On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated outside of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. What happened inside room 306 on the evening of April 3 is the subject of Katori Hall's The Mountaintop. Hours after King's final speech, punctuated by his immortal line, "I've been to the mountaintop," the celebrated Reverend forms an un...

New York Times best-selling author Sarah Waters received sweeping critical acclaim for her debut, Tipping the Velvet, and has been a finalist for the Orange and Booker Prizes. In The Night Watch she tells the riveting, intersecting tales of four Londoners during and after World War II. As these four people survive the devastation of war and experie...

In 1972, two seconds were added to time. It was in order to balance clock time with the movement of the earth. Byron Hemming knew this because James Lowe had told him and James was the cleverest boy at school. But how could time change? The steady movement of hands around a clock was as certain as their golden futures. Then Byron's mother, late...

Two families. Seven days. One house. Angela and her brother Richard have spent twenty years avoiding each other. Now, after the death of their mother, they bring their families together for a holiday in a rented house on the Welsh border. Four adults and four children. Seven days of shared meals, log fires, card games and wet walks. But in the quie...

God takes a look at the Earth around the time of the Renaissance and everything looks pretty good - so he takes a holiday. In Heaven-time this is just a week's fishing trip, but on Earth several hundred years go by. When God returns, he finds all hell has broken loose: world wars, holocausts, famine, capitalism and 'fucking Christians everywhere'....

Mark Renton has it all: he's good-looking, young, with a pretty girlfriend and a place at university. But there's no room for him in the 1980s. Thatcher's government is destroying working-class communities across Britain, and the post-war certainties of full employment, educational opportunity and a welfare state are gone. When his family starts to...

Jodi Picoult's poignant #1 New York Times best-selling novels about family and love tackle hot-button issues head on. In The Storyteller, Sage Singer befriends Josef Weber, a beloved Little League coach and retired teacher. But then Josef asks Sage for a favor she never could have imagined-to kill him. After Josef reveals the heinous act he committ...

Kennedy Marr is a novelist from the old school. Irish, acerbic, and a borderline alcoholic and sex-addict, his mantra is drink hard, write hard and try to screw every woman you meet. He's writing film scripts in LA, fucking, drinking and insulting his way through Californian society, but also suffering from writers block and unpaid taxes. Then a so...

Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year and the Green Carnation Prize 'More than just one of the best debuts of the year; one of the best books of the year. It should do for Aberdeen what Trainspotting did for Edinburgh' Louise Welsh, Herald When Janie Rya...

I wos a secrit shy and tungtied emptyheded thing. I wos tort to read and rite and spell by my tenda littl muther & by Mr McCaufrey the butcha & by Missus Malone and her gosts. So I am not cleva, so please forgiv my folts and my mistayks. I am the won that glares into your harts & that prowls insyde yor deepist dremes. Wonce I was The An...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of The Way We Were by Sinead Moriarty, read by Robert Portal, Rachel Louise Miller, Alison McKenna and Daniel Weyman. WINNER OF THE IRISH BOOK AWARD FOR POPULAR FICTION 2015 'Heartfelt and deeply moving ... I couldn't put it down.' Susan Lewis 'Intriguing and thought provoking ... a g...

Meet Raymond Gunt. A decent chap who tries to do the right thing. Or, to put it another way, the worst person ever: a foul-mouthed, misanthropic cameraman, trailing creditors, ex-wives and unhappy homeless people in his wake. Men dislike him, women flee from him. Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absol...

Dolores Claiborne has a story to tell. But it is not quite what the police had expected. Dolores Claiborne has a confession to make.... She will take her time. Won't be hurried. Will do it her way, sparing neither details nor feelings. Hers or anyone else's. This is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Truth that takes you to the e...

How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twi...

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...

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...

England,1976. Mrs Creasy is missing and The Avenue is alive with whispers. As the summer shimmers endlessly on, ten-year-olds Grace and Tilly decide to take matters into their own hands. And as the cul-de-sac starts giving up its secrets, the amateur detectives will find much more than they imagined...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Pat Barker's powerful and unforgettable story of art and war, Life Class.Spring, 1914. The students at the Slade School of Art gather in Henry Tonks's studio for his life-drawing class. But for Paul Tarrant the class is troubling, underscoring his own uncertainty about making a mark...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Toby's Room, a dark, compelling novel of human desire, wartime horror and the power of friendship. When Toby is reported 'Missing, Believed Killed', another secret casts a lengthening shadow over Elinor's world: how exactly did Toby die-and why? Elinor determines to uncover the trut...

Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he's been alive for centuries. From Elizabethan England to Jazz-Age Paris, from New York to the South Seas, Tom has seen a lot, and now craves an ordinary life. Always changing his identity to stay alive, Tom has the perfect cover - working a...

Eighteen-year-old Laura Leverett arrives from America for a new life in England. At the side-lines of her cousin's glamorous gatherings, Laura hungers for someone with whom she can discuss the new political ideas sweeping through London. Edward Last is the kindred spirit Laura has been waiting for. But the secret he is carrying will test Laura's id...