Sue Townsend, creator of the much-loved Adrian Mole series, tells a compassionate and gritty story of love and loss in Ghost Children. Seventeen years ago Angela Carr aborted an unwanted child. The child's father, Christopher Moore, was devastated by the loss and retreated from the world. However, when he makes a horrifying discovery on the heath,...

Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to her husband's gamekeeper and embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled exist...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Beartown by Fredik Backman, read by John Sackville. Beartown is a small town in a large Swedish forest. For most of the year it is under a thick blanket of snow, experiencing the kind of cold and dark that brings people closer together - or pulls them apart. Its isolation means that Beartown has been slowly...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Ralph's Party by Lisa Jewell, read by Imogen Church. The smash-hit bestseller from the author of The Girls and Then She Was Gone Six people, one big house and the party that brings it all down . . . Ralph and Smith are flatmates and best mates. Nothing can come between them - until the gorgeous Jemima moves...

The gloriously farcical story of Paul Pennyfeather, sent down from Oxford in outrageous circumstances, who finds himself a position as a schoolteacher at Llanabba Castle alongside a cast of oddballs, rascals and criminals. Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, a parent of staggering glamour and truly suspect mo...

An international bestseller and the novel of the year, 'Freedom' is an epic of contemporary love and marriage. This is the story of the Berglunds, their son Joey, their daughter Jessica and their friend Richard Katz. It is about how we use and abuse our freedom; about the beginning and ending of love; teenage lust; the unexpectedness of adult life;...

Santa Montefiore's involving and dramatic novel The Butterfly Box opens in Vina del Mar, Chile, in the sweltering Summer of 1982. Frederica Campione adores her father. When he gives her a magical box from Peru she believes he will always be there for her. Yet, when her parents' marriage falls apart, she is forced to move to Cornwall with her mother...

One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished American in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate...

Bestselling children's book writer Angelica is amused and flattered at the attention of Jack, the owner of a vineyard in South Africa, whom she meets at a dinner party. With his easy charm and reputation as a ladies' man, Jack makes her feel good about herself-surely it can't do any harm to indulge in a mild email flirtation?

Evie Snow is eighty-two when she passes away in her sleep, surrounded by her children and grandchildren. But when Evie reaches her own private heaven, she finds that she's become her twenty-seven-year-old self and the door won't open. Her soul is too heavy to pass through, so she must unburden herself of the three secrets that have weighed her down...

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Karen Kingsbury comes the third novel in the unforgettable Angels Walking series about divine intervention and the trials and triumphs of life for a group of friends. Despite needing a heart transplant and against the advice of her doctor, Mary Catherine moves to Uganda to work at a brand new orphanage. Wha...

Ellen Trawton is running away from it all-literally. She's getting married to a man she doesn't love, her job is depressing and her mother is getting on her nerves. So she escapes to the one place she knows her mother won't follow her-her aunt's house in rural Ireland. Once there, she uncovers a dark family secret-and a future she never knew she mi...

Martel's novel tells the story of Pi--short for Piscine--an unusual boy raised in a zoo in India. Pi's father decides to move the family to live in Canada and sell the animals to the great zoos of America. The ship taking them across the Pacific sinks and Pi finds himself the sole human survivor on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra wit...

Virginia Woolf's pioneering work on women in literature. An accessible yet fiercely astute essay, it is a crystallisation of the intelligent analysis behind her novels, and confirms her as a writer not only of style, but of undeniable substance. Ranging from discussing Austen's pandering to a male writing style, to imagining the dreadful fate of Sh...

Brought to you by Penguin. On 28 February 2013, a 600-year-old tradition was shattered: the conservative Pope Benedict XVI made a startling announcement. He would resign. Reeling from the news, the College of Cardinals rushed to Rome to congregate in the Sistine Chapel to pick his successor. Their unlikely choice? Francis, the first non-European po...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Lesser Evil by Lesley Pearse. She defied her parents to marry for love . . . Following her heart, Fifi moves with Dan to London where they rent a seedy flat in Dale Street, Kennington. Though Fifi must now become acquainted with squalor, she is soon drawn into the goings on behind the shabby front doors o...

Sarah's grandfather was a horseman of rare talent-only the exceptional are allowed into France's elite riding academy, Le Cadre Noir. But life took an unexpected turn, and now from a council estate in east London, the Captain hopes to train his granddaughter towards a better life. Natasha is a lawyer whose job is to represent the best interests of...

The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf's haunting tale about a naive young woman's sea voyage from London to a small resort on the South American coast. Told in symbolic, lyrical and intoxicating prose, her outward journey begins to mirror her internal voyage into adulthood as she searches for her personal identity, grapples with love, and learns how to...

Eventually becoming the 1960s film that made Michael Caine a star, 'Alfie' is the tale of a free-wheeling young man, who, thanks to his hedonistic lifestyle and numerous sexual escapades, cannot find true happiness and peace of mind.

A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters tells a series of apparently unconnected stories ranging from a woodworm's-eye-view of the journey on Noah's Ark to an astronaut's quest for its final resting place. There is pastiche and learned disquisition; there is heart-stopping documentary and heart-lifting revelation. But these stories are not se...

Why Mummy Drinks is the brilliant novel from Gill Sims, the author of the online sensation Peter and Jane. It is Mummy's 39th birthday. She is staring down the barrel of a future of people asking if she wants to come to their advanced yoga classes, and polite book clubs where everyone claims to be tiddly after a glass of Pinot Grigio and says thing...