Showing results by publisher "Penguin Random House Australia Audio" in Literary Fiction

Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place - middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They're exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they've seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they're not alone.

Deep in the heart of Australia's high country, along an ancient, hidden track, lives Molly Johnson and her four surviving children, another on the way. Husband Joe is away months at a time droving livestock up north, leaving his family in the bush to fend for itself. Molly's children are her world, and life is hard and precarious with only their dog, Alligator, and a shotgun for protection - but it can be harder when Joe's around.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world's largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts...

Knowing that he will soon die, Albert 'Poppy' Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people and everything that was ever remembered. He finds the words on the wind. August Gondiwindi has been living on the other side of the world for 10 years when she learns of her grandfather's death.

Surging out of the sea, the Bass Rock has for centuries watched over the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries the fates of three women are linked: to this place, to each other. In the early 1700s, Sarah, accused of being a witch, flees for her life. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Ruth navigates a new house, a new husband and the strange waters of the local community. Six decades later, the house stands empty.

Callie Madden, a grieving widow and single mother of three, is stunned to learn she's inherited one half of Hawkridge, a beautiful acreage in the Misty Mountains of Far North Queensland. A potential family scandal surrounds the reasons for this bequest and there are additional complications. Callie is to share the inheritance with Ben Galbraith, a Scotsman, who'd helped Hawkridge's owner in his final years. Also, the property can't be sold for twelve months.

At 38 and a quarter years old, Paris native Camille has everything she needs to be happy: a good job, a loving husband, a wonderful son. Why then does she feel as if happiness has slipped through her fingers? All she wants is to find the path to joy and fulfilment.

How far you would you go for love? Franny Stone is determined to go to the end of the earth, following the last of the Arctic terns on what may be their final migration to Antarctica. As animal populations plummet and commercial fishing faces prohibition, Franny talks her way onto one of the few remaining boats heading south. But as she and the eccentric crew travel further from shore and safety, the dark secrets of Franny's life begin to unspool.

Watching the world from her bedroom window, she exists only in second-hand romance novels and falls for any fast-food employee who happens to spare her a glance. Everything changes with the return of Vince, a boy who became a legend after he was hauled away in handcuffs at 14. Sonny and Vince used to be childhood friends. But with all that happened in-between, childhood seems so long ago. It will take two years of juvie, an inebriated grandmother and a porn stash for them to meet again.

In the summer of 1976 it's picking season on an Australian stone-fruit orchard run by Celia, a hardworking woman in her early 40s. Years ago, when her husband was killed as a bystander in an armed robbery, Celia left the city and brought her newborn daughter, Zoe, to this farm for a secure life. Now 16, Zoe is a passionate, intelligent girl, chafing against her mother's protectiveness, yearning to find intensity and a bit of danger.

John Mitchel, Irishman, lawyer, journalist, activist and politician, is a complex character. Charged with treason in Ireland and tried by an English judge, he was snuck off mainland Ireland on the day he was charged to avoid a breakout and rebellion. He was transported initially to Bermuda, then to South Africa and then to Van Diemen's Land where as an Irishman he was supported by many and given a ticket of leave. He soon became a farmer and activist and was eventually secreted out of Australia to the USA, where it was felt he could be more active for the Irish cause.

What would you do if you thought each day on earth might just be your last? Lucky by name. Not so lucky by nature. Adopted twins Nora and Stevie Lucky have always been close, despite being total opposites. When their mother dies, Nora convinces Stevie to search for their biological parents, only to come face-to-face with a life-changing revelation that sends them spiralling in opposite directions. With their careers, love lives and even their sisterly bond at risk, they're going to need more than luck to survive.

On the cusp of turning thirty, Prue feels like everyone else is living their best life. Her friends are boasting about everything from their wellness achievements and exciting travel plans to their romantic relationships and newborn babies. Prue on the other hand is struggling to recover from a failed marriage engagement and an abandoned university degree, and her job at Love on the Line counselling lonely people only seems to highlight how truly alone she really feels herself.

Frances is an artist in her forties living a quiet life in a remote mountain town in NSW, far away from the glittering lights and famous personalities of the Sydney art world she once knew. When an invitation arrives from a former lover to attend his exhibition at a state gallery, Frances is plunged back into the past, where a single irrevocable act changed the course of her story. Told across two time periods, Frances's story wrestles with themes of power and privilege, womanhood and motherhood, artistic doubt, the male gaze upon the female body, and the commodification of art.

After her partner and father die in quick succession, BB moves to a glamorous, condemned beachside apartment at the edge of a glittering city so memory-saturated it might be a mirage. Her plan? To rediscover the person she was before finding, and losing, the love of her life. To heal she'll party like it's 1999, walk her motley dog, Baby, and surrender to the simple joys of life alone by the sea.

On a remote property in western NSW, eight-year-old Parker fears that something is wrong with his brain. His desperate attempts to control this internal chaos spark a series of events that gallop from his control in deadly and devastating ways. Years later, Parker, now a father himself, returns to the bushland he grew up in for a camping trip with old friends. When this reunion descends into chaos amid revelations of unresolved fear, guilt and violence, Parker must finally address the consequences of his childhood actions.

Audrey Mendes is a clever lawyer but has never made partner. Her weeks are filled with long hours in the office, visits to her ageing parents, trivia nights at the local and evenings at home with her pet rabbit, Joni. When Audrey tries to buy wine at the pub she is ignored and walks out without paying. One thing leads to another, and soon she starts rebelling in small and creative ways against a world in which she is unseen - until a painful reminder from her childhood pushes her into a reckoning.

Girl is spending the summer at an artist's residency in Scotland. Far from her home in Australia and her tight-knit Malaysian family, she is meant to be writing a postcolonial novel and working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. But she can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of her parents and grandmother who raised her. How can she reconcile their dreams for her with her lived reality?

Melbourne 1993: Ezra and Yonatan are best friends whose lives are forever changed when their school, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Yahel Academy, is rocked by a scandal and they are thrown onto two divergent paths. Twenty years later, the lives of the two men are very different: Ezra identifies as secular and atheist, while Yonatan has been ordained as a rabbi and even teaches at the academy. By chance they are reunited, and the events of their past and present collide with devastating consequences.

Alaska 2018 and Mike is a long way from home, striking out into real estate. London 1978 and Simon is an Australian fish out of water navigating adolescence during the Winter of Discontent and drawn to an eccentric impresario next door. Washington, DC 1928 and a retired US senator is interviewed about his time in Russia in 1916 and his mission to save a young heir to an empire. Vienna 1809 and an Irish teenager on the run from the law takes refuge among composers as Napoleon besieges and shells the city. Hong Kong 2019 and estranged brothers Mike and Simon reunite in midlife.