Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Literature & Fiction

Shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, 2006

George Hall doesn't understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. 'The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.' Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored. At 57, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz.

In The End of The World Running Club Edgar Hill ran 550 miles after an apocalypse to try and find his family. He had it easy. This is his wife’s story. Beth Hill has survived the apocalypse with a baby and toddler in tow. And what’s more she’s done it alone - without her husband’s help. He’s never been any help. But when disaster strikes and someone steals her kids, she knows what she has to do.

It’s spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein—mother of three, recent divorcée, and Brooklynite—is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire and lust for a new life refuse to be contained. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park dates with younger men, flirtations with beautiful women, and actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect . . . hence her rotation. But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs?

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.

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks - not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.'s small fox-terrier Montmorency.

When Lucy Brennan, a Miami Beach personal fitness trainer, disarms a gunman chasing two frightened homeless men, the police and the breaking-news cameras are not far behind and, within hours, Lucy is a media hero. The solitary eye-witness is the depressed and overweight Lena Sorensen, who becomes obsessed with Lucy and signs up as her client - though she seems more interested in the trainer’s body than her own. When the two women find themselves more closely aligned, and can’t stop thinking about the sex lives of Siamese twins, the real problems start....

19-year-old Phoebe and her courier father Al have recently moved to Devon, to a small cottage with a river at the end of the garden. Struggling with her health, Phoebe doesn't go out much these days. Instead, she spends her time playing detective—trying to deduce from her father's deliveries what kinds of lives her neighbours lead. When Phoebe finds an abandoned baby otter by the river, it's just the push she needs to finally step into her new community. Taking the otter to the local sanctuary, she feels a joy that she has not felt in a very long time.

While on her daily walk with her dog in the nearby woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with stones. Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body. Shaky even on her best days, she is also alone and new to this area, having moved here from her long-time home after the death of her husband, and now deeply alarmed. Her brooding about the note grows quickly into a full-blown obsession as she explores multiple theories about who Magda was and how she met her fate.

Elliot. Joe. Tommy. Nathanael. Wren. Oliver. Malik. Zach. Frank. Patrick. Noah. These are the men Margot has loved, liked, lusted over. Since she was seventeen, she’s pictured them like stepping stones – each one bringing her closer to finding someone to share her life with and, eventually, father the children she’s always imagined in her future. From her first sexual encounter, to her first love, from grown-up dilemmas to spontaneous thrills, she’s soaked up every experience available to her, discovering friendship, joy and despair.

Katie has no reason to believe her boyfriend, James, is cheating until someone claiming to be his wife gets in touch. Now she's been cast in the role of mistress. Not one she's happy with. Once Stephanie and Katie know about each other, they must decide what to do. They could both just throw him out or they could join forces to make his life hell first.

A takeaway, TV and tea with two sugars is about as exciting as it gets for 30-something Sophie Stone. Sophie's life is safe and predictable, which is just the way she likes it, thank you very much. But when a mysterious benefactor leaves her an inheritance, Sophie has to accept that change is afoot. There is one big catch: in order to inherit, Sophie must agree to meet the father she has never seen. Saying yes means the chance to build her own dream home, but she'll also have to face the past and hear some uncomfortable truths....

A good job, a beautiful wife, a big house in a nice neighbourhood; there's really only one thing missing from the picture: a baby. But motherhood is a serious undertaking, especially for a wife who has always valued her selfhood above all else. And there's also a bigger problem: Temi, the wife's best friend who swears she knows her better than her husband. Set over the course of one day, husband, wife and friend toe the lines of compromise and betrayal.

Unforgettably funny and painfully honest, Jonathan Coe's tale of Benjamin Trotter and his friends' coming of age during the 1970s is a heartfelt celebration of the joys and agonies of growing up. Featuring, among other things, IRA bombs, prog rock, punk rock, bad poetry, first love, love on the side, prefects, detention, a few bottles of Blue Nun, lots of brown wallpaper, industrial strife, and divine intervention in the form of a pair of swimming trunks.

It isn't just Nanny who finds it difficult in France when Grace and her young son Sigi are finally able to join her dashing aristocratic husband Charles-Edouard after the war. For Grace is out of her depth among the fashionably dressed and immaculately coiffured French women and shocked by their relentless gossiping and bedhopping. When she discovers her husband's tendency to lust after every pretty girl he sees, it looks like trouble. And things get even more complicated when little Sigi steps in.

Samantha is a high-powered lawyer in London. She works all hours, has no home life, and only cares about getting a partnership. She thrives on pressure and adrenalin. Until one day, she makes a mistake. A mistake so huge, it will wreck her career. She goes into meltdown, flees London, and finds herself in the middle of nowhere. Asking for directions at a beautiful mansion, she is mistaken for the interviewee housekeeper and is offered the job.

Meet Cherry, a bandit queen on the run, driving a pink soft-top convertible through the Badlands of Southeast England. She's never felt more Thelma and Louise in her life - except there are three of them in the car and one of them is dead. How did a head nurse and mother of two end up driving a handcuffed policeman and the corpse of a murdered refugee on a journey to find justice? Pursued by a racist, roid-raged, shaven-headed officer of the law - not to mention by her husband and daughter - what else can a woman with a conscience do in modern Britain?

'There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party....' As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they first appear....

Q wants a simpler and safer life. His work as a quantum cryptographer for the government has led him to believe a crisis is imminent for civilisation and he's looking for somewhere to ride out what's ahead. He buys a ruined farmhouse in Cornwall and begins to build his own self-sufficient haven. Over the course of this quest he meets the eccentric characters who already live on the moors nearby.

Becky's life is blooming! She's house-hunting with her husband, Luke, and...she's pregnant! Everything has got to be perfect for her baby, from the designer nursery to the latest, coolest pram to the celebrity, must-have obstetrician. But when the celebrity obstetrician turns out to be her husband's glamorous, intellectual ex-girlfriend, Becky's perfect world starts to crumble. She's shopping for two...but are there three in her marriage?

Years after the events of The House of God, the Fat Man has been given leadership over a new Future of Medicine Clinic at what is now only Man's 4th Best Hospital, and has persuaded Dr. Roy Basch and some of his intern cohorts to join him to teach a new generation of interns and residents. In a medical landscape dominated by computer screens and corrupted by money, they have one goal: to make medicine humane again.