Short Family

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his acclaimed novel about North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson is one of America’s most provocative and powerful authors. Critics have compared him to Kurt Vonnegut, David Mitchell, and George Saunders, but Johnson’s new book will only further...

Are your children bursting with Christmas wonder and excited about the holidays? Would they like stories about kindness, courage, and believing in something bigger than themselves? Or maybe you just want Christmas stories that actually mean something? Then this audiobook was made for you. Voiced by a real narrator with a holiday feel, these fictional and never-heard-before stories will fill your home with laughter, wonder, and important morals that really help kids to develop!

In these stories, inspired by long-lost photographs, the lives of the people in the frame are imagined and then explored, layer by layer. What must have it like to be them? We share the lives of three sisters, brought up in Penang. We hear of what happened to them, and to their Chinese neighbours caught in the tides of war. We see a group of small boys in a Glasgow slum, their young lives stunted by poverty, and hear how life worked out in contrasting ways for them. We follow a young woman's search for love in the unlikely realm of Egyptian antiquities.

In his only work of political satire, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, John Steinbeck turns the French Revolution upside down as amateur astronomer Pippin Héristal is drafted to rule the unruly French. Steinbeck creates around the infamous Pippin the most hilarious royal court ever: Pippin’s...

This is a mini-sequel to The Other Son, a little gift for all those listeners who have been begging to know what happens next. Alice has been lying to herself for years, holding fast to the belief that the needs of her family far outweigh her own. But her outwardly successful marriage hides dark secrets, and for much of her life, the children were the only reason she stuck around.

Wish You Were Dead is a Quick Read short story from bestselling author Peter James. Roy Grace and his family have left Sussex behind for a week’s holiday in France. The website promised a grand house, but when they arrive the place is very different from the pictures. And it soon becomes clear...

From the author of the imaginative and “awe-inspiring” (New York Journal of Books) The Electric State—now a Netflix film—comes the haunting sequel to his remarkable Tales from the Loop. Welcome back to the Loop. In 1954, the Swedish government ordered the construction of the world’s...

In the tradition of George Saunders and Aimee Bender, an exuberantly imagined debut that chronicles an ordinary world marked by unusual phenomena. The eighteen stories of Manuel Gonzales’s exhilarating first book render the fantastic commonplace and the ordinary extraordinary, in prose that...

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST A razor-sharp new collection of stories of visionary childhood misfits and struggling adult dreamers from this legendary writer of “perfectly...

A Guide to Being Born is organized around the stages of life - love, conception, gestation, birth - and the transformations that happen as people experience deeply altering life events, falling in love, becoming parents, looking toward the end of life. In each of these eleven stories Ausubel's stunning imagination and humor are moving, entertaining, and provocative, leading readers to see the familiar world in a new way.

For fans of Dave Eggers and Kelly Link, an exhilarating collection of stories that explores the mysterious, often dangerous forces that shape our lives—from censorship and terrorism to technology and online dating. Spanning centuries, continents, and a diverse set of characters, these...

From Ann Packer, author of the New York Times best-selling novels The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Songs Without Words, a collection of burnished, emotionally searing stories, framed by two unforgettable linked narratives that express the transformation of a single family over the course of a...

WINNER OF THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE The breathtaking debut of an important new voice—centered on a constellation of Korean American families “To encounter these achingly truthful, beautiful stories of newcomer Americans is like gazing up at the...

A bestselling and award-winning debut collection from one of South Korea's most prominent young writers. In crisp, unembellished prose, Eun-young Choi paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught...

Beloved New Yorker writer Lore Segal, at ninety-five years old, is a national treasure. Working at the height of her powers, in this story collection she turns her gimlet eye and compassionate humor on aging and life in the slow lane. From the master of the short short comes a collection of sixteen new stories featuring old friends who have loved and lunched together for over forty years. These erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians offer startling insights into friendship, family and aging.

When Eva decides to investigate the secrets of her family tree on Halloween, she has no idea what she will discover. What is the secret of the large Oak tree with the lightning bolt scar. What happened at the Dunstable Hospital in the late 1960's that caused it to vanish forever.

When Alison Strange receives a debt claim she can’t afford to pay from the Australian government’s unemployment office, she’s caught completely off-balance. As she wrestles with a slippery bureaucracy, her history-loving grandfather bolsters her resolve with the story of their ancestor John Strange, an English cobbler who was banished to Australia for his part in a political movement. Drawing inspiration from John’s life, Alison finds her own unique way to demand a future that’s fair for all.

When Jules first meets the handsome artist Kirin, she’s still mourning her husband’s death, but a fairytale romance soon sweeps her off her feet. Now she and her daughter Scout are moving out of the city and into Kirin’s once-lonely mansion. He’s thoughtfully updated and adapted the home to match their personalities. But Scout is determined to keep her father’s memory alive by rejecting the new life her mother and Kirin have spun for her.

When a doddering Harry Platt tumbles from the top of his stairs in a deadly fall, it looks like an unfortunate accident. But solicitor Tony Standish's suspicions are aroused when he meets the beneficiaries and discovers the immense size of the estate. Jack and Sarah investigate and find that nothing is what it seems when it comes to families - not when money and secrets are involved. Cherringham is a serial novel à la Charles Dickens, with a new audio episode released every two weeks.

It's been 12 years since Liza Carmichael stepped foot in Surrender, but after her great aunt's death she has no choice but to return and settle her estate. Which includes the corner bakery that's been a staple in Surrender for more than 50 years.