Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios for Bloomsbury" in Literary Fiction

It’s been years since Skye Elliot has seen her biological father. He left when she was 12, breaking her heart, and her life hasn’t exactly been going uphill since. A drug user and alcoholic, Skye is given a choice after a car accident: jail or rehab. It takes eight months to get clean, but the day Skye is released, she has one plan: to be a good mother to her four-year-old daughter, Gracie. But first she has to find her.When no one shows up to pick up Skye from the centre she gets a surprise visitor: her father.

The Confessions of Frances Godwin is the fictional memoir of a retired high school Latin teacher looking back on a life of trying to do her best amidst transgressions - starting with her affair with Paul, whom she later marries. Now that Paul is dead and she’s retired, Frances Godwin thinks her story is over - but of course the rest of her life is full of surprises, including the truly shocking turn of events that occurs when she takes matters into her own hands after her daughter Stella’s husband grows increasingly abusive.

Adaptation is everything. Inge Lohmark is well aware of that; after all, she's been teaching biology for more than 30 years. But nothing will change the fact that her school is going to be closed in four years: in this dwindling town in the eastern German countryside, there are fewer and fewer children. Inge's husband, who was a cattle inseminator before the reunification, is now breeding ostriches. Their daughter, Claudia, emigrated to the U.S. years ago and has no intention of having children. Everyone is resisting the course of nature that Inge teaches every day in class.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, John Morehead Tripoli is marooned on the unspoiled Caribbean island of St. Renard. There, he lives for an idyllic year in a community of Carawak Indians. Three hundred years later, the Carawak are gone, St. Renard is carpeted with banana plantations and sugarcane fields, and Tripoli himself is remembered only through his grandson, founder of New Hampshire’s Tripoli College, which maintains a branch campus on the island.

The Korticos are from a well-endowed pygmy tribe in West Africa; the Mandingas are descended from a tribe of tall Ghanaians. Both families have been brought to Cuba as slaves. Oscar Kortico and Jose Mandinga, inseparable friends, marry a pair of sisters, and in the tiny hamlet of Pig's Foot (Pata de Puerco), five generations of these families will live out their colorful lives through the tumultuous sweep of Cuban history.

Duncan's entire world is the orphanage where he lives, a solitary outpost on the open plains of northern Minnesota. Aged 10 in 1980, he has no memories of his life before now, but he has stories that he recites like prayers: the story of how his mother brought him here during the worst blizzard of the century; the story of how God spoke to him at his birth and gave him a special purpose. Duncan is sure that his mother is dead until the day she turns up to claim him.

Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen.

For years, Elza has gotten by. A divorcee out of culinary school, she started her own little restaurant in the mid-size Hungarian city of Delibab, and she's grown a decent business, cooking quality versions of Hungarian classics and serving them with a smile. But lately her smile has gotten tired. Her loveless affair with her sous-chef has become an irritation. She's getting sick of the same old dishes and the same old customers. And in these nascent years of capitalism, it will take some competition to make her see that her restaurant, and her happiness, are worth fighting for.

Set in the working-class district of Benfica in Lisbon, The Piano Cemetery tells the story of a family, and especially of the hopes and fears of the fathers who pass the baton of the generations on to their sons. The Lazaro family are cabinet-makers who would rather be piano-makers.

A man will endlessly torture his muscles until they shriek and complain. But he will not give in. He will take a hammer to his ceiling until the neighbors begin to watch from the window and the journalists knock at the door. He will continue to train and hack away at the house until it is finished and the trapeze is in place. Although his parents thought he was nice and kindhearted and teachers saw him as a good boy, secretly he hated his drab, ordered world and longed for more.

Keith Corcoran has spent his entire life preparing to be an astronaut. At the moment of his greatness, finally aboard the International Space Station, hundreds of miles above the Earth’s swirling blue surface, he receives word that his 16-year-old daughter has died in a car accident, and that his wife has left him. Returning to Earth, and to his now empty suburban home, he is alone with the ghosts, the memories, and feelings he can barely acknowledge, let alone process.

Every day Mathilde takes the Metro, then the commuter train, to the office of a large multi-national where she works in the marketing department. Every day, the same routine, the same trains. But something happened a while ago - she dared to voice a different opinion from her moody boss, Jacques. Bit by bit she finds herself frozen out of everything, with no work to do.

It is 1958, and as Laika, the Sputnik dog, is launched into space, Golly Murray, the Cullymore barber's wife, finds herself oddly obsessing about the canine cosmonaut. Meanwhile, Fonsey "Teddy" O'Neill is returning, like the prodigal son, from overseas, with Brylcreem in his hair and a Cuban-heeled swagger to his step, having experienced his coming-of-age in Skegness, England. Father Augustus Hand is working on a bold new theatrical production for Easter, which he, for one, knows will put Cullymore on the map.

In the winter of 1976, Simon Cardoso is arrested by the military and is never seen again. Thirty years later, Emilia Dupuy, his wife, is stunned to find him in New Jersey. Her world, which had crumbled after losing him, is alight with life again. There is a caveat, however: for Simn Cardoso time stopped when he disappeared. Using this enigma as the foundation, Tomas Eloy Martinez' story of the anguish of a lost and recovered love is masterfully tied to the sinister sense of unreality created by a regime.

The seductive story of a dangerous love triangle, inspired by the infamous Nabokov marriage, with a spellbinding psychological thriller at its core. In the 1920s, Zoya Andropova, a young refugee from the Soviet Union, finds herself in the alien landscape of an elite all-girls New Jersey boarding school. Having lost her family, her home, and her sense of purpose, Zoya struggles to belong, a task made more difficult by the malice her peers heap on scholarship students and her new country's paranoia about Russian spies.

John Lock has come to India to meet his destiny: a destiny dressed in a white karate suit and sporting an impressive moustache. He has fled the quiet desperation of his life in England: decades wasted in a meaningless job, a marriage foundering in the wake of loss, and a terrible secret he cannot bear to share with his wife. He has come to offer his help to a man who has learned to conquer pain, a world record breaker who specializes in feats of extreme endurance and ill-advised masochism.

It is 1967, and as America's allies hesitate over whether to send more troops to Vietnam, and the strains of "All You Need is Love" echo from Abbey Road, students take to the streets of Wellington, New Zealand, to protest the war. Among them are Race, Candy, Chadwick, and FitzGerald, and their elusive, electrifying friend Morgan Tawhai. They are young and hopeful, and the world is all before them. Forty years later, in Washington, DC, Race's son Toby is navigating his own path across a landscape still trembling with the reverberations of 9/11.

When recently orphaned Barnaby Gaunt is sent to stay with his uncle on a beautiful remote island off the coast of Canada, he is all set to have the perfect summer holiday. Except there is one small problem: His uncle is trying to kill him. Heir to a ten-million-dollar fortune, Barnaby tries to tell everyone and anyone that his uncle is after his inheritance, but no one will believe him. That is, until he tells the only other child on the island, Chrissie, who concludes that there is only one way for Barnaby to stop his demonic uncle: He will just have to kill him first.