Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Small Town & Rural

Gerrardsville, Colorado. One tragic event. Two witnesses. Two conflicting accounts. One witness sees a woman throw herself in front of a bus—clearly suicide. The other witness is Jack Reacher. And he sees what really happened—a man in grey hoodie and jeans, swift and silent as a shadow, pushed the victim to her death, before grabbing her bag and sauntering away. Reacher follows the killer on foot, not knowing that this was no random act of violence. It is part of something much bigger.

A 30-something painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist. When he discovers a strange painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious 13-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist’s home and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors.

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Brimming with empathy and pathos, TELL ME EVERYTHING is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers.

I've been running from the past for most of my life, hiding in a small town and hoping no one discovers who I truly am. Which was working just fine until my brother moved his best friend onto our property. Now, I'm stuck trying to avoid the brooding billionaire's probing questions and piercing stares. And it doesn't help that I almost killed him the first time we met. Oops. But I can’t ignore him forever. And when all my lies come crashing down, it's Linc who steps in to shield me.

A picture-perfect village. A harrowing crime scene. A web of secrets. A victim who knew all of them. Introducing Detective Nicola Bridge, in the captivating debut novel from one of Britain’s most acclaimed storytellers.

Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus. She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand both her father's attitude toward society and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.

On the other side of town are five brothers. . . Macon is the oldest. I've never seen him smile. Army is a single dad with beautiful green eyes. Iron will be in prison soon. Dallas is the one I hate. Trace used to be mine. I need to go home. Away from the swamps and these men. I’ll leave tomorrow. I'll crash on the couch tonight. Everyone is asleep. Except for one. He sees me crying. I let him wrap his arms around my body and hold me.

Lucy is uprooted from her life in New York City and reluctantly goes into lockdown with her ex-husband, William, in a house on the coast of Maine. Strout's new novel is a miraculous work of fiction. A brilliantly sharp evocation of the period we have just lived through, it is a novel that both resonates deeply and consoles us, too.

In the aftermath of Ireland's financial collapse, dangerous tensions surface in an Irish town. As violence flares, the characters face a battle between public persona and inner desires. Through a chorus of unique voices, each struggling to tell their own kind of truth, a single authentic tale unfolds.

One summer morning, a flight takes off from New York to Los Angeles. There are 216 passengers aboard: among them a young woman taking a pregnancy test in the airplane toilet; a Wall Street millionaire flirting with the air hostess; an injured soldier returning from Afghanistan; and two beleaguered parents moving across the country with their adolescent sons, bickering over who gets the window seat. When the plane suddenly crashes in a field in Colorado, the younger of these boys, 12-year-old Edward Adler, is the sole survivor.

Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.

As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo's fraternal enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night he finds Doll - Cillian's bruised, sullen, teenage brother - in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins, goaded by his dead mother's dog and struck by spinning lights, Dev is unwillingly drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy.

The first thing Vanessa Carvin does when she arrives on the island is change her name. To the locals, she is Willow Hale, a solitary outsider escaping Dublin to live a hermetic existence in a small cottage, not a notorious woman on the run from her past. But scandals follow like hunting dogs. And she has some questions of her own to answer. If her ex-husband is really the monster everyone says he is, then how complicit was she in his crimes? Escaping her old life might seem like a good idea but the choices she has made throughout her marriage have consequences.

Beartown is a small town in a large Swedish forest. For most of the year it is under a thick blanket of snow, experiencing the kind of cold and dark that brings people closer together - or pulls them apart. Its isolation means that Beartown has been slowly shrinking with each passing year. But now the town is on the verge of an astonishing revival. A bright new future is just around the corner. Until the day it is all put in jeopardy by a single, brutal act. It divides the town into those who think it should be hushed up and forgotten, and those who'll risk the future to see justice done.

None of us ever agreed on the exact beginning. Was it when we started drawing the chalk figures, or when they started to appear on their own? Was it the terrible accident? Or when they found the first body?

Hana and her little sister Emi are part of an island community of haenyeo, women who make their living from diving deep into the sea off the southernmost tip of Korea. One day Hana sees a Japanese soldier heading for where Emi is guarding the day's catch on the beach. Her mother has told her again and again never to be caught alone with one. Terrified for her sister, Hana swims as hard as she can for the shore. So begins the story of two sisters suddenly and violently separated by war.

Meet Lana, Judith and Catrin. Best friends since primary school when they swore an oath on a Curly Wurly wrapper that they would always be there for each other, come what may. After the trip of a lifetime, the three girls are closer than ever. But an unexpected turn of events shakes the foundation of their friendship to its core, leaving their future in doubt - there’s simply too much to forgive, let alone forget. An innocent childhood promise they once made now seems impossible to keep.

Janet Pimm is used to being invisible. 70 something, with her beloved allotment for company, she simply doesn't need anyone else. But when the local council threaten to close the allotments, Janet will do anything she can to try to save them - even enlisting the help of her irritatingly upbeat and interfering neighbour, Bev. As the two women set off on a journey together, Janet begins to realise that perhaps she isn't so happy to blend into the background after all. And that maybe there's more to Bev than she first thought.

Jamie O'Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe. At age 13 there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind these things are intimately linked. And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him.

Harriet and Wyn are the perfect couple—they go together like bread and butter, gin and tonic. Except, now they don't. They broke up six months ago. And they still haven't told anyone. Which is how they end up sharing a bedroom at the cottage that has been their yearly getaway with their best friends for the past decade. Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth. The cottage is for sale so this is the last time they'll all be together here and they can't bear to break their friends' hearts. So, they'll fake it for one more week.