Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Urban

Absorbing and escapist, The Villa on the Riviera is perfect summer listening for fans of Rachel Hore and Santa Montefiore. Polly Smith is struggling to make a living as an artist when her friend and patron, Oliver, invites her to the south of France. But her world is unexpectedly turned upside down when she digs out her birth certificate to apply for a passport. Her parents are not who she believed them to be - even her name is different.

Maggie Wilson was only 33, but life in the teeming streets of Walworth was not that easy in 1908 - not if you were a widow with four young daughters. It was pretty much a hand-to-mouth existence, and without the lodger Maggie really wouldn't have managed at all. Constable Harry Bradshaw thought the Wilsons were a gutsy and brave little family.

Naomi Alderman's The Lessons reflects the truth that the lessons life teaches often come too late. Hidden away in an Oxford backstreet is a crumbling Georgian mansion, unknown to any but the few who possess keys to its unassuming front gate. Its owner is the mercurial, charismatic Mark Winters, whose rackety trust-fund upbringing has left him as troubled and unpredictable as he is wildly promiscuous.

When Frank Peter’s wife, Maureen, dies, he feels that his once-idyllic life on the Yorkshire Moors is over. And with a daughter emigrating to Australia and a son who has his own marital problems, Frank feels resigned to a life of loneliness. Then one night he finds a frightened young woman hiding at the back of his farmhouse. She explains that her name is Irena, and she was brought to this country by a man who promised her the world and then forced her into prostitution.

In late 2000, a young boy in Ahmedabad dreams of owning a business. To accommodate his friends' passion, he opens a cricket shop. However, nothing comes easily in a turbulent city. To realise their goals, they will have to face it all - religious politics, calamities, unacceptable love and, above all, their own mistakes. Will they make it? Can an individual's dreams overcome the nightmares of real life? Can we succeed despite mistakes?

Times move on for the Adams family in South London, and as business prospers, there are new worries to deal with. A young woman arrives who is intent on ruining Sammy Adams' winter fashion show, and Sammy must deal with her unwelcome attention. Boots has to find a solution when one of his female employees tells him about a sinister visitor, but he doesn't realise that his family are being observed.

New to town and delusionally confident, Slide imagined himself living in a glossy building with doormen and sweeping views of the skyline. Instead he's landed in a creaking, stuffy apartment with two roommates: a loping giant who hardly leaves his room, and a weight-obsessed neurotic who keeps no fewer than forty-seven lamps throughout the house, blazing at all hours. Unwilling to accept this fate, Slide—a barber with an opaque past—embarks on a quest for the perfect apartment, pinballing through the sprawling, madcap city of Polis and its endless procession of neighborhoods.

A chilling novel about our modern world, from the author of Empire of the Sun and Crash. An architect is driving home from his London offices when a blow-out sends his speeding Jaguar hurtling out of control. Smashing through a temporary barrier he finds himself, dazed and disorientated, on a traffic island below three converging motorways. But when he tries to climb the embankment or flag-down a passing car for help it proves impossible - and he finds himself marooned on the concrete island.

Golden Globe-winning actor Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under) performs Truman Capote's masterstroke about a young writer's charmed fascination with his unorthodox neighbor, the "American geisha" Holly Golightly. Holly - a World War II-era society girl in her late teens - survives via socialization, attending parties and restaurants with men from the wealthy upper class who also provide her with money and expensive gifts. Over the course of the novella, the seemingly shallow Holly slowly opens up to the curious protagonist.

After being cheated on by her ex, Leanne Riley is trying her hardest to get her life back on track, which isn't easy without a job and living in a bedsit surrounded by a junkie and a madwoman. On a night out with her best friend, she meets Jake, a face from her past who has changed beyond all recognition. Jake is charming, handsome and loaded, a far cry from the gawky teenager he used to be. Weary of men, Leanne isn't easy to please, but Jake tries his best to break through the wall she's built around herself.

Dr. Devlin Dane has had his sights set on my panties for months. But I've done a stellar job of fending him off. As Mercy Medical's most eligible bachelor, he has no problem in the panty-dropping department. He's tall, dark, and inked all over. I get the appeal; I'm not dead. I'm not stupid either. He's a walking heartbreak waiting to happen. But when Reese Dane comes crashing into my life - literally- the game suddenly changes. The two have an unstoppable pull like centrifugal force.

Living in the British city of Rosington of the 1950s, Wendy finds herself penniless, jobless, and on the verge of divorce. She goes to stay with her friend, who seems to have everything Wendy lacks. But a decades-old mystery lingers, and the shadow of death seeps through from turn-of-the-century Rosington, portending tragedy.

Seventeen-year-old Tyler lives in one of Edinburgh’s most deprived areas. Coerced into robbing rich people’s homes by his bullying older siblings, he’s also trying to care for his little sister and his drug-addict mum. On a job, his brother Barry stabs a homeowner and leaves her for dead, but that’s just the beginning of their nightmare, because the woman is the wife of Edinburgh’s biggest crime lord, Deke Holt.

Acapulco, 1974: Rina Walker is on assignment. Just another quick, clean kill. She wakes to discover her employer's severed head on her bedside table and a man with an AK-47 coming through the door of her hotel room. She needs all her skills to neutralise her attacker and escape. After a car chase, she is captured by a Mexican drug boss who exploits her radiant beauty and ruthless expertise to eliminate an inconvenient member of the government.

The second novel in the Roth trilogy is the story of David Byfield, a widowed parish priest with a dark past and a darker future. Set in 1970 in a commuter village near London, the novel explores the consequences of Byfield's second marriage.

Andrew Taylor's Roth Trilogy has just been made in to a three-part TV adaptation for ITV called Fallen Angel.
It is 1970. David Byfield, a widowed parish priest with a dark past, brings home a new wife to Roth. Soon the murders and blasphemies begin. But does the responsibility lie in the present or the past? And can Byfield, a prisoner of his own passion, break through to the truth before the final tragedy destroys what he most cherishes?

Back in 1964, tragedy struck when Peter Redburn and his friends were playing together. Now an adult, Peter has never been able to escape his feelings of guilt. A funeral forces him to confront the rivalries and secrets of the past.

It’s October in Montreal, 2002, and winter is coming on fast. Past due on his first freelance gig and ensnared in lies to his family and friends, a graphic design student with a gambling addiction goes after the first job that promises a paycheck: dishwasher at the sophisticated La Trattoria. Though he feels out of place in the posh dining room, warned by the manager not to enter through the front and coolly assessed by the waitstaff in their tailored shirts, nothing could have prepared him for the tension and noise of the kitchen, or the dishpit’s clamor and steam.

Ciudad de Dios es, a su vez, producto de un estudio de la antropóloga Alba Zaluar sobre la favela Ciudad de Dios, de donde el autor de esta obra fue su habitante. Asimismo, Lins fue integrante del equipo de investigación de Zaluar. De ahí que estas páginas sean una fiel mirada sociológica sobre el fenómeno que aquejó a la sociedad carioca en la década de los noventa, cuando explotó una caótica guerra por la droga.

Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday provide a stunning introduction to the uncompromising work of John Edgar Wideman, whose literary achievements have inspired The New York Times to name him “one of America’s premier writers of fiction”. Damballah’s narratives examine the vexed history of Homewood, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, neighborhood whose origins are rooted in a time when slavery was still legal in the United States of America.