Showing results by narrator "Sandra Duncan" in All Categories

When Lily moves into Marcus' flat, she is intrigued by signs of his recently departed ex-lover. A single dress left hanging in the wardrobe, a mysterious mark on the wall, the lingering odour of jasmine. Who was this woman? And what exactly were the circumstances of her sudden disappearance? It doesn't take long for Lily's curiosity to grow into an all-pervading obsession.

This is the incredible rise and unbelievable fall of a woman whose energy and ambition is often overshadowed by Napoleon’s military might. In this triumphant biography, Kate Williams tells Josephine’s searing story, of sexual obsession, politics and surviving as a woman in a man’s world. Abandoned in Paris by her aristocratic husband, Josephine's future did not look promising.

Julia is married and eight years Julian's senior; he is a gifted English student, a life of academia ahead. Ignoring warnings, they both give up all they have to be together. When Julian hears that his boyhood home is for sale, he sets out to recreate a paradise for his new family. It is only when their daughter, Mira, becomes terrifyingly ill that it is impossible for Julia to conceal the explosive secret that she has been keeping from him.

John visits his ageing mother, Mary, in her nursing home by the sea, and mourns the slow fading of her mind. Hoping to shore up her receding memory, he prompts her with songs, photographs, and questions from their shared past, taking her back to the 1940s, when she was a young woman and he a child in a small Cumbrian town. But as he rekindles her memories, it is her own mother she longs for - and John finds himself delving further back, into the secrets and silences of Mary's fractured childhood, and the unsung sorrows of her thwarted yet spirited mother, Grace.

Black Rainbow is the powerful first-person story of one woman's struggle with depression and how she managed to recover from it through the power of poetry. In 1997, Oxford graduate, working mother, and Times journalist Rachel Kelly went from feeling mildly anxious to being completely unable to function within the space of just three days.

For 40 years, Willy Chapman has struck a strange but steadfast bargain between the two poles of his life: his beautiful but emotionally damaged wife and the sweet shop he runs on a South London high street. Devoted to each, he has maintained a delicate, precarious balance. Now, on a hot summer’s day, he attempts to settle his final accounts and reach an understanding with a third, disruptive element in his reckoning: his angry, unforgiving daughter.

In this version of London, there is a small, private clinic. Behind its layers of security, procedures are taking place on poor, robust teenagers from northern estates in exchange for thousands of pounds - procedures that will bring the wealthy dead back to life in these young, supple bodies for 14 days. It's an opportunity for wrongs to be righted, for fathers to meet grandsons, for scientists to see their work completed. Old wine in new bottles. But at what cost?

In 1922, Christian, a young artist, travels to Weimar to begin his studies at the Bauhaus, where the avant-garde confronts conservative elements around it. With postwar Germany in turmoil, while the Bauhaus attempts to explore radical ways of thinking and living, Christian finds that love will change him forever. And in 1970s London Duncan uses his inheritance to establish the country's first gay bookshop in the face of opposition from the neighbours and victimisation by the police.

'I still have that recurring fear of something happening to me before I see you again, and before I can tell you myself just how much and how often I've realised during the last few months that I love you completely and to the exclusion of all others. Remember that, because if there wasn't you, my darling Mary, the world would seem very empty and meaningless.' Mary was only 21 when she met and fell in love with the privately educated 19-year-old David in 1938.

In Ruth Davidson's Yes She Can we meet world-beating women from fields as diverse as science, politics, the military, business and sport. They share their own journeys to the top - whether that's becoming Prime Minister, winning an Olympic gold medal or teaching male special forces how to fight. They share the bad times, too, the challenges faced and difficulties to hurdle, explaining what they've learned along the way. We also see the author's own path as she tracks the societal shifts that have seen women advance - and discuss how far we've still got to go.

The publishing house of John Murray was founded in Fleet Street in 1768 and remained a family firm over seven generations. Published to coincide with this remarkable achievement' and in the anniversary year, Dear Mr Murray is a collection of some of the best letters from the hundreds of thousands held in the John Murray Archive. They reveal not only the story of some of the most interesting and influential books in history but also the remarkable friendships - as well as occasional animosities - between author and publisher as well as readers, editors, printers and illustrators.

"Housekeeper or housewife?" the soldier asks Silvana as she and eight-year-old Aurek board the ship that will take them from Poland to England at the end of the war, to Janusz, her husband. But she isn’t sure any longer that she is a wife of any kind or whether she has a house. After living wild in the forests for years, carrying a terrible secret, all Silvana knows is that she and Aurek are survivors. In Ipswich, Janusz is getting ready for the arrival of the wife and son he hasn't seen in six years. After fleeing Poland and the war that left him a deserter, he has found his family a house.

Casper became a national celebrity when newspapers ran the story of the amazing cat that regularly took the No. 3 bus on journeys around his home town, Plymouth, in Devon, South-West England. While his devoted owner Sue Finden had wondered where her elusive pet was disappearing to each day, Casper was brightening the lives of countless commuters. Bus drivers, too, were getting well-acquainted with Casper, and notices went up in their depot alerting staff that a very special passenger might board their vehicle.

This is a story about a woman. And the truck driver who mistook her for a prostitute. The old man she robbed and the hunters who smuggled her across the border. The woman whose name she stole, the wife who turned a blind eye. This is the story of a mother searching for her child. This is a story you cannot stop thinking about.

It was Charles I's love for his queen, Henrietta Maria, that plummeted England into the darkness of the Civil Wars, but it was the love and loyalty of another man that sustained her through days of betrayal, destitution, and death.

Tall and brave, Harry Jermyn is captivated by the witty French princess, just 14 years old when she sails with him to Dover, queen of a land she has never seen, of a people whose language she cannot speak, who despise her for her faith - and wife of a king she has never met.

Introducing Interviewing by William Seymour - the winning short story of the Bookseller Futurebook audio original competition 2019. When a young job applicant is overwhelmed with anxiety attacks about an impending interview, his world seems about to implode. Worse still, the calm voice of reason in his head is no help at all...Chosen for its unique writing approach and fascinating prose, Interviewing is a piece of writing that is enhanced by a fresh, forward approach to the audio format.

For Eve, Irene, Betty, and Rosemary, working at the exclusive Heyworth's department store in Cambridge is a dream come true. Once the girls step inside the elegant building, the hardships of their own lives are temporarily forgotten. Serving a variety of customers, from glamorous gypsy queens to royalty and the city's fashionable elite, the store is a place where these young women can forge successful careers under the ever-watchful eye of flamboyant owner Mr Heyworth.

Pilgrim State is a stunning memoir which tells the story of Dorothy Walker - equal parts beautiful, headstrong, brave, and tragic. Her life is lovingly recreated by her daughter, Jacqueline, in homage to the remarkable woman she was.