Showing results for "The Children" in Genre Fiction

This Audible production expertly brings to life Salman Rushdie’s postcolonial masterpiece Midnight’s Children, available for the first time unabridged in audio. Written in the magical-realist style that Rushdie is renowned for, Midnight’s Children follows Saleem Sinai - a child gifted with extraordinary powers after being born at the exact moment India becomes independent. The captivating events that unfold act as an allegory for India’s transition from colonialism to independence as Saleem finds himself 'handcuffed to history', with his fate entwined with that of his newly independent state.

Saleem Sinai is born on the stroke of midnight on 14th-15th August 1947, at the exact moment that India and Pakistan become separate, independent nations. From that moment on, his fate is mysteriously handcuffed to the history of his country. But Saleem's story starts almost 30 years earlier, when his grandfather, Dr Aadam Aziz, falls in love with a woman concealed behind a perforated sheet. That pivotal moment in Kashmir in 1919 sparks a series of bizarre events that will lead to the birth of a boy with an extraordinary destiny.

Christopher and Hannah are a happily married surgeon and nurse with picture-perfect lives. All that’s missing is a child. When Janie, an abandoned six-year-old, turns up at their hospital, Christopher forms an instant connection with her, and he convinces Hannah they should take her home as their own.

The Duke's Children is the sixth and final audiobook in the Palliser series. Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium and former Prime Minister of England, is widowed and wracked by grief. Struggling to adapt to life without his beloved Lady Glencora, he works hard to guide and support his three adult children. Palliser soon discovers, however, that his own plans for them are very different from their desires. Sent down from university in disgrace, his two sons quickly begin to run up gambling debts.

Brought to you by Penguin. Unlike anything you’ve read before, The Wax Child is an extraordinary tale of witchcraft from one of the most visionary writers at work today It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in...

Painstakingly restored from Tolkien’s manuscripts and presented for the first time as a fully continuous and standalone story, the epic tale of The Children of Húrin will reunite fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with Elves and Men, dragons and Dwarves, eagles and Orcs, and the...

The year is 2021. No child has been born for twenty-five years. The human race faces extinction. Under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiat, the Warden of England, the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind.

“What does ‘allegiance’ mean?” the New Teacher asked, hand over her heart. In this classic and chilling tale about an elementary school classroom in post-war occupied America, James Clavell brings to light the vulnerability of children and the power educators have to shape and change young minds. Originally written in the Cold War era, Clavell’s extraordinary and enduringly relevant allegory on the impressionability of the human mind is still read in schools around the globe today, and is a call to every person to keep questioning and keep learning.

In this magical debut, a couple's lives are changed forever by the arrival of a little girl, wild and secretive, on their snowy doorstep. Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart—he breaking under the...

A bewitching tale of heartbreak and hope set in 1920s Alaska. Jack and Mabel have staked everything on making a fresh start for themselves in a homestead 'at the world's edge' in the raw Alaska wilderness. But as the days grow shorter, Jack is losing his battle to clear the land, and Mabel can no longer contain her grief for the baby she lost many years before. The evening the first snow falls, their mood unaccountably changes.

Brought to you by Penguin. Read by award-winning narrator Jeff Harding. **NOW A MAJOR PRIME TV SERIES STARRING ALAN RITCHSON** Jack Reacher jumps off a bus and walks fourteen miles down a country road into Margrave, Georgia. An arbitrary decision he's about to regret. Reacher is the only...

In 1969, two sisters from rural Việt Nam leave their parents’ home and travel to the bustling city of Sài Gòn. Soon their lives are swept up in the unstoppable flames of a war that is blazing through their country. They begin working as ‘bar girls’ in one of the drinking dens frequented by American GIs, forced to accept that survival now might mean compromising the values they once treasured. Decades later, two men wander through the streets and marketplaces of a very different Sài Gòn.

After a mental breakdown costs him his job in New York, a young man returns to Cape Town with his husband, Adrian. It’s 2018. The drought is severe, and their homecoming is tinged with failure and reverse culture shock. But there is hope, too. They want to start a family by adopting a child. As the adoption gets underway, the narrator is forced to confront events from his own childhood he would rather avoid, and question whether he is capable of love and fatherhood.

In a remote valley bound by prayer and fear, two boys are chosen to take part in The Drawing—a sacred ritual meant to cleanse sin from their village. But when mercy defies doctrine, and friendship challenges faith, the fire meant to purify consumes everything instead.

Helen Fairfax is a ferry pilot and the mother of Peter, aged six. From Monday to Friday, she flies from factories to airfields, then returns to the family farmhouse where her parents look after the boy. She feels torn being away from her son so much, but after her husband died in the Battle of Britain she vowed to live up to his example of courage and strike back at the enemy. Now the Germans are about to launch the V-2 against London, and MI6 is desperate to get its hands on an undamaged prototype of the rocket to discover how it might be defeated.

Charlotte Maynard rarely leaves her mother's home - the sprawling Connecticut lake house that belonged to her late stepfather, Whit Whitman. While Charlotte and her sister grew up at Lakeside, their stepbrothers, Spin and Perry, were welcomed as weekend guests. But now the grown boys own the estate, which Charlotte's mother occupies by their grace.

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, he finds that he is compelled to confront Angela about the past. As they start seeing each other again, can they avoid past mistakes? And will their future together be eclipsed by the mistakes of yesterday?

The bestselling novel featuring the “wonderfully epic hero” (People) who inspired the hit film Jack Reacher. Across the country women are being murdered, victims of a disciplined and clever killer who leaves no trace evidence, no fatal wounds, no signs of struggle, and no clues to an...

Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets.

Nora Brown teaches high school English and lives a quiet life in Seattle with her husband and six-year-old daughter. But one November day, moments after dismissing her class, a girl’s face appears above the students’ desks—“a wild numinous face with startling blue eyes, a face floating on top of shapeless drapes of purples and blues where arms and legs should have been. Terror rushes through Nora’s body—the kind of raw terror you feel when there’s no way out, when every cell in your body, your entire body, is on fire—when you think you might die.”