t know it yet. Anders has lost his wife, along with his hopes and dreams for the future. Tina is trapped in a marriage she doesn’t remember choosing.

When Funke’s mother dies in a tragic accident in Lagos, she’s sent to live with her maternal family in England. Traumatised by grief and against a backdrop of condescension and mild neglect, conformist Funke strives to fit in, determined to become one of them. Free-spirited Liv has always wanted to break free of her joyless family, resolved to be nothing like them. Fiercely protective of Funke, she at last has a purpose. And an ally. The two cousins give each other what they need most: love. But the past casts long shadows and the choices made by their mothers haunt Funke and Liv.

On the outskirts of Tokyo, in a neighbourhood crossed by a commuter railway, local cats weave their way through the lives and homes of their owners as they navigate difficult times. A cat named Chobi sends silent messages of courage to a young woman, willing her to end a faltering relationship; a gifted artist fatally misunderstands her boss's enthusiasm for her paintings; a manga fan shuts herself away after the death of her friend, while her cat Cookie hatches a plan to persuade her outside.

Elliot. Joe. Tommy. Nathanael. Wren. Oliver. Malik. Zach. Frank. Patrick. Noah. These are the men Margot has loved, liked, lusted over. Since she was seventeen, she’s pictured them like stepping stones – each one bringing her closer to finding someone to share her life with and, eventually, father the children she’s always imagined in her future. From her first sexual encounter, to her first love, from grown-up dilemmas to spontaneous thrills, she’s soaked up every experience available to her, discovering friendship, joy and despair.

After her mother's death, Nunu moves from Istanbul to a small apartment in Paris. One day outside of a bookstore, she meets M., an older British writer whose novels about Istanbul Nunu has always admired. They find themselves walking the streets of Paris and talking late into the night. What follows is an unusual friendship of eccentric correspondence and long walks around the city. M. is working on a new novel set in Turkey and Nunu tells him about her family, hoping to impress and inspire him.

Unforgettably funny and painfully honest, Jonathan Coe's tale of Benjamin Trotter and his friends' coming of age during the 1970s is a heartfelt celebration of the joys and agonies of growing up. Featuring, among other things, IRA bombs, prog rock, punk rock, bad poetry, first love, love on the side, prefects, detention, a few bottles of Blue Nun, lots of brown wallpaper, industrial strife, and divine intervention in the form of a pair of swimming trunks.

Meet Abbas. Woodcarver, toy maker, dreamer. Abbas is seventeen when he is whisked away to Tipu Sultan's glorious palace in Mysore. Apprenticed to the legendary clockmaker Monsieur Du Leze, he is ordered to create an ingenious musical tiger to delight Tipu's sons. In the eccentric Du Leze, Abbas finds an unexpected friend who encourages his skill and hunger for learning, and through whom he also meets the unforgettable Jehanne, who has questions and ambitions of her own. But when British soldiers attack and loot Mysore, Abbas's world is turned upside down.

It might not be the stuff of dreams, but Padma and Wallace have spent ten years building a relationship that feels . . . fine. Until Wallace gives Padma an ultimatum about starting a family she's not sure she even wants. Padma's fifteen-year-old niece Myra is reaching her own crisis point. When she falls in with the wrong crowd and her life ends up in danger, it's the final straw for her parents. Now Padma will spend the summer with her niece - in a ramshackle, ivy-clad house on the Kent clifftops - running a DIY rehab of sorts.

Drinking pals back in their Dublin days, Davy rarely sees Joe for a pint anymore - maybe one or two when Davy’s over from England to check in on his elderly father. But tonight, one pint will turn to three and then five as Joe recounts a secret, leading the two men on a bender back to the haunts of their youth. Joe has left his wife and family for another woman, Jessica. Davy knows her too, or he should - she was the girl of their dreams all those years ago, the girl with the cello in George’s Pub.

India, 1992. The country is ablaze with riots. In Lucknow, ten-year-old Shubhankar witnesses a terrible act of mob violence in which his family are complicit: an act that will alter the course of his life. In the two decades that follow, Shabby must wrestle with the ghosts of his past, the expectations of his family, and the seismic shifts taking place around him as the country enters the new millennium. As an adult in Mumbai, he encounters Syed and Shruti, who, like him, are seeking the freedom to rewrite their stories while navigating the contradictions of modern India.

For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. With her marriage, she gave up on her own career as a concert pianist, but her husband Bowen has long rebuffed her desire to have a child. Instead, she must accommodate her mother-in-law, newly arrived from the province of Yunnan and bringing with her long-buried family secrets. Soon strange parcels start to show up on the doorstep and Song Yan's dreams become troubling and claustrophobic.