Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Family Life

Through every family run memories that bind it together - despite everything. The Tulls of Baltimore are no exception. Abandoned by her salesman husband, Pearl is left to bring up her three children alone - Cody, a flawed devil; Ezra, a flawed saint; and Jenny, errant and passionate. Now as Pearl lies dying, stiffly encased in her pride and solitude, the past is unlocked and with it, secrets. A classic novel from one of America's greatest living novelists, now available as an audiobook.

Piglet is judging the contents of your shopping trolley. She is listening to what you order for lunch and is observing whether the dessert you serve is homemade or snatched from a packet. There isn't another 31-year-old that takes food more seriously. And who could blame her, with a childhood nickname like that? In just over a fortnight, she is marrying Kit. Kit and his tasteful family present an opportunity for reinvention - when she had been growing up in Derby, this life, this man had been beyond her imagination.

Workaholic, career-obsessed Francesca is fiercely independent and successful in all areas of life except one: family. She struggles to make time for her relationship with her teenage daughter, Allegra, and the two have become practically strangers to each other. When Allegra hangs out with a new crowd and is arrested for drug possession, Francesca gives in to her mother's wish that they take one epic summer vacation to trace their family roots in Italy. What she never expected was to be faced with the choice of a lifetime....

Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected, carefully-guarded Stockton family, has never had to worry about money. Darley followed her heart, trading her job and her inheritance for motherhood, sacrificing more of herself than she ever intended. Sasha, Darley's new sister-in-law, has come from more humble origins, and her hesitancy about signing a pre-nup has everyone worried about her intentions. And Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can't (and really shouldn't) have, and must confront the kind of person she wants to be.

Siblings Greta and Valdin have, perhaps, too much in common. They're flatmates, beholden to the same near-unpronounceable surname, and both make questionable choices when it comes to love. Valdin is still in love with his ex-boyfriend Xabi, who left the country because he thought he was making Valdin sad. Greta is in love with fellow English tutor Holly, who only seems to be using her for admin support. But perhaps all is not lost. Valdin is coming to realize that he might not be so unlovable, and Greta, that she might be worth more than the papers she can mark.

Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband—and longtime, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage, and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a portrait, stunning in its subtlety, of a decades-long partnership.

When Kate was 22, she had an intense and passionate affair with a married man, Callum, which ended in heartbreak. Kate thought she'd never get over it. Seventeen years later, life has moved on - Kate, now a successful actress, is living in London, married to Matt and mother to little Tallulah. Meanwhile Callum and his wife, Belinda, are happy together, living in Edinburgh and watching their kids grow up. The past, it would seem, is well and truly behind them all....

The year of 1947 is almost upon them, and the community of Cliffehaven is still reeling from the tragic loss of Gracie, who left behind two young orphans. Polish refugee and nurse Danuta made Gracie a promise: to love and cherish her children as her own. But with her husband’s health failing, can Danuta’s promise be fulfilled?

Liz and Laurie are mother and daughter, but they couldn't be more different. Laurie is a free spirit whose creative career is about to reach new heights. Her mother Liz is a world-renowned doctor, and everything in her life has always been just so. But when Laurie gets an unexpected call, she decides to take her mother away on a trip to Paris and Norway. As they explore Europe together, Laurie finally starts opening up to her mother. Will unburdening themselves of the secrets that have kept them apart bring them closer together?

When the kids are grown and Mercy Garrett gradually moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice. Over at her studio, she wants space and silence. She won't allow any family clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond. Yet it is a clutter of untidy moments that forms the Garretts' family life over the decades, from giving a child a ride to a painstaking Easter lunch, a fateful train journey to an unexpected homecoming. And it all begins in 1959, with a family holiday to a cabin by a lake.

Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager, meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time in over fifty years at what he supposes to be his mother's funeral. Soon after, she persuades Henry to abandon Southwood, his dahlias and the Major next door to travel her way, Brighton, Paris, Istanbul, Paraguay. Through Aunt Augusta, a veteran of Europe's hotel bedrooms, Henry joins a shiftless, twilight society: mixing with hippies, war criminals, CIA men; smoking pot, breaking all the currency regulations and eventually coming alive after a dull suburban life.

The night Jack Smyth ran into flames in a desperate attempt to save his wife from their burning home, he was, tragically, too late - but hailed a hero. Until it emerged that Kate was dead long before the fire began. Suspicion has stalked him ever since. After all, there's no smoke without fire. A year on, he's signed a book deal. He wants to tell his side of the story, to prove his own innocence in print. He just needs someone to help him write it. Emily has never ghostwritten anything before, but she knows what it’s like to live with a guilty secret.

Ebby Freeman travels to France to take a three-month hiatus from her complicated home life, the last person she expects to find is her ex-fiancé Henry, with his new girlfriend in tow. Nearly twenty years earlier, the Freemans were the only African American family living in a wealthy coastal enclave in Connecticut when armed robbers invaded their family home and tragedy changed their lives forever. Then, just as Ebby thought she had a new chance at happiness, her storybook romance with Henry fell apart. Now, this unexpected encounter with Henry will force Ebby to reckon with her past.

At sixty-six, Paula Spencer – mother, grandmother, widow, addict, survivor – is finally living her life. A job at the dry cleaners she enjoys, a man – Joe – with whom she shares what she wants, friends who see her for who she is, and four grown children, now with families and petty dramas the likes of which Paula could only have hoped for. Despite its ghosts, Paula has started to push her past aside.

Eve is a successful novelist who wakes up one day in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there. Her husband, never far from her side, explains that she has had an operation to remove the large, malignant tumour growing in her brain. As Eve learns to walk, talk, and write again — and as she wrestles with her diagnosis, and how and when to explain it to her beloved children — she begins to recall what’s most important to her: long walks with her husband’s hand clasped firmly around her own, family game nights and always buying that dress when she sees it.

William Wooler is a family man, on the surface. But he's been having an affair, an affair that ended horribly this afternoon at a motel up the road. So when he returns to his house, devastated and angry, to find his difficult nine-year-old daughter Ella unexpectedly home from school, William loses his temper. Hours later, Ella's family declare her missing. Suddenly Stanhope doesn't feel so safe. And William isn't the only one on his street who's hiding a lie. As witnesses come forward with information that may or may not be true, Ella's neighbours become increasingly unhinged.

On the precipice of Y2K, unpaid intern Lily Chen is attempting to live the American dream in New York City. But her scientist parents imagined so much more for her when they fled Mao's cultural revolution, hoping for a better life. Despite the glamour of her media job, Lily can barely make rent - until she falls into the arms of Matthew. This young financier can give her a fairy tale life of luxury, and for the first time her dreams appear within reach.

Fanny is married to absent-minded Oxford don Alfred and content with her role as a plain, tweedy housewife. But overnight her life changes when Alfred is appointed English ambassador to Paris. In the blink of an eye, Fanny's mixing with royalty, Rothschilds and Dior-clad wives, throwing cocktail parties and having every indiscreet remark printed in tomorrow's papers.

In 1973, Moll Gladney goes missing from the Tipperary hillside where she was born. Slowly, her parents - Paddy and Kit - begin to accept that she’s gone forever. But she returns, changed, and with a few surprises for her family and neighbours. Nothing is ever the same again for the Gladneys, who learn that fate cares little for duty, that life rarely conforms to expectation, that God can’t be relied upon to heed any prayer. A story of exile and return, of loss and discovery, of retreat from grief and the saving power of love.

While the Celtic Tiger rages, and greed becomes the norm, Johnsey Cunliffe desperately tries to hold on to the familiar, even as he loses those who all his life have protected him from a harsh world. Village bullies and scheming land-grabbers stand in his way, no matter where he turns. Set over the course of one year of Johnsey’s life, The Thing About December breathes with his grief, bewilderment, humour and agonising self-doubt.