Showing results by narrator "Anna Cordell" in All Categories

Can their friendship survive the darkest days of war? When Abigail arrives for a new start in Bristol in the late 1930s, she knows life won’t be easy - particularly as she is the unmarried mother of three-year-old Emily Grace. But as the war starts to take over the city and threaten their very existence, will Abigail’s new friends, Carrie and Eileen, be enough to keep herself and her daughter safe?

All the neighbours were laughing, drinking out of plastic glasses and getting along. I almost felt happy. Almost forgot about the terrible argument earlier and the sinister messages I’d been receiving from a strange address all week, threatening to expose the lies behind my perfect life. As we finished with the red and gold fireworks and welcomed everyone back to our house, I believed that everything would be okay. But I didn’t know who I was inviting in.

Deep down she knew she was only dreaming, knew that whatever feelings she cherished for him could never be fully returned. After all, he was the heir to the biggest clay works in all of Cornwall, and she was but the daughter of one of their workmen. For just as an unexpected passion began to blossom between Morwen Tremayne and Ben Killigrew, the fates seemed determined to stifle its growth. A long, bitter struggle between owner and workforce brought about Charles Killigrew’s sudden illness, and with it Ben’s summons to the head of the family firm.

Detective Inspector Bethany Smith arrives at the scene of the crime still dressed in her funeral attire. Her head thick with emotion. Her colleagues think she's mad. But she wants to be there. She needs to be there. Even if what she sees makes her skin crawl. The next day another body is discovered. The victim has suffered a similar gruesome fate. Left for dead at the bottom of his garden where the creepy-crawlies can get to him.

Guardian Angel is that rare memoir that grabs you by the shoulders with an urgency that screams, “Pay attention!” It leaps to life with an immediacy and relevance that few books achieve. Beginning with her solitary childhood in London, it took years for Melanie Phillips to understand her parents’ emotional frailties and even longer to escape from them. But Phillips inherited her family’s strong Jewish values and a passionate commitment to freedom from oppression.

This cold call is murder. Detective Bethany Smith is called out to 21 Bladen Avenue, the home of Jason and Georgia Holt. It's one of the worst murder scenes she's ever seen.

The land, sea and skyscapes of the UK are constantly shifting. Species, landmarks and ways of life slip in and out of existence, and firm ground is often just out of reach. Weaving together stories drawn from literature, local history and her own family heritage, Oxford professor Fiona Stafford leads us along coastlines and through forests and fens, revealing the forces, both natural and human, which leave places unrecognisably changed.

Angelina Green never knew her mother, who left her in a cardboard box by the East London docks on a freezing November night when she was a tiny baby. Saved by a local orphanage, she knows she owes her life to the kindness of others. And she’s determined to repay her debt by working as a nurse. Strong, kind and patient, Angelina is a natural on the ward. But when war breaks out in 1914 and she is sent to The Front, her courage is tested like never before....

Lidia was just three years old when she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother, grandparents and foster brother. They were from Belarus, their ‘crime’ that they supported the partisan resistance to Nazi occupation. Lidia was picked by Dr Josef Mengele for his experiments and sent to the children’s block where she survived eighteen months of hell. Injected with infectious diseases, desperately malnourished, she came close to death. Her mother - who risked her life to secretly visit Lidia - was her only tie to humanity.

Summer, 1929. The Hinton Dysart estate is dying from lack of money, and Kit Dysart, the heir, sees no way out. Then, at his sister's wedding, he meets the vibrant Daisy Chudleigh and her cousin, the heiress Matty Verrall. In love with Daisy but troubled by his family's decline, Kit chooses to marry Matty, though neither Kit nor Daisy is able to forget the other. When Matty, growing increasingly unhappy in her troubled, empty marriage, decides to re-create the estate's garden, she discovers solace and a gift of which she never dreamt.

As the Nazis’ relentless bombs fall during the Blitz of Coventry, six-year-old Rose Sherbourne finds herself orphaned and under the guardianship of a Cornish farmer's daughter, Elenor Cardew. Elenor knows that the only way to protect spirited Rose is to leave the city and make a new life for themselves away from harm. But soon Elenor discovers that Hitler’s firestorm is not the only thing she must fear when she learns a devastating secret about Rose....

When Izzie Dean’s beloved nan, Molly Blackshaw, passes away, Izzie returns to the Blackpool bungalow where she grew up, to say good-bye once and for all. When Izzie’s homecoming reunites her with her first love, Justin Swift, every emotion that Izzie has repressed since the day he broke her heart comes rushing to the surface. But then an unexpected discovery changes everything.

Can she save her family and her name from destruction? As financial troubles wrack the Killigrew household, the passion and strength of the man Morwen loved so dearly ebb away. Into this turbulent landscape arrives a dynamic stranger from America. Randell Wainwright is determined to forge a stronger bond with one particular person - Morwen. As old hurts are renewed, bitter family quarrels rage and blackmail and tragedy threaten the foundation of her home, Morwen struggles to save her name and her family from destruction.

When Morwen Tremayne read her vows to Ben Killigrew, now master of the greatest clay works in Cornwall, she swore to stay by his side until death parted them. Had she known how closely she would have to hold to those words, she would still have sworn them a thousand times and with all her heart....

Enid Elliot Linder was the daughter of a butler and a lady’s maid in service in some of England’s grandest country houses. Evoking the lost world of a childhood ‘below stairs’, Linder’s touching memoir describes how her life changed as Britain headed towards war. After the family moved to a Marylebone tenement, her father sought work in London restaurants whilst battling personal demons. Meanwhile Linder’s aunt was nanny to a high-ranking member of the British Union of Fascists as they grew in influence.

Hardly out of childhood, Amy Kennedy and fellow orphans Seth, Jay and Daisy are sent from the Lambeth Workhouse in London to the Devon port of Brixham to be taken into service, the girls as maidservants, the boys as apprentices on a trawler. Although her initiation into her job is hard, Amy quickly finds her feet, and shortly her horizons are brightened by an attentive young man, Daniel Newton, the son of a prosperous sea captain.

Tracey Curtis-Taylor has created headlines around the world with three epic flights in a 1942 Boeing Stearman biplane. Paying homage to two historic female aviators, she flew from Cape Town to Goodwood in 2013, from London to Australia in 2015 and, two years later, completed a transcontinental flight across the USA, after surviving a plane crash during the expedition. But her daring exploits came at a huge personal cost. Tracey tells, in breathtaking detail, the remarkable story of how she overcame extreme adversity to complete her three epic journeys.

Maddy Shillabeer’s prospects are limited. As the only woman in a household of men, in a town with precious few romantic possibilities, she’s resigned herself to a life of familial duty. That is, until the arrival of mysterious stranger Patrick Howard. It’s clear Patrick has seen a world Maddy can only imagine, and she’s awed by his charm and beguiling tongue. In no time at all Patrick has skillfully climbed the social pecking order in Duncannon...and worked his way into Maddy Shillabeer’s heart.

Audrey, recently widowed, is not saying why she left her comfortable home in the south of England to move into an old school boarding house on the edge of a moor. Tina, a young estate agent, is concerned for Audrey’s safety as she believes the folklore about a schoolboy who never went home.

The legal speed limit for vehicles traveling along the Old Military Road was 60 miles an hour, and he was breaking it. If a car rounded a corner in the opposite direction, it would end up in a ditch, because this driver was not in the mood to slow down for anyone. The sound of cannon fire blasted from his top pocket, and he reached for his phone. He took his eyes off the road to read the text, grunted, and handed the phone to the person seated beside him. The passenger glanced at the short message, looked up, and saw they were approaching a humpback bridge. "You're going too fast."