Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Literary Fiction

Unlike the other residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is elegant, smart and in control. Only Jenny, her care assistant, knows that she harbours a painful secret, and only she can prevent Stella from carrying it to the grave. As the women talk, Jenny pieces together the answers to many questions that arise: Why has she kept possession of a house that her family don’t know about? What happened there that holds the key to a distant tragedy?

In a crumbling apartment block in the Angolan city of Luanda, families work, laugh, scheme, and get by. In the middle of it all is the melancholic Odonato, nostalgic for the country of his youth and searching for his lost son. As his hope drains away and as the city outside his doors changes beyond all recognition, Odonato’s flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless.

Dark allegory describes Marlow's journey up the Congo River and his meeting with and fascination by Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the unruly inhabitants of the region. A masterly blend of adventure, character development and psychological penetration. Considered by many to be Conrad's finest, most enigmatic story.

Set in a beautifully rendered 1990s Cape Town, Zoë Wicomb’s celebrated novel revolves around Marion Campbell, who runs a travel agency but hates traveling, and who, in post-apartheid society, must negotiate the complexities of a knotty relationship with Brenda, her first black employee. Caught in the narrow world of private interests and self-advancement, Marion eschews national politics until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission throws up information that brings into question not only her family’s past but her identity and her rightful place in contemporary South African society.

It is 1948 and a young American couple arrive in France for a holiday, full of anticipation and enthusiasm. But the countryside and people are war-battered, and their reception at the Chateau Beaumesnil is not all the open-hearted Americans could wish for.

In The Darcy Connection, Mr. Collins of Pride and Prejudice is now the Bishop of Ripon, living with his wife Charlotte and their two daughters, who have reached marriageable age. The elder, another Charlotte, is extraordinarily beautiful, and her parents hope her looks and connections will ensure a brilliant marriage. Her sister Eliza, while not as handsome, possesses a lively intelligence that, in Mr. Collins's opinion, is too like her godmother Mrs. Darcy.

Who needs love? Not Quinta, who's made a good life for herself, bringing up her difficult young daughter, absorbed in her work as a violin maker. And she certainly doesn't need anybody to tell her how to live her life: She has it all sorted out, down to the last dot and comma. If it isn't on a list, it doesn't exist. When her old friend Lydia appears, jilted and angry, Quinta's orderly life is shaken and her past begins to catch up with her.

Where would you rather be? Lonely and fog-bound in an ancient English castle... or sitting under the stars with friends on a magical Mediterranean island? Magdalena Mountjoy, furious with her impossible husband, the rakish Valdemar, doesn't hesitate when she has the chance to run away to Aeolus, a jewel of an island off the coast of Sicily. Yet every Eden has its serpent.

When police rescue five-year-old Jenna Thompson from the dark closet where she's been held captive for days, they tell her she's a lucky girl. Compared to the rest of her family, it's true. But even with their killer dead of an overdose, Jenna is still trying to find peace 25 years later.

Kate and Baba are in London, playing out the tragicomedy of their married lives to its surprisingly level-headed conclusion. Kate, feeling trapped in her grey stone house with her increasingly cold husband, tearfully looks for her dreams of romance elsewhere. And when Eugene takes terrible, implacable revenge, she naturally turns to her brazen friend Baba for help.

As Montrealer Catherine Day sets foot in a remote fishing village and starts asking around about her birth mother, the body of a woman dredges up in a fisherman's nets. Not just any woman, though: Marie Garant, an elusive, nomadic sailor and unbridled beauty who once tied many a man's heart in knots. Detective Sergeant Joaquin Morales, newly drafted to the area from the suburbs of Montreal, barely has time to unpack his suitcase before he's thrown into the deep end of the investigation.

It's every parrothead's dream: to leave behind the rat race of the workaday world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colors, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise. It's the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle age, runs away to a Caribbean island to reinvent himself as a hotel keeper. (Hilarity and disaster - of a sort peculiar to the tropics - ensue.)

When a man dies in a gas explosion, the police suspect arson, and the Murder Investigation Team is called in to investigate. But the case takes on a new and terrible twist when a local villain is viciously attacked. As the police enquiries lead from the expensive Harchester Hill estate to the local brothel, a witness dies in a hit-and-run. Was it coincidence - or cold-blooded murder? The Murder Investigation Team has problems of its own – and so does Geraldine Steel. A shocking revelation threatens her peace of mind as the investigation races towards its dramatic climax.

Moscow, 1993. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union have brought unimaginable change to Russia. With this change come new freedoms: freedom to travel abroad and to befriend Westerners, freedom to make money, and even the freedom for an underground gay scene to take root. Encouraged by the new climate of openness, twenty-one-year-old Kostya ventures out of the closet and resolves to pursue his dreams: to work in the theatre and to find love as his idol Tchaikovsky never could.

Aric, a half-elf with a rare natural ability with the psionic discipline known as "the Way", must find his place in a world ruled by the tyranny of evil sorcerer kings, and dominated by the savage wilds of the Athasian desert, a world presided over by the unrelenting crimson eye of Dark Sun. When Aric is brought into a quest to search for a priceless trove of weapons, he would rather keep his head down and live a simple life. But nothing is simple in the city of Nibenay with its reclusive ruler known as the Shadow King. And in a world where metal is the rarest of commodities, Aric’s "way" with metal is an even rarer talent.

Three time-traveling historians are visiting World War II England: Michael Davies, intent on observing heroism during the Miracle of Dunkirk; Merope Ward, studying children evacuated from London; and Polly Churchill, posing as a shopgirl in the middle of the Blitz. But when the three become unexpectedly trapped in 1940, they struggle not only to find their way home but to survive as Hitler's bombers attempt to pummel London into submission.

In a reimagined contemporary Edinburgh, where a tectonic fault has opened up to produce a new volcano in the Firth of Forth, and where tremors are an everyday occurrence, volcanologist Surtsey makes a shocking discovery. On a clandestine trip to new volcanic island The Inch, to meet Tom, her lover and her boss, she finds his lifeless body and makes the fatal decision to keep their affair, and her discovery, a secret. Desperate to know how he died, but also terrified she’ll be exposed, Surtsey’s life quickly spirals into a nightmare when someone makes contact - someone who claims to know what she’s done....

The powerful forces of science and family collide when geneticist Paige Robson finds her world in upheaval: Her eight-year-old son Miles is struggling to fit in at his new school and begins asking questions about his biological father that Paige can’t answer - until fate thrusts the anonymous donor she used into their lives.

The Manticore, the second book in The Deptford Trilogy after Fifth Business, follows David Staunton, a man pleased with his success but haunted by his relationship with his larger-than-life father. As he seeks help through therapy, he encounters a wonderful cast of characters who help connect him to his past and the death of his father.

Sitting in a New York park, an old man holds a book and tries to accept that his contribution to the future is over. Instead, he remembers a youthful yearning for open horizons, for Australia, a yearning he now knows inspired his life as a writer. Instinctively he picks up his pen and starts at the beginning.... At 21 years, Robert Crofts leaves his broken dreams in Far North Queensland, finally stopping in Melbourne almost destitute. It's there he begins to understand how books and writing might be the saving of him. They will be how he leaves his mark on the world. He also begins to understand how many obstacles there will be to thwart his ambition.