Showing results by narrator "Penelope Rawlins" in All Categories

Learn all about - Ada Lovelace and the world's first computer programme - Helen Keller and how she overcame her disabilities - Harriet Tubman's inspirational life and work - in this children's biography. This new biography series from DK goes beyond the basic facts to tell the true life stories of history's most interesting people. An age-appropriate text to create an engaging audiobook children will enjoy listening to. This is the one biography series everyone will want to collect.

Seventeen-year-old Veronica Clarke never thought she’d want to fail a test - that is, until she finds herself staring at a piece of plastic with two solid pink lines. With a college-bound future now disappearing before her eyes, Veronica considers a decision she never imagined she'd have to make: an abortion.

Nine-year-old Tooly is spirited away from Bangkok by a seductive group of outsiders who take her from city to city across the globe. At 20, she is wandering the streets of Manhattan with a scribbled-on map, scamming strangers for her shadowy protector, Venn. Now, aged 31, she runs a secondhand bookshop on the Welsh borders and has found peace with her strange upbringing - until she's called to return to New York to see her dying father. Warm, hilarious and fizzing with intelligence, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers is a masterpiece about the search for identity.

Bella's new next-door neighbour is Magda. Magda is lots of fun, and soon they are best friends. But Magda is also trouble! She breaks Bella's mum's best tea set, wrecks Bella's room and covers the living room in soot. And in Trouble at School, on Bella's first day at her new school she already has a best friend - or frenemy! - Magda! Bella wants to make a good impression, but with Magda around, things don't always go according to plan.

To her friends, Amber leads the perfect life with her successful marriage, her powerful job in London and her immaculate style. But as more of her friends fall pregnant, and her best friend, Dylan, announces his decision to adopt a baby with his gay lover, Amber's carefully structured world begins to fall apart. Intricately crafted and sensually evocative, Something I'm Not is a sharp, contemporary novel that discusses the way the psychological scars of the past pass through the generations of a family.

Robotics scientist Rachel Prosper has created a top-secret humanoid android. When she dies suddenly, her family take the robot, which looks just like Rachel, into their home as part of an experiment. The After Wife is the story of a family ripped apart by grief who are given a second chance to reconnect with the woman they loved and lost.

At 23 Alice Hare leaves England for New York. She becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, a Japanese writer living in New York, whose life story has strange parallels to her own and whom she believes is her "Internet twin". What seems to Mizuko like a chance encounter with Alice is anything but - after all, in the age of connectivity, nothing is coincidence. Their subsequent relationship is doomed from the outset, exposing a tangle of lies and sexual encounters as three families across the globe collide.

They say there's no place like home. It's where the heart is....Meet the little boy who believes in miracles. Meet the mother who loves to bring babies home from the newborn aisle of her supermarket. Meet the husband who carves a longed-for baby out of ice as a gift for his wife. Meet the widow who is reminded of romance whilst standing at the kitchen sink. In this prize-winning short story collection, Carys Bray weaves together moments of joy, heartache, sadness and unwavering love as told through 17 very different notions of home.

Mind-boggling, heart-rending and darkly comic, this is the full story for the first time, from the writer of the Guardian column "Mid-Life Ex-Wife". When her husband fell in love with someone else, Stella Grey thought she'd be unhappy for the rest of her life. But then she realised that she needed to take her future in her own hands. She needed to meet someone wonderful and find a heartfix for heartbreak. So she joined online dating sites and embarked on a mission.

Sophia Beaumont-Brown was an 'it' girl. But now she's in the papers for all the wrong reasons. She's single, sofa surfing and not speaking to her family; only her grandmother has any faith left in her. From her hospital bed, Tilly Beaumont sends Sophia letters about her life: dispatches about wartime England, about family secrets and, finally, about the most beautiful thing she ever owned - a necklace of the most incredible pearls. If Sophia's prepared to listen, she'll unlock the secret story of generations of incredible women.

You shared your life online. Now how will you get it back? Twitter. Facebook. WhatsApp. Google Maps. Every day you share everything about yourself - where you go, what you eat, what you buy, what you think - online. Sometimes you do it on purpose. Usually you do it without even realising it. At the end of the day, everything from your shoe size to your credit limit is out there. Your greatest joys, your darkest moments. Your deepest secrets. If people want to know everything about you, all they have to do is look. But what happens when someone starts spilling state secrets?

Dark times lie ahead for Special Agent Ren Bryce and the Rocky Mountains Safe Streets Task Force in the heart-stopping new thriller from the best-selling author of Darkhouse and Blood Loss. In her most shocking case yet, FBI Special Agent Ren Bryce takes on a depraved serial killer fueled by a warped sense of justice. A master of evasion, each life he takes ramps up Ren's obsession with finding him.

On her 10th birthday, Hattie B is swept into the magical Kingdom of Bellua, where she meets a little pink dragon who needs her help. Evil King Ivar of the Imps has stolen the dragon’s magical voice, and Hattie is the only one who can help her get it back.

You, Me and Other People is the life-affirming, heartbreaking and ultimately stunning debut novel from Fionnuala Kearney. They say every family has skeletons in their closet...but what happens when you open the door and they won't stop tumbling out? For Adam and Beth, the first secret wasn't the last; it was just the beginning. You think you can imagine the worst thing that could happen to your family, but there are some secrets that change everything.

In the tradition of Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work or Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand That First Held Mine comes a complex, tender and gorgeously written novel of parenthood, love and marriage that is impossible to put down. Cambridge 1963. Charlotte struggles to reconnect with the woman she was before children, and to find the time and energy to paint. Her husband, Henry, cannot face the thought of another English winter.

Haunting, compelling, this psychological thriller will have you hooked. Perfect for fans of Gone Girl and Daughter. Best friends are there for each other through thick and thin. You trust them with your life. At least that's what Emma, Daisy, Leanne, and Al think. But all that changes when they embark on a trip of a lifetime together. When they return home, only two of them are left alive, and the group has been torn apart by lies and deception. Many years later, when the dust has settled and life has moved on, one girl receives a threatening letter.

Astra Ordott is in exile. Evicted from Is-Land for a crime she cannot regret, she has found work in an ancient fortress in Non-Land: headquarters of the Council of New Continents, the global body charged with providing humanitarian aid to the inhabitants of this toxic refugee camp. Recovering from a disorienting course of memory pacification treatment, Astra struggles to focus on her overriding goals - to find her Code father and avenge the death of her Shelter mother, Hokma.

The whole of society knows there isn’t a redeemable bone in Riordan Barrett’s sinfully sexy body. Suddenly Riordan finds himself not only an earl…but father to two young wards! His only experience is in the art of irresponsibility. This rake needs help--and hiring a pretty young governess won’t be such a hardship! Sweet, innocent Maura Caulfield is seemingly unaware of Riordan’s disreputable ways. But it won’t stay like that for long. He’ll show her just how much fun sinning can be…

Paul and Elaine have two boys and a beautiful home, yet they find themselves thoroughly, inexplicably stuck. Obsessed with 'making things good again', they spin the quiet terrors of family life into a fantastical frenzy that careens well and truly out of control. From a hilarious encounter in the pantry with a Stepford Wife neighbour, to a hostage situation at the school, Homes lays bare the foundations of marriage and family life.

Damascus, Syria, 2009. Carrie Mathison is leading an operation to capture or kill al Qaeda terrorist, Abu Nazir. But arriving at the compound where he was supposed to be in hiding, they find it empty. Carrie is sure that someone is leaking CIA information to the enemy and has betrayed their operation, seriously threatening American interests in the Middle East. To expose the double agent, her boss, Saul Berenson, devises an elaborate ruse that will send her on the most dangerous mission of her life.