Hesther Quantock is universally loathed by the other seamen who run shipping lines and Gabrielle is the first member of her family to defy their tyrannical grandmother - and live. When Captain Luke Calthan discovers her stowed away, he finds it hard to resist the passion she arouses in him.
Things are looking up for Caroline and Malcolm Parker: they have a new baby girl and Malcolm's son, Chris, is back, helping his father to plant a vineyard. When Chris discovers silver artefacts in the vineyard they call in antiques expert Diana Fraser, a striking woman to whom Chris is immediately attracted. But things will not be so easy...Diana's revelations about the silver provide a background reaching back into the history of Kent, but it is the strengthening relationships between a cast of...
Throughout her childhood, Becky Ryan has lived in fear of her alcoholic mother and selfish stepsister, Dora, as the family struggle to survive on a miner's wage. With only her other sister, Liz, for support, she determines that she will run away to Newcastle as soon as she is old enough. Once in Newcastle, Becky's feisty spirit and talent for dress-making combine to launch her on a new life - a life that will take her far from the hardship and misery of her childhood to a new world of romance an...
Julia has just turned seventeen when she first meets Captain Charles Hamilton. A casualty of war he has lost all memory of his family or life before he heroically saved a soldier from the trenches. He has come to the home of Julia's parents, Philip and Jenny Allington, to recuperate and try to piece his past back together. Julia and Charles fall in love but it seems there are secrets in his past which cannot remain hidden for long, and soon Julia realises the man she married is more scarred than...
Ellie, just married to Quinn Peters, is set to live happily ever after She has not bargained, however, for the intervention of her flamboyant Aunt Columba of the famous theatrical Flowerdew family. A casual remark of Columba's about the similarity that Quinn bears to Ellie's mother's first husband, sixties pop star the Mighty Rich of the Coinmakers, sets in train a frantic hunt into the past. Ellie has been told that her half-brother Marcus, whose photograph sits by her mother's bed, had died as...
A spellbinding novel of 19th century Ireland, from the acclaimed author of On A Clear Day and Beyond the Green Hills Little Rose McGinley is just seven years old when her family is harshly evicted from their home in Donegal, victims of the Clearances of 1861. It is the first step in what will be a long and eventful journey for Rose, one that will take her from Donegal to Kerry, and back again to the North, with her husband and four children. But the feisty little girl blossoms into a woman of ex...
Four-year-old Annette and Lisette Balfour are sent to live with their aunt's family in Scotland after their mother dies in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919, and their father goes back to sea. But times are hard for farmers, and when an opportunity arises for Lizzie to move to London with her mother's wealthy sister, the family seize it - even though it means the twins will be separated. As they grow up, Annie and Lizzie live very different lives, one in solitary luxury in London, the other, surr...
The Unbearable Lightness of Scones (44 Scotland Street, #5)
by Alexander McCall Smith
The story of Bertie and his dysfunctional family continues in this fifth instalment alongside the familiar cast of favourites - Big Lou, Domenica, Angus Lordie, Cyril and others - in their daily pursuit of a little happiness. With customary charm and deftness, Alexander McCall Smith has again given us a clever, witty and utterly delightful new novel.
This is an engrossing saga set in the North East of Victorian England. As the sixth of Mary Ingram's surviving children, Calandra - known as Callie - determines from an early age that she will not follow in her beloved mother's footsteps. Married into a fisherman's family near Hartlepool, Mary's life is one of hard work, unrelenting poverty and narrow horizons. One day, whilst gathering sea coal at the water's edge, Callie meets Patricia Lazarus and her brother James. Though their backgrounds ar...
1919, London's East End. Robert Hunter is eagerly awaiting the return of his father from the war. Next door, Ruth Cooper's family are also preparing to welcome her dad, whose ship was lost at Jutland. After five years of separation and anxiety - and, for Bob, the worry of caring for his frail mother - emotions are running high for both young people. But Alf Hunter, who saw action in the trenches, returns a changed man, and when he takes to drink, Bob must put his own happiness on hold to support...
The Heart of the Home (A Badgers Brook Saga, #4)
by Grace Thompson
Meriel Evans had worked in her father's estate agency since leaving school and she was happy there, but at twenty-nine she knew she had to make a move. She found a place at the Ace Estate Agency but realised at once that the owner, George Dexter, and her father knew and disliked each other. Though neither would explain why. She was attracted to the house called Badgers Brook and determined to stay, even though she would miss her parents and her lifetime love, Leo Hopkins. The quarrel between Dex...
The girl from Wish Lane is Eva Masson, brought up in poverty in 1920s Dundee, who longs to escape to something better than the jute-mills in Scotland where her mother and sister are spinners. Clever as well as pretty, Eva is selected to stay on at school after the age of 14 and trains as a teacher. When she falls in love with Nicholas North, privileged son of the jute-mill owner, she embarks on a life very different from that of her family.But Eva is principled and compassionate, and things are...
New Beginning (Badger Brook, #3) (A Badgers Brook Saga, #3)
by Grace Thompson
Badgers Brook offers her the chance for a fresh start. As the Second World War ends, Sophie Daniels quits the WAAF with nowhere to go. She wanders around the country searching for a place where she can settle, living in bedsits, barns, and small guesthouses in the meantime. Eventually she finds Badgers Brook, where she meets and befriends nine-year-old Bertie, neglected and running wild.The neighbours warm to her, the place is welcoming, and Sophie knows she has found her home. Friendly local Ry...
A sensitively written and memorable novel of youth by one of Scotland's most distinguished twentieth century writers. Malcolm, studious, imaginative, footballing, shy, sexually aware but uncomfortably innocent, is in his last term at school on a Hebridean island during the Second World War. His awkward relationship with his teachers, his widowed mother and younger brother, his friends - and with Janet whom he loves from a distance and the less comely and warmer, but to him still enigmatic, Shei...
Ralph Simmons, a writer, struggles to survive a nervous breakdown that leaves him anxious, suspicious, and frightened. In the Middle of the Wood is considered by many to be Iain Crichton Smith's most remarkable achievement in prose. Like Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, it derives directly from a phase of paranoia, which in Crichton Smith's case actually led to a spell in a mental hospital.
The new summer romance from the bestselling author of Home Sweet Christmas Some things shouldn’t be left to chance… For Heather life is pretty perfect. She has a successful business, a cute but contemptuous cat, and best friends Daphne and Tori. Except one thing, the father she never knew. Should she find him, and risk heartache or be content not knowing why he left? When Daphne’s husband accuses her of having an affair her world is rocked. T...