Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Literary Fiction

Nutshell is a classic story of murder and deceit, told by a narrator with a perspective and voice unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things?

Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. She’s living her best life! Or is she? The debris of years of dysphoria and failed relationships rattle around in her head. When she tumbles down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party and wakes up in hospital alone, she decides to make some changes. First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity. Enter Vincent, corporate lawyer and hobby baker. His trad friendship group may as well speak a different language to Max, and his Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman.

A damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the quiet village church of Oxgodby where he is to spend the summer uncovering a huge medieval wall-painting. Immersed in the peace and beauty of the countryside and the unchanging rhythms of village life he experiences a sense of renewal and belief in the future. Now an old man, Birkin looks back on the idyllic summer of 1920, remembering a vanished place of blissful calm, untouched by change, a precious moment he has carried with him through the disappointments of the years.

Clara's sister is missing. Angry, rebellious Rose had a row with their mother, stormed out of the house and simply disappeared. Eight-year-old Clara, isolated by her distraught parents' efforts to protect her from the truth, is grief-stricken and bewildered. Liam Kane, newly divorced, newly unemployed, newly arrived in this small northern town, moves into the house next door, a house left to him by an old woman he can barely remember and within hours gets a visit from the police. It seems he's suspected of a crime.

Identical twins, Georgia and Bessi Hunter, live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue. It is a place of beanbags, nectarines and secrets, and visitors must always knock before entering. Down below there is not such harmony. Their Nigerian mother puts cayenne pepper on her Yorkshire pudding and has mysterious ways of dealing with homesickness; their father angrily roams the streets of London, prey to the demons of his Derbyshire upbringing. Forced to create their own identities, the Hunter children build a separate universe.

When powerful real estate tycoon Nero Golden moves to the States under mysterious circumstances, he and his three adult children assume new identities, taking Roman names, and move into a grand mansion in downtown Manhattan. Invoking literature, pop culture, and the cinema, Salman Rushdie spins the story of the American zeitgeist over the last eight years, hitting every beat. In a new world order of alternative truths, Rushdie has written the ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror and lies.

A leak is traced to a small sub-section of the secret service, sparking off the inevitable security checks, tensions and suspicions. The sort of atmosphere, perhaps, where mistakes could be made? For Maurice Castle, it is the end of the line anyway, and time for him to retire to live peacefully with his wife and child. But no-one escapes so easily from the lonely, isolated, neurotic world of the SIS.

It is summer, and Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him with a fragile hold on reality and a persistent hunger to connect with the mother who abandoned him as a child. His therapist, Martin, is also facing challenges, including his adopted daughter Olivia’s tenuous relationship with her biological mother – a predicament that makes Sebastian’s struggle feel uncannily close to her own.

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter - and he always works alone. But when he is engaged to find a child who disappeared three years ago, he must break his own rules, joining a group of eight very different mercenaries working together to find the boy. Following the lost boy's scent from one ancient city to another, into dense forests and across deep rivers, Tracker starts to wonder: who is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And, most important of all, who is telling the truth and who is lying?

'He left you some money.' Mickey felt her mouth drop open. The first half of that sentence had rung clear and true. The second half had not. Her father was one to take, not give. After he left them for his new family, Mickey resolved never to think of her father again. She's fine without him; yes, she drinks, but only sometimes and, really, she can’t not. But with only $181 to her name, she’s not above attending some mandated therapy to access her inheritance. She’ll kneel at the Kleenex alter and soon be bingei

"You don't live the life I have without making some enemies." Having accepted a strange but intriguing invitation to a French island, psychiatrist Robert Hendricks meets the man who has commissioned him to write a biography. But his subject seems more interested in finding out about Robert's past than he does in revealing his own.

Jungmin is down on her luck. She's worked tirelessly as a screenwriter her whole life, and has finally burnt out. But after months of isolation, she realises it's time to make a change, and ventures out into the streets near Seoul. When she stumbles upon a pottery workshop, a new world opens up to her. Leaning into the joys of her craft, Jungmin’s heart is slowly warmed by the kiln’s intense heat. Everyone at the workshop has their own story to tell, and as summer ebbs to autumn, autumn to winter, winter to spring, wounds begin to heal.

Young D'Artagnan arrives in Paris to join the king's elite guards but almost immediately finds he is duelling with some of the very men he has come to swear allegiance to - Porthos, Athos and Aramis: inseparable friends, the Three Musketeers. Soon, part of their close band, D'Artagnan's loyalty to his new allies puts him in the deadly path of Cardinal Richlieu's machinations. And when the young hero falls in love with the beautiful but inaccessible Constance, he finds himself in a world of murder, conspiracy and lies, with only the Musketeers to depend on.

Following its unforgettable characters through almost two centuries of history, from the horrors of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1865 to the aftermath of a mass shooting in the early 21st century, Wandering Stars is an indelible novel of America's war on its own people. It is also the tender, shattering story of many generations of a Native American family, struggling to find ways through displacement, addiction and pain, towards home and hope.

Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh takes you by the hand and drags you through Doncaster’s schoolyards, alleyways and nightclubs, bringing back the intimate treachery of adolescence and how we betray ourselves when we don’t trust our friends. Like The Glorious Heresies and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked and forgotten place into the very centre of the world.

Johnny Grant faces stark life decisions. Seeking answers, he looks back to his relationship with Jerry Field. When they met, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They fell in love and made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s flat: 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today—but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew. As Johnny’s mind travels between then and now, he begins to remember stories of Jerry’s youth: of experiments in living; of radical philosophies; of the many possibilities of queer love, sex and friendship before the AIDS crisis devastated the queer community.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Love Is Blind by William Boyd. Love Is Blind is William Boyd's sweeping, heart-stopping new novel. Set at the end of the 19th century, it follows the fortunes of Brodie Moncur, a young Scottish musician, about to embark on the story of his life. When Brodie is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist irrevocably changes his future - and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum.

A brother chosen. A brother left behind. And a family where you'd least expect to find one. Leon is nine, and has a perfect baby brother called Jake. They have gone to live with Maureen, who has fuzzy red hair like a halo, and a belly like Father Christmas. But the adults are speaking in low voices, and wearing pretend faces. They are threatening to give Jake to strangers.

A rampaging force of nature is wreaking havoc on the streets of Edinburgh, but has top shagger, drug dealer, gonzo-porn star and taxi driver, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson finally met his match in Hurricane ‘Bawbag’?Can Terry discover the fate of the missing beauty, Jinty Magdalen, and keep her idiot-savant lover, the man-child Wee Jonty, out of prison? Will he find out the real motives of unscrupulous American businessman and reality-TV star Ronald Checker?

Here we are, just living in the first draft of creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart. In this first draft, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira's chest like a portal - to what, she doesn't know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and she enters that strange and dizzying dimension that true loss opens up.