Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Political

In 1989, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Rd crossing. He is fine; he gets up and goes to see his girlfriend, Jennifer. They have sex and then break up. He leaves for the GDR, where he will have more sex, bury his dead father in a matchbox, and get on the wrong side of the Stasi. In 2016, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Rd crossing. He is not fine at all; he is rushed to hospital and spends the following days in and out of consciousness. Jennifer is sitting by his bedside. His very-much-not-dead father is sitting by his bedside. Someone important is missing.

New Year’s Eve, 1975. Two hunted men leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the mythical, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. But, twenty years later, they are still on the run. The Savage Detectives is their remarkable journey through our darkening universe.

In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it's the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. Mary will go on to live through the Coronation and the World Cup final, royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She'll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

1431 is a dangerous time for a woman to be defiant. England has been fighting France for 100 years. At home, power-hungry men within a corrupt government manipulate a weak king - and name Cecily's husband, York's loyal duke, an enemy. As the king's grasp on sanity weakens, plots to destroy York take root. It will take all of Cecily's courage and cunning to save her family. But when the will to survive becomes ambition for a crown, will she risk treason to secure it?

When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless élite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another.

Paris, 2018. Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer, discovers a legendary book titled The Maze of Inhumanity. It has an immediate hold over him. No one knows what happened to the author, T.C. Elimane, who was accused of plagiarism, his reputation destroyed by the critics. Obsessed with discovering the truth about Elimane's disappearance, Faye weaves past and present, countries and continents, following the author's labyrinthine trail from Senegal to Argentina and France and confronting the great tragedies of history.

It is the 1980s, and the Winshaw family are getting richer and crueller by the year: newspaper-columnist Hilary gets thousands for telling it like it isn't; Henry's turning hospitals into car parks; Roddy's selling art in return for sex; down on the farm Dorothy's squeezing every last pound from her livestock; and Thomas is making a killing on the stock exchange. But once their hapless biographer, Michael Owen, starts investigating the family's trail of greed, corruption and immoral doings, the time is growing ripe for the Winshaws to receive their comeuppance....

Brendan has always lived a careful, constrained life. A salesman who never liked the work, he's a man who has stayed in his marriage and his faith because it was what was expected of him. But now, having lost his job after corporate downsizing and on the cusp of 60, he finds himself scrambling to somehow stay afloat in the only Los Angeles work on offer to a man his age - driving for Uber.

Intimidated by her father, the rector of Knype Hill, Dorothy performs her submissive roles of dutiful daughter and bullied housekeeper. Her thoughts are taken up with the costumes she is making for the church school play, by the hopelessness of preaching to the poor and by debts she cannot pay in 1930s Depression England. Suddenly her routine shatters and Dorothy finds herself down and out in London. She is wearing silk stockings, has money in her pocket and cannot remember her name.

Bruce Chatwin's best-selling novel traces the fortunes of the enigmatic and unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz. Despite the restrictions of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Utz asserts his individuality through his devotion to his precious collection of Meissen porcelain. Although Utz is permitted to leave the country each year, and considers defecting each time, he is not allowed to take his porcelain with him and so he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner both of the Communist state and of his collection.

A long time ago, in a bountiful land not so far away, the animal denizens lived quite happily. Then the colonisers arrived. After nearly a hundred years, a bloody War of Liberation brought new hope for the animals—along with a new leader. A charismatic horse who commanded the sun and ruled and ruled and kept on ruling. For 40 years he ruled, with the help of his elite band of Chosen Ones, a scandalously violent pack of Defenders and, as he aged, his beloved and ambitious young donkey wife, Marvellous.

Leo Kall is a zealous, middle-ranking scientist in the totalitarian World State who has just made a thrilling discovery: a new drug, Kallocain, that will force anyone who takes it to tell the truth. At last, criminality will be dragged out into the open and private thought can be outlawed. But can the World State be trusted with Kallocain? For that matter - can Kall himself be trusted? Written as the terrible events of the Second World War were unfolding, Karin Boye's classic dystopian novel speaks more clearly than ever of the dangers of acquiescence and the power of resistance.

It is the summer of 1938 and Phyllis Forrester has returned to England after years abroad. Moving into her sister's grand country house, she soon finds herself entangled in a new world of idealistic beliefs and seemingly innocent friendships. Fevered talk of another war infiltrates their small, privileged circle, giving way to a thrilling solution: a great and charismatic leader, who will restore England to its former glory. At a party hosted by her new friends, Phyllis lets down her guard for a single moment, with devastating consequences.

Tudor England. The word treason is on everyone's lips. Arbella Stuart, niece to Mary, Queen of Scots, and presumed successor to Elizabeth I, has spent her youth behind the towering windows of Hardwick Hall. As presumed successor to the throne, her isolation should mean protection - but those close to the crown are never safe. Aemilia Lanyer, writer and poet, enjoys an independence denied to Arbella. Their paths should never cross. But when Arbella enlists Aemilia's help in a bid for freedom, she risks more than her own future.

Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain - and it is his mission to carry out the will of the people. Nothing must get in his way: not the opposition, nor the dissenters within his own party. Not even the rules of parliamentary democracy. With trademark intelligence, insight and scabrous humour, Ian McEwan pays tribute to Franz Kafka’s most famous work to engage with a world turned on its head.

George Pantis is in a pickle. After walking out on his wife Rosie on Referendum night 2016 to shack up with hairdresser 'Brexit Brenda' next door, he thinks he's got it made - especially when he wins millions on a Kosovan lottery he only vaguely remembers entering. Unfortunately, he's forgotten his password and can't get at his money. Which is a problem because he suddenly has to contend with lots of forceful new friends desperate to know his mother's maiden name.

At the turn of the twentieth century Pirbhai, a teenage boy, is taken from his village in India and travels perilously across the sea to labour on the East African railroad for the British. There, he is given a ruthless order. Following it will ensure his survival. But it will also torment him and reverberate across his family's future for decades to come. During the waning days of British colonial rule, and as Uganda moves towards independence and military dictatorship, Pirbhai's children and grandchildren come of age in a divided nation.

In this surreal work by the author of The Master and Margarita, wealthy Moscow surgeon Filip Preobrazhensky implants the pituitary gland and testicles of a drunken petty criminal into the body of a stray dog named Sharik. As the dog slowly transforms into a man, and the man into a slovenly, lecherous government official, the doctor's life descends into chaos. A scathing indictment of the New Soviet Man, A Dog's Heart was immediately banned by the Soviet government when it was first published in 1925.

From her pygmy goat farm in Vermont, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathing memoir about her own greed and privilege? But how can she just sit around writing a book when the world is hanging on a thread? In this hilariously skewering comic novel, Alison is existentially pained by a climate-challenged world and a country on the brink of civil war.

My name is Sara Eden. My name is Sara Eden. My name is Sara Eden. My name is Sara Eden. This is all Sara Eden knows about herself. She was found at the age of 10, abandoned in a vat of water - a homemade sensory-deprivation chamber. Someone had placed her there - trapped for days in the dark, with only a cassette player taped to her head repeating again and again, 'My name is Sara Eden'. There were a handful clues: a battered cassette player, a cheap necklace, a few scraps of paper. And a Polaroid of a stranger with a handwritten note: 'Don't trust this man'.