Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Urban

Helen Clapp is a physics professor. She doesn't believe in pseudoscience or time travel and especially not in ghosts. So when she gets a missed call from Charlie, her closest friend from university with whom she hasn't spoken in over a year, Helen thinks there must be some mistake. Because Charlie died two days ago. Then when her young son, Jack, claims to have seen Charlie in their house just the other day, Helen begins to have doubts.

Seven years ago, Zella Grisham came home to find her man, Harry Tangelo, in bed with her friend. The weekend before, $6.8 million had been stolen from Rutgers Assurance Corp., whose offices are across the street from where Zella worked. Zella didn't remember shooting Harry, but she didn't deny it either. The district attorney was inclined to call it temporary insanity - until the police found $80,000 from the Rutgers heist hidden in her storage space. For reasons of his own, Leonid McGill is convinced of Zella's innocence. But as he begins his investigation, his life begins to unravel.

‘Down among the women. What a place to be!’ So says Wanda, a former radical who left her husband and raised her daughter Scarlet to be as liberated as she. But twenty-year-old Scarlet, with an abortion already behind her, is about to discover real liberation – as a single mother in Fifties’ London. Yet Scarlet’s not alone. Meet her friends: Sylvia, the born victim; respectable Jocelyn, willingly trapped in a dull, bourgeois marriage; Audrey, bristling to break free of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant – and very doomed.

He watches you constantly. He sees everything. As a CCTV operator, he can travel at speed through the streets of Aberdeen and keep people safe, all from the comfort of his chair. He knows your secrets. You are one of the people he likes to follow. He keeps an eye on you, notices every detail of your body language, even in your most intimate moments, when you think no one is watching. But now he wants more. He knows your routine like the back of his hand, but that’s not enough. Now he wants something more fulfilling. And when you know as much as he does, it’s easy to take advantage…

Let’s be real. House hunting is a special kind of hell. After a year and a half, and more failed bids than she cares to count, Margo is officially losing it. Then, a tip-off: a perfect house, off-market, that Margo just knows will save her and Ian’s marriage, and get her life, career and plan to have a baby back on track. A little stalking? Harmless! A bit of trespassing? Necessary! But when Margo’s scheming hits a snag, she is pushed to her breaking point. As her methods get increasingly unhinged, it’s clear that nothing is off limits. It’s not her fault she’s just doing what it takes.

York, 1988. Dr Tom Frith is beginning his first term as a tutor at the University of Eboracum. After teaching primary school children for several years, he's sure shaping the minds of young adults will be a welcome change. But that's before considering the pressures he'll face outside the lecture hall, from helping three hapless students who've been surviving exclusively on porridge, to fielding inappropriate propositions from students chasing higher grades. And then there's the particular challenge of Edna Wallop, the Acting Head of Faculty.

On a weekend morning, college roommates, Ah Li and Panda, wake up with very different reactions to the night before. They have been chased and tear-gassed in the streets of their city after joining tens of thousands of others to protest a national security law that would effectively spell the end of democracy in Hong Kong. Ah Li couldn’t get out of bed, her heart heavy with the lingering images of the police and the violence on the streets, and her worries about the future of her hometown.

Nobody in Manhattan eats better than Bernice Black. It’s 1972, and she is the city’s busiest restaurant critic, juggling her fiance and his two young sons with demands of fine dining. Bernice talks fast, walks faster, has a razor-sharp wit and no patience for anything--or anyone--that gets in her way. When she stops by the famed restaurant of her favorite chef and mentor, Laurent Tirel, early one morning, she stumbles across a horrific scene in the kitchen: Laurent's severed head, perfectly preserved in a flawless mold of jellied aspic.

Set in post-World War II Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks, a young, harmonica-blowing blues singer who is always writing music in his head. Torn between his friendships with fellow musicians and nightclub life and his responsibilities to his wife and child, along with the pressures of dealing with a racist America that assaults him at every turn, Manfred seeks easy answers in "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey) and in moving on.

Twenty-one-year-old Beth is in prison. The thing she did is so bad she doesn't deserve to ever feel good again. But her counsellor, Erika, won't give up on her. She asks Beth to make a list of all the good things in her life. So Beth starts to write down her story, from sharing silences with Foster Dad No. 1 to flirting in the Odeon on Orange Wednesdays to the very first time she sniffed her baby's head. But at the end of her story, Beth must confront the bad thing. What is the truth hiding behind her crime?

Hermano rises at five a.m. and leaves his home in an SUV filled with survival gear. He doesn't wake his wife or child to bid them good-bye - nor does he meet his best friend at their prearranged rendezvous point. Driving through the sleeping streets of Porto Alegre, he is haunted by ghosts of his past selves: the fearless boy riding a battered stunt bike, the silent adolescent fascinated by bodies and violence, the obsessive young surgeon, the distant husband.

How can Leonid McGill say no to the beautiful young woman who walks into his office with a stack of cash? She's an artist, she tells him, who's escaped from poverty via marriage to a rich collector who keeps her on a stipend. But she says she fears for her life, and needs Leonid's help. Though Leonid knows better than to believe every word, this isn't a job he can afford to turn away, even as he senses that - if his family's misadventures don't kill him first - sorting out the woman's crooked tale will bring him straight to death's door.

December 2008. A heavy snowstorm is blowing through Manhattan and the economy is on the brink of collapse, but none of that matters to a handful of guests at a posh holiday party. Five years after their college graduation, the fiercely devoted friends at the heart of this richly absorbing novel remain as inseparable as ever.

Eve Laing, once the muse of an infamous painter, is now - 40 years later - an artist herself. But she feels she has sacrificed her career for her family and she resents the global success of her old college roommate, now a celebrity of the international conceptual art scene. When Eve embarks on her most ambitious work yet, she takes a wrecking ball to her comfortable life, jettisoning her marriage for a beautiful young lover, a drifter half her age, who seems to share her single-minded creative vision.

Bayou transplant Odessa Dean has a lot to learn about life in Brooklyn. So far she's scored a rent free apartment in one of the nicest neighborhoods around by cat-sitting, and has a new job working at Untapped Books & Café. Hand-selling books and craft beers is easy for Odessa, but making new friends and learning how to ride the subway? Well, that might take her a little extra time. But things turn more sour than an IPA when the death of a fellow waitress goes viral, caught on camera in the background of a couple's flash-mob proposal video.

Cate is a stage designer in her early 40s, embroiled in theatre projects and the lives of her unconventional Chicago friends and lovers, when her life is suddenly overturned. Walking into her best friend's kitchen one day, she witnesses an act of violence that forces her to do something she would never have thought she could do. The bubble of her safe, bohemian world is shattered. Right After the Weather explores what happens when two worlds collide and a group of friends are confronted with their worst fears.

When Grace’s fiancé vanishes without a trace the night after proposing, her life is turned upside down. But has Nick walked out on her, or is he in danger? As Grace desperately searches for answers, it soon becomes clear that Nick wasn’t the uncomplicated man she thought she knew. And when she uncovers a hidden tragedy from his childhood, she realises an awful truth: that you can run from your past - but your secrets will always catch up with you....

Beginning his second year as a tutor at the University of Eboracum, Dr Tom Frith is surprised to be paired as a ‘buddy tutor’ for a new member of staff. At first, Dr Rosie Tremaine appears staunchly independent, and even standoffish. But as Rosie and Tom navigate the trials and tribulations of life on campus, they soon become firm friends. Whether they’re investigating the shady practices of the new bursar or chasing down a rogue student suspected of being a Peeping Tom, university life is always full of surprises.

Claude McKay’s first novel, Home to Harlem, was published in 1928 during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay portrays Harlem post-WWI through two Black migrants to New York: Jake, a Southern-born African American longshoreman who deserts the U.S. army and returns to his home in Harlem; and Ray, an educated Haitian immigrant. With his innovative use of Black dialects, McKay portrays a complex world of Black people, both native-born and immigrant, who navigate a dynamic society in the midst of radical change.