Showing results by narrator "Louise Brealey" in All Categories

A brand-new collection from the internationally best-selling author of Letters of Note.

Every year, Tess and Maggie meet up to try a different activity, something they've never done together before. This year, it's baking, and for a few hours each Friday afternoon, they put the rest of their lives on hold to make cakes. And not just ordinary cakes, but spectacular, unique and glorious gateaux, to celebrate special occasions and commemorate landmark events. When they help a neighbour in distress, they create their first showstopper - a dark, sultry bitter chocolate cake.

Sarah Hargreaves doesn't share her husband Matthew's desire to join the Puritan exiles, but when their son Benjamin is arrested on a trumped-up charge, they have little choice but to go. Things go rapidly from bad to worse and they decide to leave everything behind. Hoping to find peace and like-minded souls in a new religious community in America, they spend everything they have left on a ticket to sail on the Mayflower.

Set between Moscow, Russia and St Andrews, Scotland, it tackles the metaphysics of golf, the mindset of the classic Russian novels and the power of art and music to rewrite reality, as Aneliya comes into contact with an angelic presence named Xstabeth who simultaneously fulfils and disappears both her father and her lover. Written in a tender, mythical key, it is a love letter to the books of Chandler, Nabokov and Dostoevsky and also a musical text, with chord progressions appearing at key points in the action, so that the audiobook may be sung, played or otherwise accompanied.

Summer is swelling around the village. Heat is surging, people are whispering about a great hungry wave, and in the garden, Anna is kicking her dying dog on the grass. But someone is watching her. The girl. Ava. Outside, the brutal summer blisters on. Inside, over the course of one claustrophobic week, Anna and Ava become caught up in their own world. Become swallowed by each-otherness. But what does Ava really want? As faces fray and secrets splinter, the past casts the present anew, and Anna and Ava are forced to reckon with who they truly are.