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

The Emperor of Gladness follows a wayward young man in New England who, out of sheer chance, becomes the caretaker for an 82-year-old widow living with dementia. Hallmarks of Vuong's writing - formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness - are on full display in this masterful story of friendship and how much we’re willing to risk to possess one of life’s most treasured mercies: a second chance.

Sasha is well and truly over it all: work (all-consuming), friendships (on the back burner), sex-life (non-existent). Sasha has hit a brick wall. Armed with good intentions to drink kale smoothies, try yoga and find solitude, she heads to the Devon resort she loved as a child. But it's off-season, the hotel is falling apart and now she has to share the beach with someone else: a grumpy, stressed-out guy called Finn. How can she commune with nature when he's sitting on a rock, watching her? Especially when they don't agree on burnout cures.

Twelve summers ago: Poppy and Alex meet. They hate each other and are pretty confident they'll never speak again. Eleven summers ago: they're forced to share a ride home from college, and by the end of it, a friendship is formed. And a pact: every year, one vacation together. Ten summers ago: Alex discovers his fear of flying on the way to Vancouver. Poppy holds his hand the whole way. Seven summers ago: they get far too drunk and narrowly avoid getting matching tattoos in New Orleans. Two summers ago: it all goes wrong. This summer: Poppy asks Alex to join her on one last trip.

The one thing you never talk about while you're in the Scholomance is what you'll do when you get out - not even the richest enclaver would tempt fate that way. But that impossible dream has somehow come true for El and her classmates. And what's more, she didn't even have to become the monstrous dark witch she's prophesised to become to make it happen. Instead of killing enclavers, she saved them, and now the world is safe for all wizards. Peace and harmony have enveloped all the enclaves of the world. Just kidding.

Two kids meet in a hospital gaming room in 1987. One is visiting her sister, the other is recovering from a car crash. The days and months are long there. Their love of video games becomes a shared world—of joy, escape and fierce competition. But all too soon that time is over, fades from view. When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station, they are catapulted back to that moment. The spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love—making games.

It is June 1962. In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, just married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Neither is entirely able to suppress anxieties about the wedding night to come. On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from Ian McEwan - a story about how the entire course of a life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

Everybody thought Shiloh and Cary would end up together – everybody but Shiloh and Cary. Slow Dance follows these star-crossed best friends from their inseparable teen years on the wrong side of the tracks to their far-flung adulthoods – through her marriage and motherhood and his time in the Navy – as they try to work out what they’re actually supposed to be to each other.

Skippy and Ruprecht are having a doughnut-eating race one evening when Skippy turns purple and falls off his chair . . .And so begins this epic, tragic, comic, brilliant novel set in and around Dublin’s Seabrook College for Boys.

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.

From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the 20th century to the teens of the 21st, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of 12 characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope....

Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe, a famous writer, chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back to Philippe's teenage years, to a winter morning in 1984, a small French high school, and a carefully timed encounter between two 17-year-olds. It's the start of a secret, intensely passionate, world-altering love affair between Philippe and his classmate, Thomas.

Following the explosive energy of On the Road, the book that put the Beat Genration on the literary map - and Jack Kerouac on the best-seller list - comes The Dharma Bums, in which Kerouac charts the spiritual quest of a group of friends in search of Dharma, or truth. Ray Smith and his friend, Japhy, along with Morley the yodeller, head off into the high Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude and experience the Zen way of life.

Melody Browne can remember nothing before her ninth birthday. Now in her early 30s, Melody lives in the middle of London with her 17-year-old son. She hasn’t seen her parents since she left home at 15, but Melody doesn't mind. She’s better off on her own. And then fragments of her past start to come back. At first her memories mean nothing to her, but slowly, day by day, she begins to piece together the real story of her childhood. But with every mystery she solves, another one materialises; with every question she answers, another appears....

Smart, diligent and a bit plain, that’s the general consensus. Then Hillary goes to college and her star rises. At Yale Law School, she continues to be a leader - and catches the eye of driven, handsome and charismatic Bill. But when he asks her to marry him, Hillary gives him a firm 'no'. The rest, as they say, isn’t history. How might things have turned out for them, for America, for the world itself, if Hillary Rodham had really turned down Bill Clinton?

Some stories are universal. They play out across human history. And time is the river which will flow through them. It starts with a family, a family which will mutate. For now, it is a father, mother and two sons. One with his father’s violence in his blood. One who lives his mother’s artistry. One leaves. One stays. They will be joined by others whose deeds will change their fate. It is a beginning. Their stories will intertwine and evolve over the course of 2,000 years.

Will and Rosie meet as teenagers. They're opposites in every way, but over secret walks home and late-night phone calls they become closer, destined to be one another's great love story. Until, one day, tragedy strikes and any possibility of them being together shatters. But that tragedy - and their history - is what will connect them forever.

After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent by her mother to live for a year with her aunt and uncle. It is a year which will change her life. The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle's big colonial mansion hides many secrets. It also has an unusual occupant in Pochiko, a Pygmy hippopotamus who is the last survivor from a time when the extensive gardens housed a zoo. But it is Tomoko's growing friendship with her cousin Mina which has the most profound effect on her time with the family.

Andy's story wasn't meant to turn out this way. Living out of a suitcase in his best friends' spare room, waiting for his career as a stand-up comedian to finally take off, he struggles to process the life-ruining end of his relationship with the only woman he's ever truly loved. As he tries to solve the seemingly unsolvable mystery of his broken relationship, he contends with career catastrophe, social media paranoia, a rapidly dwindling friendship group and the growing suspicion that, at 35, he really should have figured this all out by now.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns, and the truth.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost 20 years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.