Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Contemporary Fiction

Captain Jack Aubrey sails away from the hated Australian prison colonies in his favourite vessel the Surprise, pondering on middle age and sexual frustration. He soon becomes aware that he is out of touch with the mood of his ship: to his astonishment he finds that in spite of a lifetime's experience he does not know what the foremost hands or even his own officers are thinking.

「君はこれから世界でいちばんタフな15歳の少年になる」――15歳の誕生日がやってきたとき、僕は家を出て遠くの知らない街に行き、小さな図書館の片隅で暮らすようになった。

Essays in Love is a stunningly original love story. Taking in Aristotle, Wittgenstein, history, religion and Groucho Marx, Alain de Botton charts the progress of a love affair from the first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to the onset of anxiety and heartbreak.

Just before dawn one late-summer morning, Captain Bruno Courrèges is roused from sleep by the wail of the town siren atop the Mairie, summoning the volunteer firemen of St Denis. Bruno, the only policeman in the small Périgord town, follows the fire engines towards the site of a large barn, now engulfed in flames, the surrounding fields ablaze. Everything points to arson. A Californian wine maker is planning to buy up half the valley to create a huge wine-producing operation.

When Lisa Jones and her boyfriend George take on the run-down Rocks Hotel, they aim to do for Mariscombe what Rick Stein did for Padstow and set up a chic maritime retreat. But renovating a hotel is about more than stripped wooden floors and Egyptian cotton sheets, particularly when the locals are shifty and unhelpful. Especially Bruno Thorne, the tall, dark and surly owner of the nearby Mariscombe Hotel, where life is one long holiday; for the staff, anyway.

Goodwood is a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone. It's a place where it's impossible to keep a secret. In 1992, when Jean Brown is 17, a terrible thing happens. Two terrible things. Rosie White, the coolest girl in town, vanishes overnight. One week later, Goodwood's most popular resident, Bart McDonald, sets off on a fishing trip and never comes home. People die in Goodwood, of course, but never like this. They don't just disappear.

It’s high summer when Molly Pargeter drags her amiably bickering family to a rented Tuscan villa for the holidays. Molly is sure that the house is the perfect setting for their three-week getaway, but soon she becomes fascinated by the lives of the absent owners and things start to go horribly wrong.

On a lake deep in the Minnesota woods, Kathy Wade comforts her husband John, a rising political star, after a devastating electoral defeat in which he's been pursued by rumors of the atrocities he committed in Vietnam. But it is clear that something is horribly wrong between them - too much has been hidden. Then Kathy vanishes, along with their boat.

When Lord Petrefact hires Walden Yapp, Professor of Demotic Historiography at Kloone University, to write a scurrilous family history Yapp finds plenty of material in Buscott village, where Frederick Petrefact is running the Mill and adding new vices to the family collection. If Yapp can lay his hands on the Petrefact Papers in the Buscott Museum he may be able to expose the multi-national capitalism of the Petrefacts to the whole world.

It is the early 1960s in a country village in Ireland. Caithleen Brady and her attractive friend, Baba, are on the verge of womanhood and dreaming of spreading their wings in a wider world - of discovering love and luxury and liquor and above all, fun. With bawdy innocence, shrewd for all their inexperience, the girls romp their way through convent school to the bright lights of Dublin – where Caithleen finds that suave, idealised lovers rarely survive the real world.

The instinct of the true Porterhouse man faced with a crisis is to reach for the bottle and then to fall back on the subtle tactical skills honed at Cambridge down the centuries: blackmail and kidnap. But will these be enough? Menaced on all sides - by the collapse of the Chapel, by the tentacles of organised crime, and by the hovering threat of the abominable Dog’s Nose Man - will Porterhouse be forced to unleash the most fearsome weapon in its armoury - the college food?

The mid-'70s: at an all-boys Catholic school in Melbourne, Timothy Conigrave falls wildly and sweetly in love with the captain of the football team. So begins a relationship that weathers disapproval, separation and ultimately death. With honesty and insight, Holding the Man explores the highs and lows of any partnership and the strength of heart both men have to find when they test positive for HIV. This is a book as refreshing and uplifting as it is moving - a funny and sad and celebratory account of growing up gay.

Most of the big money belongs to Torquil Paterson Frisby, the dyspeptic American millionaire – but that doesn’t stop him wanting more out of it. His niece, the beautiful Ann Moon, is engaged to ‘Biscuit’, Lord Biskerton, who doesn’t have very much of the stuff and so he has to escape to Valley Fields to hide from his creditors. Meanwhile, his old schoolfriend Berry Conway, who is working for Frisby, himself falls for Ann – just as Biscuit falls for her friend Kitchie Valentine.

Adapted For The Film Slumdog Millionaire. Eighteen-year-old Ram Mohammad Thomas has been arrested after answering twelve questions correctly on a TV quiz show to win one billion rupees. The producers have accused him of cheating his way to victory. Twelve extraordinary events in street-kid Ram's life - how he was adopted as a foundling orphan by a priest; came to have three names; fooled a professional hit man; even fell in love - give him the crucial answers.

We all need to know where we come from, where we belong. But for David and Nathalie, this need to know is even more urgent, since they are adopted. Brought up by the same parents but born to two different mothers, they have grown up as brother and sister, and share a fierce loyalty.Their decision, in their late thirties, to embark upon the journey to find their birth mothers is no straightforward matter.

As a boy, William Bellman commits one small cruel act that appears to have unforeseen and terrible consequences. The killing of a rook with his catapult is soon forgotten amidst the riot of boyhood games. And by the time he is grown, with a wife and children of his own, he seems indeed, to be a man blessed by fortune. Until tragedy strikes, and the stranger in black comes, and William Bellman starts to wonder if all his happiness is about to be eclipsed. Desperate to save the one precious thing he has left, he enters into a bargain.

Compelling, challenging and resilient, over 10 beautifully contained chapters Clade canvasses three generations, from the very near future to late this century. Central to the novel is the family of Adam, a scientist, and his wife, Ellie, an artist. Clade opens with them wanting a child and Adam in a quandary about the wisdom of this. Their daughter proves to be an elusive little girl and then a troubled teenager, and by now cracks have appeared in her parents' marriage. Their grandson is in turn a troubled boy.

四国の図書館に着いたカフカ少年が出会ったのは、30年前のヒットソング、夏の海辺の少年の絵、15歳の美しい少女――。一方、猫と交流ができる老人ナカタさんも、ホシノ青年に助けられながら旅を続ける。

Beatrice considers herself to be delicate and sensitive, idle and confused. Forced into early retirement, she has an unashamed and romantic desire to be rescued by the ideal man. But Beatrice's only family is her orderly sister, Miriam.

When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies painting obsessively in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children are left to unravel a legacy of secrets and emotional damage.