Books with author Random House AudioBooks

The Big Miss is Hank Haney's candid and surprisingly insightful account of his tumultuous six-year journey with Tiger Woods, during which the supremely gifted golfer collected six major championships and rewrote golf history. Hank was one of the very few people allowed behind the curtain. He was with Tiger 110 days a year, spoke to him over 200 days a year, and stayed at his home up to 30 days a year, observing him in nearly every circumstance: at tournaments; on the practice range; over meals, with his wife, Elin; and relaxing with friends. The relationship between the two men began in March 2004, when Hank received a call from Tiger in which the golf champion asked him to be his coach. It was a call that would change both men's lives. Tiger - only 28 at the time - was by then already an icon, judged by the sporting press as not only one of the best golfers ever, but possibly the best athlete ever. Already, he was among the world's highest paid celebrities. There was an air of mystery surrounding him, an aura of invincibility. Unique among athletes, Tiger seemed to be able to shrug off any level of pressure and find a way to win. But Tiger was always looking to improve, and he wanted Hank's help. What Hank soon came to appreciate was that Tiger was one of the most complicated individuals he'd ever met, let alone coached. Although Hank had worked with hundreds of elite golfers and was not easily impressed, there were days watching Tiger on the range when Hank couldn't believe what he was witnessing. On those days, it was impossible to imagine another human playing golf so perfectly. And yet Tiger is human - and Hank's expert eye was adept at spotting where Tiger's perfection ended and an opportunity for improvement existed. Always haunting Tiger was his fear of "the big miss" - the wildly inaccurate golf shot that can ruin an otherwise solid round - and it was because that type of blunder was sometimes part of Tiger's game that Hank carefully redesigned his swing mechanics. Hank's most formidable coaching challenge, though, would be solving the riddle of Tiger's personality. Wary of the emotional distractions that might diminish his game and put him further from his goals, Tiger had developed a variety of tactics to keep people from getting too close, and not even Hank - or Tiger's family and friends, for that matter - was spared "the treatment". Toward the end of Tiger's and Hank's time together, the champion's laser-like focus began to blur, and he became less willing to put in punishing hours practicing - a disappointment to Hank, who saw in Tiger's behavior signs that his pupil had developed a conflicted relationship with the game. Hints that Tiger hungered to reinvent himself were present in his bizarre infatuation with elite military training, and - in a development Hank didn't see coming - in the scandal that would make headlines in late 2009. It all added up to a big miss that Hank, try as he might, couldn't save Tiger from. There's never been a book about Tiger Woods that is as intimate and revealing - or one so wise about what it takes to coach a superstar athlete.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak. From the internationally acclaimed, prize-winning, best-selling author of The Book Thief, here is a story told backwards and inside out. The five Dunbar brothers are living - fighting, dreaming, loving - in the perfect squalor of a house without grownups. Today, the father who abandoned them is about to walk back in. But why has he returned, and who have the boys become since he left? At the helm is Matthew, cynical, poetic; Rory, forever truanting; Henry, the money-spinner; and young Tommy, the pet collector who has colonised the house with dysfunctional pets, including Achilles the mule and Rosy the border collie. And then there's Clay, the quiet one, his whole young life haunted by an unspeakable act. From the tale of their grandfather, whose passion for the ancient Greeks still colours their lives, to the mother and father who met over a mislaid piano, to the present day, where five sons dwell in a house with no rules, Bridge of Clay is an epic portrait of a ramshackle family and the unburying of one boy's tragic secret.

In this new middle-grade series from James Patterson, an extraordinary robot signs up for an ordinary fifth grade class - and elementary school will never be the same! It was never easy for Sammy Hayes-Rodriguez to fit in, so he's dreading the day when his genius mom insists he bring her newest invention to school: a walking, talking robot he calls E - for 'Error'. Sammy's no stranger to robots - his house is full of a colourful cast of them. But this one not only thinks it's Sammy's brother - it's actually even nerdier than Sammy. Will E be Sammy's one-way ticket to Loserville? Or will he prove to the world that it's cool to be square? It's a roller-coaster ride for Sammy to discover the amazing secret E holds that could change his family forever - if all goes well on the trial run! Includes a bonus PDF of illustrations.

Tracing his ancestory through six generations - slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects - back to Africa, Alex Haley discovered a sixteen-year-old youth, Kunta Kinte. It was this young man, who had been torn from his homeland and and in torment and anguish brought to the slave markets of the New World, who held the key to Haley's deep and distant past.

Read by two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks. A collection of 17 wonderful short stories showing that Tom Hanks is as talented a writer as he is an actor. A gentle Eastern European immigrant arrives in New York City after his family and his life have been torn apart by his country's civil war. A man who loves to bowl rolls a perfect game - and then another and then another and then many more in a row until he winds up ESPN's newest celebrity, and he must decide if the combination of perfection and celebrity has ruined the thing he loves. An eccentric billionaire and his faithful executive assistant venture into America looking for acquisitions and discover a down-and-out motel, romance and a bit of real life. These are just some of the tales Tom Hanks tells in this first collection of his short stories. They are surprising, intelligent, heart-warming and, for the millions and millions of Tom Hanks fans, an absolute must-have.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Line Becomes a River, written and read by Francisco Cantú. How does a line in the sand become a barrier that people will risk everything to cross? Francisco Cantú was a US Border Patrol agent from 2008 to 2012. He worked the desert along the Mexican border, at the remote crossroads of drug routes and smuggling corridors, tracking humans through blistering days and frigid nights across a vast terrain. He detains the exhausted and the parched. He hauls in the dead. He tries not to think where the stories go from there. He is descended from Mexican immigrants, so the border is in his blood. But the line he is sworn to defend is dissolving. Haunted by nightmares, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. And when an immigrant friend is caught on the wrong side of the border, Cantú faces a final confrontation with a world he believed he had escaped. The Line Becomes a River is timely and electrifying. It brings to life this landscape of sprawling borderlands and the countless people who risk their lives to cross it. Yet it takes us beyond one person's experience to reveal truths about life on either side of an arbitrary line, wherever it is.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Talk to Me, written and read by James Vlahos. The next great technological disruption is coming. The titans of Silicon Valley are racing to build a single world-changing piece of software. They know that whoever gets there first will revolutionise our relationship with technology - and make billions of dollars in the process. They call it voice computing. Computers that can speak and think just as clearly as humans may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but they are mere years away from becoming a reality. In Talk to Me, veteran tech journalist James Vlahos meets the researchers at Google, Amazon and Apple who are leading the way to a voice computing revolution. He explores how voice tech will transform every sector of society, handing untold new powers to businesses, and fundamentally altering the way we understand human consciousness. And he even tries to understand the significance of the AI revolution firsthand - by building a robotic version of his terminally ill father. Vlahos' research leads him to one fundamental question: what happens when our computers become as articulate, as compassionate and as creative as we are?

Here is the gorgeous and sinister story of Marius, patrician by birth, scholar by choice, one of the oldest vampires of them all, which sweeps from his genesis in ancient Rome, in the time of Emperor Augustus, to his meeting in the present day with a creature of snow and ice. Thorne is a Northern vampire in search of Maharet, his maker, the ancient Egyptian vampire queen who holds him and others in thrall with chains made of her red hair, 'bound with steel and with her blood and gold'. When the Visigoths sack his city, Marius is there; with the resurgence of the glory that was Rome, he is there, still searching for his lost love, Pandora, but bewitched in turn by Botticelli; the Renaissance beauty Bianca, with her sordid secrets; and the boy he calls Amadeo (otherwise known as the Vampire Armand). Crisscrossing through the stories of other vampires from Rice's glorious pantheon of the undead, haunted by Pandora and by his alter ego, Mael, tracked by the Talamasca, the tale of Marius, the self-styled guardian of those who must be kept is the most wondrous and mind-blowing of them all.