Showing results by publisher "Macmillan Audio" in Literary Fiction

When Joan finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, she is stunned by Martin's delight, his instant betrayal of their pact. She makes a fateful, selfless decision then, to embrace her unintentional family. Challenged by raising two precocious sons, it is decades before she finally completes her masterpiece novel. Poised to reclaim the spotlight, to resume the intended life she gave up for love, a betrayal of Shakespearean proportion forces her to question every choice she has made.

Emma is a rising star at the marketing firm she works at as a "creative," but would have trouble describing what exactly it is she does all day. She pours most of her actual creative energy into a popular blog that all of her friends agree is brilliant, but she has yet to make a cent on it. Clem is a massively talented screenwriter just back from New York, where she picked up a fancy graduate degree in film. But until she convinces an agent to take on her masterpiece script, she's stuck hostessing at the bar she frequented as an undergrad.

In Lindsay Hunter’s achingly funny, fiercely honest second novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, we meet Greg—an overweight fifty-eight-year-old and the father of Greg Junior, GJ, who has been missing for three weeks. GJ’s been an addict his whole adult life, disappearing for days at a time, but for some reason this absence feels different, and Greg has convinced himself that he’s the only one who can find his son. So he rents an RV and drives from his home in West Virginia to the outskirts of Orlando, Florida, the last place GJ was seen.

Best-selling novelist Robert Littell employs all his considerable skills in telling the story of Kim Philby through the eyes of more than 20 true-life characters. When Kim Philby fled to Moscow in 1963, he became the most infamous double agent in history. A member of Britain's intelligence service since World War II, he had risen to become their chief officer in Washington, D.C. after the war. The exposure of other members of the group of double agents known as the Cambridge Five led to the revelation that he had been working for Russia for even longer than he had been part of MI6.

The first thing Leif notices about Oola is the sharp curve of her delicate shoulders, tensed as if for flight. Even from that first encounter at a party in a flat outside of London, there's something charged, electric about the way Oola, a music school dropout, connects with the cossetted, listless drifter of a narrator we find in 25-year-old Leif. In love, infatuated, the two hit the road across Europe, house-sitting for Leif's parents' wealthy friends and finally settling for the summer in Big Sur. Left to their own devices, a project begins.

It is 1958 and France's first nuclear submarine, Plongeur, leaves port for the first of its sea trials. On board, gathered together for the first time, are one of the Navy's most experienced captains and a tiny skeleton crew of sailors, engineers, and scientists. The Plongeur makes her first dive and goes down, and down and down. Out of control, the submarine plummets to a depth where the pressure will crush her hull, killing everyone on board, and beyond.

In each section of Michael Cunningham's new book, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. "In the Machine" is a ghost story which takes place at the height of the Industrial Revolution, as human beings confront the alienated realities of the new machine age. "The Children's Crusade," set in the early twenty-first century, plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band which is detonating bombs seemingly at random around the city.

Gail, a prominent Boston judge, keeps receiving letters from her husband's latest girlfriend, while her husband, a theology professor, claims he's nine-months sober from sex with grad students. Hannah, a homemaker, catches her husband having sex with a male prostitute in a public restroom. Bridget, a psychiatric nurse at a state hospital, is sure she has a loving, doting spouse, until she learns that he is addicted to chat rooms and match-making websites.

Grace and Ted Chapman are widely regarded as the perfect couple. Ted is a successful novelist and Grace, his wife of twenty years, is beautiful, carefree, and a wonderful homemaker. But what no one sees are Ted’s rages, his mood swings, and the precarious house of cards that their lifestyle is built upon. When Ted’s longtime assistant and mainstay leaves, his world begins to crumble, and Grace, with dark secrets in her past, is most vulnerable. She finds herself in need of help but with no one to turn to…until Ted’s new assistant, Beth, comes to the rescue.

Richard Yates, who died in 1992, is today ranked by many readers, scholars, and critics alongside such titans of modern American fiction as Updike, Roth, Irving, Vonnegut, and Mailer. In this work, he offers a spare and autumnal novel about a New England prep school. At once a meditation on the twilight of youth and an examination of America's entry into World War II, A Good School tells the stories of William Grove, the quiet boy who becomes an editor of the school newspaper; Jack Draper, a crippled chemistry teacher; and Edith Stone, the schoolmaster's young daughter.

Former Michigan detective Adam Tatum receives an unexpected offer, a golden opportunity that seems almost too good to be true. He travels to 10 Downing Street to participate in a high-stakes conference. Immediately after his visit, a bomb detonates, wounding the prime minister and placing Adam Tatum squarely in the crosshairs of suspicion. Sensing a setup, Tatum flees with his family, desperately fighting for survival in an unfamiliar country.

At Last begins as friends, relatives, and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor. An American heiress, Eleanor married into the British aristocracy, giving up the grandeur of her upbringing for "good works" freely bestowed on everyone but her own son, who finds himself questioning whether his transition to a life without parents will indeed be the liberation he had so long imagined. The service ends, and family and friends gather for a final party.

Young couples gather to participate in an annual "chainsaw party", cutting down trees for firewood in anticipation of the winter. A group of men spend a weekend hunting for mushrooms in the wilderness where they grew up, and where some still find themselves trapped. An aging environmentalist takes out his frustration and anger on a singular, unsuspecting target. A woman helps another get revenge against a man whose crime extends far beyond him to an entire community.

A thrilling adventure set in a peculiar world, a fantastical 18th century, where a young woman must uncover the secrets of her past while confronting the present dangers of a magical wilderness. When Tom Orange rescues a mysterious young woman from a flooded river, he senses that their fates will deeply intertwine. At first she claims to remember nothing, and rumor animates Root - an isolated settlement deep in a strange wilderness.

Callum, a seasoned horse thief at 15 years old, came to America from his native Ireland as an orphan. Ava, her father and brother lost to the war, hides in her crumbling home until Callum determines to rescue her from the bands of hungry soldiers pillaging the land, leaving destruction in their wake. Ava and Callum have only each other in the world and their remarkable horse, Reiver, who carries them through the destruction that is the South.

Wounded in love, tormented by his past, Shakespeare's most complex villain is brought magnificently to life in this tale of two adversaries - one an accused killer; the other, one of the most powerful men in Venice. Having escaped from Cyprus, accused of the murders of the governor, known as the Moor, and his lovely young wife, Iago is now locked in battle with Annibale Malipiero, known as Il Terribile, the chief inquisitor of Italy's greatest city. Malipiero is repelled by the more brutal tasks of the interrogante. His obsession is with the very nature of evil.

It is 1920, and Edward Mason is making a call upon Miss Mary Bayly, the current owner of the legendary Mason family estate, the Retreat. Miss Mary is dying. She plans to give the Retreat to the closest direct descendant of the original immigrant owner that she can find. Edward believes he can charm the old lady, secure the estate and be back in Baltimore by lunchtime. Instead, over the course of a long day, he hears the stories that will forever bind him and his family to the land.

Before she became the immortal and haunting Miss Havisham of Great Expectations, she was Catherine, a young woman with all of her dreams ahead of her. Spry, imperious, she is the daughter of a wealthy brewer. But she is never far from the smell of hops and the arresting letters on the brew house wall - HAVISHAM - a reminder of all she owes to the family name and the family business.

Tom Putnam has resigned himself to a quiet and half-fulfilled life. An English professor in a sleepy college town, he spends his days browsing the Shakespeare shelves at the campus bookstore, managing the oddball faculty in his department and caring, alongside his formidable mother-in-law, for his wife Marjory, a fragile shut-in with unrelenting neuroses, a condition exacerbated by her discovery of Tom's brief and misguided affair with a visiting poetess a decade earlier.

Retired architect Otto Laird is living a peaceful, if slightly bemused, existence in Switzerland with his second wife, Anika. Once renowned for his radical designs, Otto now spends his days communing with nature and writing eccentric letters to old friends (which he doesn't mail). But Otto's comfortable life is rudely interrupted when he learns that his most significant and revolutionary building, Marlowe House, a 1960s tower block estate in South London, is set to be demolished.