Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Family Life

On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, Alice Jansen collects her treasures – the keepsakes, figurines and mementoes that help her make sense of her fragile family. But the next day her heart is broken, and the final treasure, a gift from her father, is lost. Two years later, Alice answers a phone call from a stranger and runs away to New York, and tries to forget her last golden summer at the orchard on the banks of the Hudson.

A kid walks into your bookstore and...guess what? He's your son. The one you put up for adoption eighteen years ago. The one you never told anyone about. Surprise! And a huge surprise it is. It's a huge surprise to his adoptive mother, Monica, who thought she had a close relationship with Matthew, her nearly adult son. Until he secretly arranged a vacation to Cape Cod so he could meet his birth mother...without a word to her. It's also a surprise to Harlow, the woman who secretly placed him for adoption so many years ago.

Jennifer Quinn has a secret. Her love of baking has just won her a spot as a contestant on a primetime TV show. It's only the second time in fifty-nine years that she's kept something from her beloved husband Bernard. She's about to be whisked into an unfamiliar world of cameras, timed challenges and celebrity judges. She could be in with a chance of being crowned the best baker in Britain. But, as Mrs Quinn's quiet ambitions turn into unexpected stardom, the other secret she's been keeping is in danger of resurfacing. It was supposed to stay hidden forever.

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…

Two sisters, one farm. A family is split when their father leaves their shared inheritance entirely to Helen, his younger daughter. Despite baking award-winning pies at the local nursing home, her older sister, Edith, struggles to make what most people would call a living. So she can't help wondering what her life would have been like with even a portion of the farm money her sister kept for herself.

When Molly married Alex, she thought theirs would be the perfect future. But after a night out with his twin brother, Graeme, a terrible injury leaves Alex with permanent brain damage. In a single moment the man she married is transformed into someone new. Someone who has forgotten how to love her. And someone Molly isn't sure if she can ever love again. How can she stay married to a man she doesn't know? Should she let the future she dreamt of slip from her fingers?

Scarborough, 1880. Young Jeannie spends her days watching her mother and the other harbour girls sitting at the water's edge - mending nets, gutting herring - and waiting for her friend Ethan Wharton to come in on his father's fishing smack. As she was growing up, Jeannie always expected to marry Ethan, who is loyal and dependable. But then she meets Harry - a stranger who has come to visit from Hull for the day - and she falls for him.

Millions of Karon fans will be thrilled that it's life as usual in the wildly popular Mitford series: A beloved town character lands a front-page obituary, but who was it, exactly, who died? And what about the former mayor, born the year Lindbergh landed in Paris, who's still running for office? All this, of course, is but a feather on the wind compared to Muse editor J. C. Hogan's desperate attempts to find a cure for his marital woes. Will it be high-def TV or his pork chop marinade?

Hana and her little sister Emi are part of an island community of haenyeo, women who make their living from diving deep into the sea off the southernmost tip of Korea. One day Hana sees a Japanese soldier heading for where Emi is guarding the day's catch on the beach. Her mother has told her again and again never to be caught alone with one. Terrified for her sister, Hana swims as hard as she can for the shore. So begins the story of two sisters suddenly and violently separated by war.

It’s 1980s New York. Heady, excessive times. Alice Burns - a young book editor - is deep into a manuscript about the morass of family life. The observations resonate, perhaps because she has just watched her own family implode. As she reads she wonders: when did the sadness start? And could it be that unhappiness is a choice? Thus begins a great American epic which follows Alice as she navigates high school bullying, first love and sexism at an elite college, a spell in 1970s Ireland, and a tragedy that sends her stateside as the US embraces a cowboy actor named Reagan.

After a lifetime spent navigating his desires, John Addington, married to Catherine, has met Frank, a working-class printer. Meanwhile Henry Ellis's wife Edith has fallen in love with Angelica—and Angelica wants Edith all to herself. When in 1894 John and Henry decide to write a revolutionary book together, intended to challenge convention and the law, they are both caught in relationships stalked by guilt and shame. Yet they share a vision of a better world, one that will expand possibilities for men and women everywhere.

Meet Charlie Savage: a middle-aged Dubliner with an indefatigable wife, an exasperated daughter, a drinking buddy who’s realized that he’s been a woman all along.... Compiled here for the first time is a whole year’s worth of Roddy Doyle’s hilariousseries for the Irish Independent. Giving a unique voice to the everyday, he draws a portrait of a man - funny, loyal, somewhat bewildered - trying to keep pace with the modern world (if his knees don’t give out first)

Meet Eve, who has departed from her 30-year career to become a Free Spirit, Sally, who has waved goodbye to her indifferent husband and two grown-up children, and Anastasia: defiantly independent narrow-boat-dweller, suddenly vulnerable as she awaits a life-saving operation. Inexperienced and ill-equipped, Sally and Eve embark upon a journey through the canals of England, guided by the remote and unsympathetic Anastasia.

It is 1944, and Anne Black is making the best of a new life in Somerset, but bringing up her daughters so far from their father; her mother, Peggy; and their real home of Cliffehaven isn't easy. The safety of Somerset makes separation bearable until danger strikes and rocks Anne's world. Back in Cliffehaven Peggy Reilly is running the Beach View Boarding House with her usual love and warmth. The war is taking its toll, however, and Peggy longs to have her scattered family home again.

The father has a story he needs to share before it's too late. As he tells his son about a courageous little girl lying in a hospital bed a few miles away, he reveals even more about himself - his past regrets, his hopes for the future. Now, on Christmas Eve, he has been given the chance to do something remarkable that could change the destiny of the little girl he hardly knows. But before he can make the deal of a lifetime, he must find out what his own life has actually been worth, and only his son can reveal the answer.

Hull, 1856. James Ripley and his wife Moira have always looked out for the poor of Hull. When, during one stormy night, there is a flood in a nearby cellar—a popular shelter for the homeless—James rushes to help. Among those rescued is a dark-haired little girl who speaks a language no one can understand. Some say that she came to the cellar with her mother, but no one knows where the mother is now. Concerned for the child's safety, James is unsure of what to do.

Grace Adams is one bad day away from saving her life. One hot summer day, stuck in traffic on her way to pick up the cake for her daughter's sixteenth birthday party, Grace Adams snaps. She doesn't scream or break something or cry or curl into a ball. She simply abandons her car in traffic and walks away. But not from her life—towards it. To the daughter who won't live with her anymore and has banned her from the party. To the husband divorcing her. Towards the terrible thing that has blown their family apart.

Lilia Liska is 81. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the arrival of 17 grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press: the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair.

The wonderful fourth outing for Delhi detective Vish Puri. When Ram and Tulsi fall in love, the young woman’s parents are dead set against the union. She’s from a high-caste family; he’s an Untouchable, from the lowest strata of Indian society. Young Tulsi’s father locks her up and promises to hunt down the “loverboy dog.” Fortunately, India’s Love Commandos, a group of volunteers dedicated to helping mixed-caste couples, come to the rescue. But just after they liberate Tulsi, Ram is mysteriously snatched from his hiding place.

Jimmy Rabbitte is back. The man who invented the Commitments back in the eighties is now forty-seven, with a loving wife, four kids...and bowel cancer. He isn't dying, he thinks, but he might be. Jimmy still loves his music, and he still loves to hustle - his new thing is finding old bands and then finding the people who loved them enough to pay money for their resurrected singles and albums. On his path through Dublin he meets two of the Commitments - Outspan, whose own illness is probably terminal, and Imelda Quirk, still as gorgeous as ever.