Showing results by publisher "Penguin Random House Australia Audio" in Literature & Fiction

Adrift in outer space, a motley crew of human-made objects tell their tales, making real history sweeter and stranger. Starman, a lovelorn mannequin orbiting the Sun in his cherry-red car, pines for his creator. The first sculpture ever taken to the Moon is possessed by the spirit of Neil Armstrong. The International Space Station, awaiting deorbit and burial in a spacecraft cemetery beneath the ocean, farewells its last astronauts. A team of tamponauts sets off on a perilous mission to Mars inspired by the courage of their predecessors.

Paul Kelly's songs are steeped in poetry. And now he has gathered from around the world the poems he loves - poems that have inspired and challenged him over the years, a number of which he has set to music. This wide-ranging and deeply moving anthology combines the ancient and the modern, the hallowed and the profane, the famous and the little known, to speak to two of literature's great themes that have proven so powerful in his music: love and death - plus everything in between.

In 1939, Anton, a captain in the Polish army, says goodbye to his wife, Elisabeth. He is leaving to defend their homeland against the invasion by Nazi Germany and Russia. They make a vow that - whatever happens, however much time passes - they'll meet again at the Winter Palace, their stately home in the Polish countryside. The winds of war draw them far apart. Anton is captured and sent to slave in a Siberian logging camp. The Winter Palace is taken over by the German army, and Elisabeth is forced to be the 'mistress' of a Nazi officer.

1967: Hazel's new job at the docks quickly turns perilous when she stumbles into the criminal underworld that lurks beneath the surface. A million in gold coins has vanished from a cargo ship and a dead body washed up. Suddenly, she's in over her head. Disillusioned with her life, Betty is led astray by a charismatic new friend and finds herself exposed in more ways than one - until a crisis drags her back to reality. Living in a high-class brothel, Irene gets wind of a threat that could destroy her livelihood.

Cassie Prince lives in a beautiful beach suburb with her successful husband Jon and their children Ellie and Danny. Life is perfect, right? Except now she's reached her mid-forties, she can't help wondering what happened to the fun-loving, sexy and accomplished woman she used to be. This isn't what was promised. She's panicking about ageing, bored in her marriage, exhausted by her demanding kids, and increasingly torn by news of her sick mother back in England. So Cassie does what she's always done - buries her feelings and ignores her problems (and does some more online shopping).

Armed with nothing but some loose change and her beloved dog Duke, Mallee girl Pippa Black has finally found the courage she needs to escape a dangerous relationship. Two cryptic words written on a paper napkin send her in search of the one person who might help her—a long-lost brother she has always dreamed of finding. Pippa's quest leads her to the remote town of Currajong, high in the beautiful Victorian alps. As a runaway seeking refuge among strangers, Pippa learns that she's been mistakenly implicated in a shocking crime.

Gabby McPhee is the owner of The Tin Man, a chic new cafe and coffee roasting house in Melbourne. The struggles of her recent heart transplant are behind her, and life is looking up - until a mysterious customer appears in the cafe, convinced that Gabby has her deceased husband's heart beating inside her chest. Krystal Arthur is a bereaved widow, struggling to hold herself and her two young boys together since Evan's death, and plagued by unanswered questions. Why was her husband in another city the night he died? And why won't his spirit rest?

Dublin 1966. When Joan Quinn, a factory girl from the Cranmore Estate, marries Martin Egan, it looks like her dreams have come true. But all is not as it seems. Joan lives in the shadow of a secret—the couple's decision to give up their first daughter for adoption only months before. For the next three decades, Joan's marriage and her relationship with her second child Carmel suffer as a consequence. Then one day in 1996, a letter arrives from their adopted daughter.

Amina Bennis has come back to her childhood home in Morocco to attend her sister's wedding. The time has come for her to confront her strict, traditionalist father with the secret she has kept for more than a year - her American husband, Max. Amina's best friend, Charlie, and Charlie's feisty grandmother, Bea, have come along for moral support, staying with Amina and her family in their palatial riad in Fès and enjoying all that the city has to offer. But Charlie is also hiding someone from her past - a mystery man from Casablanca.

Nineteen-year-old identical twins Violet and Daisie Chettle can hardly believe their luck when they are recruited as maids to accompany the queen's lady-in-waiting on the royal tour to Australia in 1954. It's just the ticket they need away from cold, grey England and the tension that's been brewing at home since the loss of their parents. However, life on board the SS Gothic, and indeed in the colony, is far from the glamorous adventure they expected, and their relationship becomes even more strained when one twin discovers her sister's unconscionable act of betrayal.

It's February 1939. As the Fuhrer edges towards an invasion of Poland, total war looms in Europe. However in Krakow, 17-year-old Marie Karska's primary concern is the unexplained disappearance of her mother 15 years ago, and her father Dominik's unbreakable silence on the matter. Even his wife's name is a secret he guards closely. Dominik, a well-respected and innovative doctor at the local hospital, has devoted his life to caring for his only daughter.

John Mitchel, Irishman, lawyer, journalist, activist and politician, is a complex character. Charged with treason in Ireland and tried by an English judge, he was snuck off mainland Ireland on the day he was charged to avoid a breakout and rebellion. He was transported initially to Bermuda, then to South Africa and then to Van Diemen's Land where as an Irishman he was supported by many and given a ticket of leave. He soon became a farmer and activist and was eventually secreted out of Australia to the USA, where it was felt he could be more active for the Irish cause.

Marina and her husband, Jacob, were each born on a kibbutz in Israel. They meet years later at a university in California, when Jacob is a successful psychiatrist with a young son, Ben, from a disastrous marriage. The family moves to a brownstone in Harlem, formerly a convent inhabited by elderly nuns. Outside the house one day Marina encounters Constance, a young refugee from Rwanda, and her toddler, Gabriel. Unmoored and devastated, Constance and Gabriel quickly come to depend on Marina, and her bond with the little boy intensifies.

Melbourne 1993: Ezra and Yonatan are best friends whose lives are forever changed when their school, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Yahel Academy, is rocked by a scandal and they are thrown onto two divergent paths. Twenty years later, the lives of the two men are very different: Ezra identifies as secular and atheist, while Yonatan has been ordained as a rabbi and even teaches at the academy. By chance they are reunited, and the events of their past and present collide with devastating consequences.

Brothers Thom and Archie are the best of friends and never disagree, until the beautiful, young and very headstrong Molly James comes into their life. Molly might be playing a game with the brothers - but when war strikes and they both join up to fight, it isn't a game anymore. Based on the true story of the author's grandfather's wartime experiences, At the Going Down of the Sun explores the intense bond between soldiers and brothers fighting in war, and a love that may tear them apart.

How did Corporal Hitler's Luger from the First World War end up being the weapon that killed an IRA turncoat in Kempsey, New South Wales, in 1933? When an affluent Kempsey matron spots a young Aboriginal boy who bears an uncanny resemblance to her husband, not only does she scream for divorce, attempt to take control of the child's future and upend her comfortable life, but the whole town seems drawn into chaos.

Frank Moorhouse was legendary in Australian literary and cultural life, the author of a huge and diverse body of work - essays, short stories, journalism, scripts, the iconic Edith Trilogy - an unapologetic activist, intellectual, libertarian and champion of freedom of speech and sexual self determination. Though he lived his life publicly, his private stories have not been shared, the many paths he forged left unexamined, until now. This landmark study is the fascinating story of how one of Australia's most original writers and pioneer of the discontinuous narrative came to be.

At the age of ten, and just short of four feet tall, a boy from Ballarat named Johnny Day became Australia's first international sporting hero. Against adult competition he wooed crowds across continents as the World Champion in pedestrianism, the sporting craze of the day. A few years later, in 1870, he won the Melbourne Cup on a horse aptly called Nimblefoot, this time impressing British royalty and Melbourne's high society. And then, still aged only fourteen, this already-famous athlete and jockey disappeared without a trace. Robert Drewe picks up where history leaves off.

At age 28, Jane Austen should be seeking a suitable husband, but all she wants to do is write. She is forced to take extreme measures in her quest to find true love - which lands her in the most extraordinary of circumstances. Magically, she finds herself in modern-day England, where horseless steel carriages line the streets and people wear very little clothing. She forms a new best friend in fading film star Sofia Wentworth, and a genuine love interest in Sofia's brother Fred, who has the audacity to be handsome, clever and kind-hearted.

Across these twenty fresh and boldly intimate stories, Erin Riley writes about the things that matter most: family, heartbreak, humanity, justice and swimming, and the messy, hard graft of becoming one's authentic self. In weaving together their everyday while questioning society and its structures, Erin gifts us stories that double as a manifesto on how to disrupt and reinvent narrative, identity, love and community.