Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Family Life

Meet Lana, Judith and Catrin. Best friends since primary school when they swore an oath on a Curly Wurly wrapper that they would always be there for each other, come what may. After the trip of a lifetime, the three girls are closer than ever. But an unexpected turn of events shakes the foundation of their friendship to its core, leaving their future in doubt - there’s simply too much to forgive, let alone forget. An innocent childhood promise they once made now seems impossible to keep.

With her hotly anticipated third instalment, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Fielding introduces us to a whole new enticing phase of Bridget's life set in contemporary London, including the challenges of maintaining sex appeal as the years roll by and the nightmare of drunken texting, the skinny jean, the disastrous email CC, total lack of twitter followers, and TVs that need 90 buttons and three remotes to simply turn on. An uproariously funny novel of modern life, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a triumphant return of our favourite Everywoman.

The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, driven to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family's rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov. Dostoyevsky's dark masterwork evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur and everyone's faith in humanity is tested.

Benjamin Honey- American, Bantu, Igbo- born enslaved- freed or fled at fifteen- aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, and discovered they could make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. Then comes the intrusion of 'civilization': officials determine to 'cleanse' the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities' institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah's Ark.

Celebrate Christmas with the ultimate Shopaholic! Becky Brandon (née Bloomwood) is back in a new adventure for 2019 - Christmas Shopaholic. A brilliant laugh-out-loud festive novel from the number one best-selling author.

Artist, Hassie Day and her sister, Margot, buy a rambling, run-down Jacobean house in Hope Wenlock on the Welsh Marches. While Margot continues her London life in high finance, Hassie is left alone to work the large, long-neglected garden. She is befriended by eccentric, sharp-tongued Miss Foot, who recommends Murat, an Albanian migrant, out of place in the village, to help Hassie in the garden. As Hassie works in the garden alongside Murat, she begins to ruminate on her past life, her hostile mother, her diffident father and the sibling rivalry that tainted her childhood.

There is a heatwave across Europe, and Goose and his three sisters gather at the family's house by Lake Orta in Piedmont, Italy. Their father, a famous artist, recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped to Italy to finish his masterpiece. Now he is dead. And there is no sign of his new wife and or his final painting. Though the siblings have always been close, the things they learn that summer - about themselves, their father and their new stepmother - will drive them apart before they can come to any kind of understanding of what their father's legacy truly is.

When she stumbles across the advert, she's looking for something else completely. But it seems like too good an opportunity to miss: a live-in nanny position, with a staggeringly generous salary. And when Rowan arrives at Heatherbrae House, she is smitten by the luxurious 'smart' home fitted out with all modern conveniences, by the beautiful Scottish Highlands, and by this picture-perfect family. What she doesn't know is that she's stepping into a nightmare - one that will end with a child dead and her in a cell awaiting trial for murder.

The twice Booker-shortlisted author returns with his third novel, THE ROAD TO THE COUNTRY, about a young man, Tunde, whose brother is involved in an accident and stranded just as the Biafran war begins. Tunde spends the novel travelling through a war zone to be reunited with his brother - to bring him home and to ask for forgiveness for the part he played in the accident, a part his brother has no knowledge of.

Where is Pradeep S. Mathew - spin bowler extraordinaire and 'the greatest cricketer to walk the earth'? Retired sportswriter W. G. Karunasena is dying, and he wants to know. W. G. will spend his final months drinking arrack, making his wife unhappy, ignoring his son and tracking down the mysterious Pradeep. On his quest he will also uncover a coach with six fingers, a secret bunker below a famous stadium, a Tamil Tiger warlord, and startling truths about Sri Lanka, cricket and himself.

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....

He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, lucrative business, sporting prowess and good looks. He is the embodiment of thriving post-war America, land of liberty and hope. Until one sunny day in 1968, when Swede's daughter, Merry, commits an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism and the Levov family is plunged into mayhem. Extraordinarily nuanced and poignant, American Pastoral is the first in an eloquent trilogy of post-war American novels that still resonates today.

Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we visit our mistakes on our children? What makes life truly beautiful? Set between New England and London, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families—the Belseys and the Kipps—and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some searching questions about what life does to love. For the Belseys and the Kipps, the confusions—both personal and political—of our uncertain age are about to be brought close to home: right to the heart of family.

Tasha has always felt in the shadow of her older sister, Alice. Their lifestyles couldn't be more different; Alice is married to wealthy entrepreneur Kyle and has a high-flying career, Tasha is married to her childhood sweetheart and lives in a Bristol suburb with their four-year-old twins. When Alice realises that Tasha is struggling - with money, the kids, losing her identity - she suggests they do a lifeswap for a week. Alice and Kyle will come to stay at Tasha's terraced house to look after the twins, while Tasha and Harry spend the week in Alice and Kyle's Venice apartment.

In the far north of Norway a man lives a peaceful existence. However one day his younger brother, always the more successful and charming of the two, turns up to visit, accompanied by his new wife. It soon turns out that the little brother is not quite as angelic as he seems.

'There is only one book to a man,' Steinbeck wrote of East of Eden, his most ambitious novel. Set in the rich farmland of the Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations hopelessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity; the inexplicability of love and the murderous consequences of love's absence.

Michael and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment she walked into his mother's grocery store in the Polish neighbourhood of Baltimore, he was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervour, they were hastily wed. But they never should have married. Pauline, impulsive and impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, and judgemental, proceeds deliberately. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll.

A book about family, selfishness and compassion on Ireland's Atlantic coast, from the Booker Prize-winner. Hanna, Dan, Constance and Emmet return to the west coast of Ireland for a final family Christmas in the home their mother is about to sell. As the feast turns to near painful comedy, a last, desperate act from Rosaleen - a woman who doesn't quite know how to love her own children - forces them to confront the weight of family ties and the road that brought them home.

In the aftermath of Ireland's financial collapse, dangerous tensions surface in an Irish town. As violence flares, the characters face a battle between public persona and inner desires. Through a chorus of unique voices, each struggling to tell their own kind of truth, a single authentic tale unfolds.

Lisette lives in East Berlin but brings her new-born baby to a hospital in West Berlin. Under doctor's orders, she goes home to rest, leaving the baby in the care of the hospital. But overnight the border between East and West closes, slicing the city - and the world - in two. With a city in chaos and armed guards ordered to shoot anyone who tries to cross, her situation is desperate.