Showing titles in Literature & Fiction

Maud is an irascible 88-year-old Swedish woman with no family, no friends, and...no qualms about a little murder. Ever since her darling father's untimely death when she was only 18, Maud has lived in the family's spacious apartment in downtown Gothenburg rent-free, thanks to a minor clause in a hastily negotiated contract. That was how Maud learned that good things can come from tragedy. Now in her late 80s, Maud contents herself with traveling the world and surfing the net from the comfort of her father's ancient armchair. It's a solitary existence, and she likes it that way.

Lisa Edwards, top London magazine editor, has been fantasizing about promotion to New York. Instead, she's asked to launch a new women's magazine in Dublin. She thinks nothing could be worse - until she meets her new staff. They're friendly, helpful, and enthusiastic - in other words, they wouldn't last two minutes in London!

Wilhemina 'Billie' Bennett, red-haired daughter of an American millionaire, loves golf, dogs, and Tennyson ¿ and is to marry Eustace Hignett, the weak, poetry-writing son of a famous English writer on theosophy. Enter San Marlowe, Eustace's tournament golfing cousin, and Jane Hubbard, Billie's big-game-hunting friend, and another romp in the inimitable Wodehouse style unfolds.

Two years after successfully melting down the top secret sperm bank under the Space Needle, the CLITO collective (Community of Lesbians Inclusive To Others) is thriving on their newly acquired private island, Lesbos 2. All is well in their queer utopia. Or is it? Investigative reporter Sarah Keebler (Sarah Steele) is piecing together the crew's previous heist for her bombshell true-crime podcast–and getting dangerously close to the truth.

After being court-martialed by the Space Legion for ordering the strafing of a treaty-signing ceremony, multimillionaire Willard Phule receives his punishment: He must command the misfit Omega Company on Haskin's Planet, a mining settlement on the edge of settled space. At his duty station, he leverages his personal money and a knack for managing people to get the company to come together as a unit.

In a small town in Sweden it appears to be an ordinary day. But look more closely, and you'll see a mysterious masked figure approaching a bank. Two hours later, chaos has descended. A bungled attempted robbery has developed into a hostage situation - and the offender is refusing to communicate their demands to the police. Inside the building, fear quickly turns to irritation for the seven strangers trapped inside. But as the minutes tick by, they begin to suspect that the criminal mastermind holding them hostage might be more in need of rescuing than they are.

Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's novels, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey and is surely a demonstration of its eponymous title. The story centers on brother and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who represent Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who died young of cancer almost two decades before the book's publication.

Something really strange is happening in the City by the Bay. People are dying, but their souls are not being collected. Someone - or something - is stealing them. No one knows where they are going, or why, but it has something to do with that big orange bridge. Death merchant Charlie Asher is just as flummoxed as everyone else.

A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, a behemoth of fat, flatulence and furious suspicion of anything modern—this is Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, noble crusader against a world of dunces. The ordinary folk of New Orleans seem to think he is unhinged. Ignatius ignores them, heaving his vast bulk through the city's fleshpots in a noble crusade against vice, modernity and ignorance. But his momma has a nasty surprise in store for him: Ignatius must get a job. Undaunted, he uses his new-found employment to further his mission.

J.W. Wells seemed to be a respectable establishment, but the company now paying Paul Carpenter's salary is in fact a deeply sinister organisation with a mighty peculiar management team. Paul thought he was getting the hang of it (particularly when he fell head over heels for his colleague Sophie), but death is never far away when you work at J.W. Wells, unlike the stapler - that's always going AWOL. Our love-struck hero is about to discover that custard is definitely in the eye of the beholder. And that it really stings.

All Bunny McGarry wants is a spot of breakfast and a decent cup of tea. So imagine how annoyed he gets when two masked men attempt to rob the New York diner he is in. Unfortunately, dealing with that problem just leads to a whole lot more. One of the diner’s other customers isn’t who she appears to be, and the odds aren’t great that she is going to live to see another breakfast.

One year on from the death of her husband, Emma feels no closer to moving forward with her life. Seeking distraction, she quits her job and begins working at the local garden centre. Here, Emma begins to open up and finds herself attending boss Les’ talk on the Titanic. Intrigued, Emma sets out to research who would have arranged the flowers on-board.

The accidental governess...After her livelihood slips through her fingers, Alexandra Mountbatten takes on an impossible post: transforming a pair of wild orphans into proper young ladies. However, the girls don’t need discipline. They need a loving home. Try telling that to their guardian, Chase Reynaud. The ladies of London have tried - and failed - to make him settle down. Somehow, Alexandra must reach his heart...without risking her own.

In Espresso Tales, Alexander McCall Smith returns home to Edinburgh and the glorious cast of his own tales of the city, the residents of 44 Scotland Street, with a new set of challenges for each one of them. Bruce, the intolerably vain and perpetually deluded ex-surveyor, is about to embark on a new career as a wine merchant, while his long-suffering flatmate Pat MacGregor, set up by matchmaking Domenica Macdonald, finds herself invited to a nudist picnic in Moray Place in the pursuit of true love.

Rue Siebert might not have it all, but she has enough: a few friends she can always count on, the financial stability she yearned for as a kid, and a successful career as a biotech engineer at Kline, one of the most promising start-ups in the field of food science. Her world is stable, pleasant, and hard-fought. Until a hostile takeover and its offensively attractive front man threatens to bring it all crumbling down. Eli Killgore and his business partners want Kline, period.

Pierce Egan's renowned 19th-century comic novel adapted by Dan Tetsell is a rollicking real tour of the sprawling post-Regency metropolis in the years before the Victorians turned up and made everything boring.

Minnie and Bert are over the moon to have their three grown-up children home for the first time in a decade. But having Lizzie, Jess, Owen and the grandchildren under one roof isn’t without its dramas. Lizzie is off the alcohol (although emergency gin doesn’t count), Jess is juggling a toddler and a newborn, but it’s Owen who has the power to throw a grenade into everything.

All eight series of the comedy drama series set in a Donegal town in the 1950s and '60s. Ireland in the '50s, and the days of mass tourism and indoor plumbing have not yet come to rural Co. Donegal. But in the small, sleepy town of Ballylenon, change is coming, and trouble is brewing. A power struggle is under way for control of the town, with two rival forces aligned against each other.

Hera is in her mid-twenties, which seems young to everyone except people in their mid-twenties. Since leaving school, she has been trying to kick and scream into existence a life she cares about, but with little success so far. Until she meets Arthur. He works with her, he is older than her, he is also married. But in her soulless office - the large cold room she feels destined to spend her life in - he is a source of much-needed sustenance. And though Hera has previously dated women, she soon falls headlong into a workplace romance that will quickly consume her life.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of About a Boy by Nick Hornby, read by Stephen Mangan. Nick Hornby's second best-selling novel is about sex, manliness and fatherhood. Will is 36, comfortable and child-free. And he's discovered a brilliant new way of meeting women - through single-parent groups. Marcus is 12 and a little bit nerdish: he's got the kind of mother who made him listen to Joni Mitchell rather than Nirvana.