Showing results by narrator "Nicolette McKenzie" in All Categories

Superior saga set in Lancashire and Australia from prize-winner Anna Jacobs. Norah's husband was killed in the Great War, and she's struggling to provide a home for her daughter. Andrew's wife is dead and he wants to make a new life for his two sons. The Australian government is giving...

Red Sky in the Morning is an unputdownable historical story from Margaret Dickinson, richly evocative of the Lincolnshire landscape. A young girl stands alone in the cobbled market place of a small Lincolnshire town, bedraggled, soaked through and very afraid. Who is she? Where has she come from...

Rachel Smedling is not like the other women in her isolated Pennine village: she is taller, stronger and weaves cloth like a man. Without her, the household would fall apart, for her mother is ailing and her vicious drunkard father seems to hate her so much, he would happily offer money to any...

Suffragette Girl is an heart-wrenching tale of love and liberty by the author of The Clippie Girls, Margaret Dickinson. When Florrie Maltby defies her father by refusing to marry Gervase Richards, she sets off a chain of events that will alter her life. Instead she goes to London and becomes...

Brought to you by Penguin. In a place and time unknown, two elderly sisters live in a walled garden, secluded from the outside world. For as long as they can remember, Evelyn and Lily have only had each other. What was before the garden, they have forgotten; what lies beyond it, they do not know...

Bram Deagan has a thriving trading business, a growing family - and a gift for matchmaking. His dearest wish is to see his friends Dougal and Mitchell happily married too. In England, Eleanor Prescott has been widowed and often thinks of Dougal McBride, the ship's captain who was a true friend...

She thought she could trust him . . . Eva Kershaw thought she would never marry, and is happy living a quiet life with her dear friend Alice. But Alice is ill, and her nephew, Gus, has thrust himself into their household. Alice's dearest wish is that Eva should not make the same mistakes she did...

In Stories of Hope, Heather will explore her extraordinary talents as a listener - a skill she employed when she first met Lale Sokolov, the tattooist at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the inspiration for her bestselling novel. It was this ability that led Lale to entrust Heather with his story, which she told in her novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz and the bestselling follow up, Cilka's Journey.

At eighteen, Cathie longs for more than life as a settler in the Australian bush. So when her uncle offers her the chance to send her to England, she grabs the opportunity with both hands and runs away from her family. But little does she know that he is using her to get revenge on his sister...

The house was built in the Old Queen's time: built for an Elizabethan pirate who was knighted for the plunder he brought home. It survived many eras, many reigns: it saw the passing of Cromwell and the Civil War. It became rich with an Indian Nabob and poor with a 20th century innkeeper. It saw wars, and lovers, and death. Children were born there, both heirs and bastards. It had ghosts and legends and a history that grew stranger with every generation.

'When had I a choice to be other than I was?' From childhood Alice Salisbury has learnt obedience in all things and at fourteen dutifully marries the man her father has chosen for her – at the cost of losing the love of her mother forever and the family she holds dear.

When Adelaide Anson-Gravetty finds out her father is not the man who raised her, she is both shocked and intrigued. Determined to find out more about her new family, she travels to the convent of Our Lady of Mercy in France to meet her aunt, the Reverend Mother. But when France falls to the German army, Adelaide and the nuns are soon in the thick of a war that threatens both their beliefs and their lives. Collaborating with the Resistance, sheltering Jewish orphans, defying the rulings of Vichy France: these are dangerous activities in dangerous times.

After yet another failure on the London dating scene, Kate escapes to the idyllic Exmoor village of Bursford and her "Cinderella Project" renovating a run-down cottage on the edge of the moors. Hopes of a quiet retreat are thwarted, however; in a village seething with intrigues, a new female face attracts a lot of attention. She becomes entangled with local landowners the Blackmores - in particular brooding Ed, his divorced playboy brother Jack, and their flighty stepmother, Camilla.

Ruth had fostered a lifelong love of reading, and from the moment she first encountered Pride and Prejudice in the 1940s she had looked to Jane Austen's heroines as her models for the sort of woman she wanted to become. She resolved to re-read Austen's six novels; to reflect on her life in relation to what she discovered in each of them. And as Ruth read between the lines of both the novels and her own life, she began to reclaim her voice.

Brenda Ashford is 91 years old and spent 62 years working as a Norland Nanny. Brenda began training at the Norland Institute in 1939 at the age of 18, shortly before war was declared. Even as a nervous young trainee, Brenda was determined to give the children in her care a wonderful childhood. She worked with evacuees from the East End, as well as in the nurseries of smart Kensington homes. She frequently put her life at risk, dashing to air raid shelters with her charges clutched to her chest. But the war was also a time when people pulled together like never before or since.

Pargeting is a highly skilled trade. And Pargeters is the name given to the Suffolk home of John Mercer in honour of Adam Woodley, the craftsman who had decorated it so lovingly. Over two generations, and throughout the turbulent years of the Civil War, Pargeters comes to stand as a symbol of unity for a household divided by conflicting political loyalties and abandoned by its menfolk. And it is the mistress of Pargeters, Sarah Woodley-Mercer, who holds the small household together in this troubled time.

1921. In the sleepy village of Charlton Ambrose, eight ash trees stand as a timeless memorial to the men killed in the Great War. On a dark and chilly night, a ninth tree appears. Who planted it and why? And who was 'the unknown soldier' for whom it is marked? 2001. Eighty years later, the memorial is under threat from developers. Local reporter, Rachel Elliott, is determined to save it, and to solve the mystery of the ninth tree. The trail will take her into the dark heart of her own family history; to a tragic, love; and to a secret that has been kept since the war to end all wars.

An afternoon at the races - laced with champagne and women - is just another event for Ethan Cartwright, until very ordinary Daisy Donohue catches his eye. Daisy knows to keep her head down and stay invisible amongst the throngs of designer-clad socialites. But ruthless Ethan is intrigued by the drab assistant, and can't resist one passionate embrace! Daisy is devastated to be fired for a kiss - she needs her job! That's where Ethan comes in.

After Julius Caesar's murder, his mistress Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, fled to Alexandria where she gave birth to their son. Civil war broke out in Rome, and Mark Antony, Caesar's friend, was given control over the East. Summoned to his headquarters, Cleopatra made her entry at dusk on a scented, candle-lit barge: and so began one of the greatest love stories of all time.

One lousy Monday, Jenna loses her job, her boyfriend, and her home. She finds a job that feels like a holiday - cataloguing books for an elderly cousin, Kitty Everest, at her country mansion. Jenna soon gets involved in Kitty’s life and the lives of those around her: especially Kitty’s infuriating godson, Alexander Latham, and his icily disapproving fiancée. She is horrified to discover that Kitty may be forced to sell Holtby House.… But when she tries to help save it, an attempt is made on her life. Jenna finds herself at the heart of a baffling plot and a race to save Holtby, Kitty - and herself.