Showing results by publisher "Penguin Random House Australia Audio" in All Categories

It's 2002. Britney and Justin are done. Low-rise jeans tyrannise the pants-wearing public. And Hector Singh, a 27-year-old eccentric, moderately talented yet extremely confident aspiring TV writer, is hell bent on 'making it' in LA. He's Puerto Rican and Indian but also post-race (or so he thinks) and he refuses to be intimidated by the Whites Only landscape of show business. But when his mother dies suddenly, Hector's grief turns into depression, triggering dark thoughts and a binge-eating disorder. With a series of implosions that threaten to sink his work and relationships, Hector unravels.

Zadie Ma has a special talent for telling stories...and it seems that some of Zadie's stories come true. Zadie's dearest wish is to have a dog of her own, and so she starts to write the story of a poor unwanted dog called Jupiter, who's just waiting to be rescued by a loving girl like Zadie. One morning when she's supposed to be minding the family shop for her mother, Zadie sets off to look for Jupiter. The scene that unfolds isn't quite the same as in her story, but she does find a real dog, and his name is Jupiter.

Jody, also known as the Stay at Home Mum, has been there and done it herself. She was made redundant while pregnant with her second child and, inspired by necessity, built a money-saving blog from her kitchen table that has grown to become Australia's biggest mothers' network. In this book, Jody explains everything she's learned to help other women get it right: from how to choose a smart business idea and where to start, to the best marketing strategies and digital tools to use, and much more.

Bath-time is fun! There's the bubbles, the bath toys and lots of splashing of course. But have you ever wondered what it's like for the bath? Scaredy Bath does not like bath time...the piping hot water, the gooey muck and especially not the small, boisterous grubby ones that shout and splash and make Scaredy all mucky! What's a bath to do? Will Scaredy Bath ever enjoy bath time?

What does it take to find courage in the midst of deprivation and devastation? Why are some people able to continue living with purpose, even when faced with loss and despair? How does our community turn challenge into triumph? And what can we learn from the exceptional women in our midst who have done just that? It might feel like we are living in unprecedented times, but ours is not the first generation to withstand upheaval as seismic as the COVID-19 pandemic has caused.

Veteran war historian Paul Ham embarks on a journey that has never been attempted: to restore the idea of the soul to the human story and to show how belief in, and beliefs arising from, the soul/mind have driven human history. The Soul tells the story of the inner 'I', the strange essence of ourselves, and how it has been animated, immortalized, loved, armed, inflamed, enslaved, illuminated and enlightened over 250,000 years.

Honest, funny, brave and inspired, Macca shares her story here for the first time: the family and first-believers who supported and challenged her from the beginning; the coaches and mentors who pushed her beyond her comfort zone and provided the blueprint of a champion; the rivals and teammates who transformed the Matildas into a global force to be reckoned with.

This was meant to be Alice's year to shine, but things are already going wrong. First she is given young environmental activist Greta Thunberg as her pen pal for a fictional writing assignment. Why couldn't Alice get someone easy to write to, like a pop star? Through her letters to Greta, Alice finds herself opening up about her life. And as Alice approaches the hard questions by wondering, 'What would Greta do?', she starts to believe that her voice can make a difference - a big one.

Ever since Esther Solar's grandfather met Death, her entire family has been cursed to suffer one great fear in their lifetime - a fear that will eventually lead each and every one of them to their graves. Take Esther's father, for instance: he's an agoraphobe who hasn't left the basement in six years. Then there's her twin brother, Eugene, whose fear of the dark goes far beyond the things that go bump in the night. And her mother, Rosemary, is terrified of bad luck.

As a boy living in a tribe in what is now South Sudan, the youngest country in the world, Ayik Chut Deng was a member of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA). During his time as a child soldier, he witnessed unspeakable violence and was regularly tortured by older boys. At age 19, he and his family escaped the conflict in Sudan and resettled in Toowoomba, Australia. But adjusting to his new life in small-town Queensland was more difficult than he anticipated.

Told from five different points of view, each one revealing something different, On a Bright Hillside in Paradise tells the story of a family of convict descendants in the back-blocks of Tasmania, on a farm in a place called Paradise. They lead hard-scrabble lives. The drama begins when strangers arrive, Christian Brethren evangelists who hold big revival meetings in local barns. On a Bright Hillside in Paradise tackles big questions of faith and family but remains grounded in the dreams and strivings of its beautifully drawn characters.

On 24 July 2013, Anglican priest Rod Bower put up these words on the roadside sign of his Gosford parish church. Next he posted them on Facebook, sparking a social media revolution. The post was shared thousands of times - suddenly the onetime butcher was on the public stage. Today Fr Rod has close to 65,000 followers on social media. He uses this platform to raise questions about Australia's corporate soul, to assert that we are all brothers and sisters - asylum seekers, Muslims, those identifying as LGBTI, Indigenous Australians.... And for such messages, the death threats pour in.

Oxford 1863: young Samuel Speed sets a barley stack alight in the hope it will earn him a bed in prison for the night. He wants nothing more than a morsel of food in his belly and a warm place to sleep off the streets. What he receives is a sentence of seven years' servitude, to be served half a world away in the penal colony of Fremantle, Western Australia.

When Sydney boxer Davey Browne died in 2015 after being knocked out in the final round of a title fight that he was about to win, boxing once again came under intense public scrutiny. For journalist Stephanie Convery, the story of that fatal fight raised questions she became determined to answer: who should be held accountable when someone dies in the ring? Did the actions of the referee, the ringside doctor, the combat sports inspectors, and the trainer affect what happened that night?

Chrissie Foster is the mother who brought the rich and powerful Catholic Church to its knees over its global abuse of children, including two of her daughters, Emma and Katie. Like the Boston Globe's Spotlight team, she built an undeniable case in her first book Hell on the Way to Heaven, which helped inspire Australian governments to hold world-leading inquiries.

The son of first-generation Tongan immigrants, Hau drew on the legacy of his name (meaning 'King') to become one of the nation's most influential musical artists. But the best stories often come from the humblest beginnings. A promising junior rugby player, Hau decided in his teens to trade in the footy boots for Hammer pants, soaking up every bar and breakbeat of the new sound and culture exploding out of urban America: DJ Kool Herc and LL Cool J, mix-tapes and graffiti, velour Kangols and Beat Street.

Edwina Dawling is the golden girl of Australian television. The former pop singer is now the country's most popular actress, an international star thanks to the hit TV soap The Glitter Game. But behind the seductive glamour of television is a cutthroat world where careers are made or destroyed with a word in the right ear...or a night in the right bed. Where success breeds envy and corruption, concealed in the flashing smiles at every premier event, every party.

This was Nina Young's shocking realisation in her mid-20s, when she found out from online court records that her estranged father, Allan Ladd, had strangled a woman to death decades before. In prison he'd met Denise, Nina's mother, who was his tutor. Although Denise didn't know the extent of Allan's crime when she fell in love with him, by the time she found out, she was in too deep. She had to flee from him before Nina turned two. A decade after reading the court records, Nina, now a journalist, decided to release a podcast to tackle the questions she'd been asking herself ever since.

British mother Rosie Ayliffe thought her 21-year-old daughter, Mia, would be safe travelling around Australia on a gap year. But Mia wanted to extend her visa and in order to do that needed to find 88 days of work on a farm - a requirement that would lead to catastrophic events. Four short days after Mia moved to a hostel in Queensland to take a job on a sugarcane farm, she was brutally murdered.

Amelia stands beside a highway in the Australian desert, alone except for her dog and the occasional road train that speeds past her raised thumb. After her mother's funeral, Amelia was confronted by Zach and reminded of the relationship they had when she was a teenager. She feels complicit and remains unable to process what happened. So she ran. Her best friend, Sid, is Zach's cousin and the one person in the world she can depend upon.