Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in World Literature

While the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Stranded at boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. Twenty-five years later, as the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe, Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes and he is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence and look for answers in his family history.

On a hot day in 1960s Maine, six-year-old Joe watches his little sister, Ruthie, sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields, while their family, Mi’kmaq people from Nova Scotia, pick fruit. That afternoon, Ruthie vanishes without a trace. As the last person to see her, Joe will be forever haunted by grief, guilt, and the agony of imagining how his life could have been.

Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war tears through her hometown of Jaffna, her dream takes her on a different path as she sees those around her, including her four beloved brothers and their friend, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. Desperate to act, she must ask herself: is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm?

Eleanor Bennett won't let her own death get in the way of the truth. So when her estranged children - Byron and Benny - reunite for her funeral in California, they discover a puzzling inheritance. First, a voice recording in which everything Byron and Benny ever knew about their family is upended. Their mother narrates a tumultuous story about a headstrong young woman who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder, a story that cuts right to the heart of the rift that's separated Byron and Benny. Second, a traditional Caribbean black cake made from a family recipe.

Simran Mehta has always felt harshly judged by her mother, Nandini, especially when it comes to her little "writing hobby". But when a charismatic and highly respected journalist careens into Simran's life, she begins to question not only her future as a psychologist, but her engagement to her high-school sweetheart. Nandini Mehta has strived to create an easy life for her children in America. It isn’t until an old colleague makes her a life-changing offer that Nandini realizes she's spent so much time focusing on being the perfect Indian woman, she’s let herself slip away.

As the First World War shatters families, destroys friendships and kills lovers, a young Palestinian dreamer sets out to find himself. Midhat Kamal picks his way across a fractured world, from the shifting politics of the Middle East to the dinner tables of Montpelier and a newly tumultuous Paris. He discovers that everything is fragile: love turns to loss, friends become enemies and everyone is looking for a place to belong.

A young boy, Victor, is collected from school by a stranger in a bowler hat - the stranger says he has won Victor in a game of backgammon with Victor's father. The stranger, known as the Captain, takes Victor to live with the sweet but withdrawn Lisa, where he serves as her conduit to the outside world. From mysterious beginnings, Graham Greene's final novel becomes a twisting thriller of smuggling, jewel theft and international espionage which culminates in a dramatic showdown in Panama.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, read by Max Deacon and Dan Stevens. At the start of the 20th century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself; these profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for writers and artists of all kinds.

Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three teenage children, and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled. Yet there is an emptiness at the heart of Ella's life - an emptiness once filled by love. So when Ella reads a manuscript about the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, and his 40 rules of life and love, she is shocked out of herself. Turning her back on her family, she embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author of this work.

It is 1873. Mrs Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper - and cousin by marriage - of a once famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, read by George Blagden. The tender feelgood story of a man's journey around Japan with a streetcat. Translated by Philip Gabriel, a translator of Murakami. It's not the journey that counts but who's at your side. Nana is on a road trip, but he is not sure where he is going. All that matters is that he can sit beside his beloved owner, Satoru, in the front seat of his silver van. Satoru is keen to visit three old friends from his youth, though Nana doesn’t know why, and Satoru won’t say.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost 20 years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

After young Jieun accidentally misuses her powers, causing her beloved family to vanish, she lives a million restless lives in search of them. Overnight, in the village of Marigold on top of a hill, she conjures up her Mind Laundry, where she cleanses painful experiences, transferring them into stains on a T-shirt and turning them into dazzling red petals. We meet five souls: a frustrated young filmmaker; a tortured social-media influencer; a distraught mother who has discovered her husband’s other family; a young woman two-timed by her lover; a talented photographer and victim of bullying.

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.

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.

From an ancient, storm-tossed sea, a tribe of gods reach the rocky shores of Ireland. Among them, a strange, hungry, red-haired girl. A girl who can change shape, from bird to beast to goddess. A girl who dreams of battle, of blood, of death and power. She does not know yet that a woman who seeks to rule will always be in danger – or that there are far more treacherous figures in this land than the gods who raised her. She does not know that one day love will burn so deep in her heart that its scars will never heal. That she will know pain so raw and pure it will almost tear her apart.

In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight's account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath's Arthurian legend, to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook.

The many voices of The Promise tell a story in four snapshots, each one centered on a family funeral, each one happening in a different decade. In the background, a different president is in power, and a different spirit hangs over the country, while in the foreground the family fights over what they call their farm, on a worthless piece of land outside Pretoria. Over large jumps in time, people get older, faces and laws and lives all change, while a brother and sister circle around a promise made long ago and never kept....

The twice Booker-shortlisted author returns with his third novel, THE ROAD TO THE COUNTRY, about a young man, Tunde, whose brother is involved in an accident and stranded just as the Biafran war begins. Tunde spends the novel travelling through a war zone to be reunited with his brother - to bring him home and to ask for forgiveness for the part he played in the accident, a part his brother has no knowledge of.

Growing up within the walls of Grave's Orphanage, Nica's imagination burned with fantastical stories. Including that of The Tearsmith, a mysterious craftsman, guilty of having forged all the fears and anxieties in the world. When at seventeen, she's adopted by Mr and Mrs Mulligan, Nica thinks she's leaving her world of dark fairy tales behind her. But the Mulligans also adopt Rigel, an orphan who is as mesmerising and handsome as he is troubled. They share a past filled with grief and isolation, and the ever-gentle Nica starts to fall for her forbidden love.