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

Nina does not have a drinking problem. She likes a drink, sure. But what 17-year-old doesn't? Nina's mum isn't so sure. But she's busy with her new husband and five-year-old Katie. Nina's almost an adult, after all. And if Nina sometimes wakes up with little memory of what happened the night before, then her friends are all too happy to fill in the blanks. Nina's drunken exploits are the stuff of college legend. But then one dark Sunday morning, even her friends can't help piece together Saturday night.

Bel Kumar wakes up in hospital surprised and confused. Surprised to be told she had a near-fatal accident outside work. And confused as to why her ex-boyfriend is by her bedside. Bel's HR record still lists her ex as her next of kin, but she can't think of a less appropriate person to nurse her back to health.

On the brink of 40, newly single with a failed business, Philip thought he'd reached an all-time low. It only needed a discarded chip on a South London street to lay him literally flat. So, bedbound and bored, Philip naturally starts to write the story of his life. But between the mundane catalogue of seaside holidays and bodged DIY, broken relationships and unspoken truths, more surprises are revealed, both comic and touching, than Philip or his family ever bargained for. Even, perhaps, a happy ending.

Smart, diligent and a bit plain, that’s the general consensus. Then Hillary goes to college and her star rises. At Yale Law School, she continues to be a leader - and catches the eye of driven, handsome and charismatic Bill. But when he asks her to marry him, Hillary gives him a firm 'no'. The rest, as they say, isn’t history. How might things have turned out for them, for America, for the world itself, if Hillary Rodham had really turned down Bill Clinton? 

Alice Stern isn't ready to turn 40. She thought she'd have more time to figure it all out. Above all, she thought she'd have more time with her father, Leonard Stern, an eccentric novelist—but he's lying in a hospital bed and Alice isn't sure if she'll hear his voice again. When she falls asleep outside their old apartment on the night before her birthday, she's surprised to be greeted the next morning by a much younger Leonard, with a 16th birthday card for a teenage Alice who, far from clinging to her youth, is hurtling towards adulthood.

It's 1984 - and it's an important time for the children of Ragley-on-the Forest school.... Their school choir is to sing a carol in a church in York, and it's actually going to be on television! Helping to keep his excited children - not to mention their parents - under control during these momentous events taxes Jack and his staff to the limit. And at the same time, Jack has his own problems to deal with....

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Kill 'Em All by John Niven, read by Tom Riley. The long-awaited sequel to Kill Your Friends. It is 2017 - the time of Trump, Brexit and fake news. And time for the return of Steven Stelfox, exactly 20 years on from his Britpop heyday. Now 47 and rich beyond the dreams of avarice, Stelfox works only occasionally as a music industry ‘consultant’. A fixer. A problem solver. He’s had a call from his old friend James Trellick, now president of Unigram, one of the largest record companies in America....

The theme that unites these stories in this dazzling first collection by Curtis Sittenfeld is how even the cleverest people tend to misread others and how much we all deceive ourselves. Sharp and tender, funny and wise, this collection shows Sittenfeld’s knack for creating real, believable characters while also skewering contemporary mores with brilliant dry wit. 

In 1976, four students took a trip to the desert. Now the repercussions of that fateful summer are coming back to haunt them. And repercussions are just what Guy doesn't need: his wife, Jane, is moving swiftly from slightly eccentric to downright peculiar, their three-year-old daughter seems set on destroying Jane's sanity, and now even God's gone quiet on him. As for Nina, she's having enough trouble with her son, James. He's got exams looming, a new girlfriend with pneumatic breasts, and now, it seems, he's on drugs. Nina certainly won't welcome any ghosts from the past.

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?

The star of Parks and Recreation and author of the New York Times bestseller Paddle Your Own Canoe returns with a second book that humorously highlights twenty-one figures from our nation’s history, from her inception to present day—Nick’s personal pantheon of “great Americans...

At sixty-four Mickey Sabbath is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous; sex is an obsession and a principle, an instrument of perpetual misrule in his daily existence. But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose great taste for the impermissible matches his own - Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, tormented by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Terry Pratchett will remain an enduring, endearing presence in comic literature' Guardian The Discworld is very much like our own - if our own were to consist of a flat planet balanced on the back of four elephants which stand on the back of a giant turtle, that is...

The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: No one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any historical import at all has ever happened there, which is why Solomon Kugel, like other urbanites fleeing their pasts and histories, decided to move his wife and young son there...

Cleveland, Ohio, 2003. A young man is just a college freshman when he meets Emily. They share a passion for Edward Albee and ecstasy and fall hard and fast in love. But soon Emily has to move home to Elba, New York, and he flunks out of school and joins the army. Desperate to keep their relationship alive, they marry before he ships out to Iraq. But as an army medic, he is unprepared for the grisly reality that awaits him.

Meet the Rabbitte family, a motley bunch of loveable ne'er-do-wells whose everyday purgatory is rich with hangovers, dogshit, and dirty dishes. When the older sister announces her pregnancy, the family are forced to rally together and discover the strangeness of intimacy. But the question remains: which friend of the family is the father of Sharon's child?

Set in a near-future America, an America that has borne two terms of a Trump presidency and is now in the first term of Donald’s daughter as president, Frank Brill, a retired small-town newspaper editor, lives in a world where the populist policies Trump is currently so keen to pursue have been a reality for some years and are getting even more extreme – an erosion of abortion rights, less and less gun control, xenophobic immigration policies.

Glue is the story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh schemes, and about the loyalties, the experiences, and the secrets that hold them together into their 30s. Four boys becoming men: Juice Terry, the work-shy fanny-merchant, with corkscrew curls and sticky fingers; Billy the boxer, driven, controlled, playing to his strengths; Carl, the Milky Bar Kid, drifting along to his own soundtrack; and the doomed Gally, who seems to find catastrophe at every corner.

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.

Small-time hustler Arthur Abdel Simpson ekes out a living in Athens by robbing gullible tourists. But when an attempted theft backfires, he finds himself out-smarted and blackmailed into driving a highly suspicious car across the border to Istanbul. Then the Turkish secret police get involved, and Simpson becomes embroiled in something far deeper, and more dangerous, than he could imagine. Featuring a heart-stopping jewel heist, this compulsive, morally complex thriller became the basis for the classic film Topkapi.