Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in World Literature

Alex Ehren is a poet, a prisoner and a teacher in block 31 in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the children’s block. He spends his days trying to survive while illegally giving lessons to his young charges while shielding them as best he can from the impossible horrors of the camp. But trying to teach the children is not the only illicit activity that Alex is involved in. Alex is keeping a diary....

The year is 1815. One October night in the small town of Heron's Creek, Georgia, Yip Tolroy is born, the cord snaked around his fragile neck, his skin a deathly white. As his mother still lies in the blood-slicked sheets and Yip takes his first gulps of air, his father disappears without trace. By the time Yip reaches his 15th year, he has not spoken a word—he is mute, friendless, an outcast. But his life is about to change irrevocably.

In this spellbinding new collection, Charlotte Higgins reinterprets some of the most enduring stories of all time. Here are myths of the creation, of Heracles and Theseus and Perseus, the Trojan war and its origins and aftermaths, tales of Thebes and Argos and Athens. There are stories of love and desire, adventure and magic, destructive gods, helpless humans, fantastical creatures, resourceful witches and the origins of birds and animals.

Rose McLarney’s fourth collection of poems, Colorfast, reckons with fading and bleeding away, the gray of aging and the gray areas to which truths are relegated. McLarney reconsiders girlhood stories, acknowledges omissions from Southern history, and studies the silences of women’s and other voices left out of accounts of the past. Yet she does not write of only what has been lost, defying elegy with tributes to her mother while she is alive to read them, and finding vibrancy that remains in sources such as weeds, gravel, insect shells, and the flawed human body.

The first book of its kind, The Penguin Book of Latina Writings shines a light on a robust community of U.S.-based Latina voices that have been historically overlooked and underrepresented in literature, and demonstrates the valuable contributions Latina writers have made to the literary and intellectual community. The curated selections in this unique anthology elucidate U.S. Latina writers' intersectionality and give readers an understanding of the various positions they are writing to and from.

Milan, 2020. Drawn abruptly from his reclusive life in London for a friend's funeral, Frank finds himself in the eye of a pandemic he had barely registered on the news. From the relative comfort of his balcony at Hotel Milano, he surveys the train station across the piazza, seeing the mad dash for the last trains, hearing the sirens and watching the police stop people in the street. He feels himself remote from it all. Then, one night, the sound of a child's footsteps leads him to discover a family sheltering secretly above him: a family who need his help.

After fifty years in London, Alice wants to live out her days in the land of her birth. Her three children are divided on whether she stays or goes. In the wake of their father's death, the imagined stability of the family begins to buckle. Meanwhile youngest daughter Melissa is forging a new life but has never let go of a love she lost. Michael too remains haunted by the failed perfection of their past, even within the sturdy walls of his marriage to the sparkling Nicole.

What happens when we attempt to exchange the life we are given for something better? Can we transform the possibilities we are born into? A State of Freedom prises open the central, defining events of our century - displacement and migration - but not as you imagine them. Five characters in very different circumstances, from a domestic cook to a vagrant and his dancing bear, and a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city, find out the meanings of dislocation and the desire for more.

In pieces that are at once brilliant, beautiful and hyper-imagined, Atwood gives voices to remarkably drawn characters – mythological figures, animals and everyday people – all of whom have something to say about what it means to live in a world as strange as our own. ‘How can one live with such a heart?’ Atwood asks, casting her singular spell upon the listener, and ferrying us through life, death and whatever comes next. Walking the tightrope between reality and fantasy as only she can, Atwood’s journey through poetry illuminates our most innate joys and sorrows, desires and fears.

In Rooms for Vanishing, the violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family.

animates life in her Small Town in 1980s southwestern Ethiopia. She arrives like a flash flood; unexpected, strong-willed, roaring. Selam and her father listen to the radio in secret as the socialist military junta seizes properties and wages civil war in the North. Meanwhile her mother, the powerful and relentlessly dignified Degitu, embraces a persecuted Pentecostal God as she gets sicker. Once an enterprising, landowning family, now they are ostracised under the new regime, and Selam grows up seeking revenge on despotic comrades, neighbourhood bullies and a ruthless God.

Kayo Chingonyi's remarkable second collection follows the course of a 'blood condition' as it finds its way to deeply personal grounds. From the banks of the Zambezi river to London and Leeds, these poems speak to how distance and time, nations and history can collapse within a body. With astonishing lyricism and musicality, this is a story of multiple inheritances—of grief and survival, renewal and the painful process of letting go—and a hymn to the people and places that run in our blood.

A dazzling collection of raw and explosive poems from a thrilling new feminist voice. In this multi-faceted collection of odes, anecdotes, sonnets and prose, Olivia Gatwood weaves together the trials and triumphs of growing up and explores the many ways that fear and violence can be internalised in a woman's psyche. At times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant, Life of the Party is about what it means to be a girl and a woman in today’s world and the challenge of briefly being both.

One summer, a teenager disappears from Deep Valley, Pennsylvania. She is beautiful, intelligent, richer than most in those parts - and black. The cops search for her, but not as hard as they would if she were a white girl. Watching this drama unfold is Cindy, a younger girl from a white trash family. She has idolised Jude for years, yearning for her glamour, her popularity, her loving home and decent chance in life. And so, in the absence of anyone to give a damn where she goes or what becomes of her, Cindy starts to slip out of her own skin and into the space Jude left behind....

At 16, Nancy, the only member of her family to survive the Great Famine, leaves her small island for the mainland. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she feels irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love affair that soon throws her into a fight for her life. In 1920, Nancy's son Jer has lived through battles of his own as a soldier in the Great War. Now drunk in a jail cell, he struggles to piece together where he has come from and who he wants to be.

In these 10 beautifully moving short stories, mostly written over the last year, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle paints a collective portrait of our strange times. A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother's funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret.

Young and confident, with a swagger in her step, Sugar arrives in the small Southern town of Bigelow with the hope of starting over. Soon Bigelow is alight with gossip and suspicion, and Sugar fears she can't hide from her past. Until, that is, she meets Pearl, her next door neighbour. Over sweet-potato pie, an unlikely friendship begins, transforming both women's lives - and the life of an entire town.

Penguin presents the audio edition of A Slipping Down Life by Anne Tyler. In a small Southern town teenager Evie Decker becomes obsessed with local rock singer Bertram 'Drumstrings' Casey and decides to take her life into her own hands. When she carves his name on her forehead their two lives become unforgettably entwined in this remarkable novel.

1980s Cork. Jack Shine is sorting through his mother's belongings when he discovers a shoe box full of love letters and newspaper clippings. Jack's mother, Rebekah, was a young woman when the Second World War broke out, and she came to Cork alone as a Jewish refugee from Vienna. She died when Jack was young, and he never learned of his father's identity. So, who wrote these love letters to Rebekah and why did she keep newspaper clippings about a famous Austrian footballer player? Who was 'The Paper Man'?

What is The Tiger Who Came to Tea really about? What has Meg and Mog got to do with Polish embroidery? Why is death in picture books so often represented by being eaten? Fierce Bad Rabbits takes us on an eye-opening journey in through the history of picture books. From Edward Lear through to Julia Donaldson, Clare Pollard shines a light on some of our best-loved childhood stories and what they really mean, weaving in tales from her own childhood and her rereadings as a parent. Because the best picture books are far more complex than they seem - and darker too.