Will her soldier sweetheart make it home for Christmas?Lydia is in training to be a nurse when she first meets Robert and, despite the differences in their class and background, they fall head over heels for one another. Robert is the nephew of a Lord, and Lydia a mere doctor’s daughter – and a German doctor at that. While her parentage is no hindrance to their relationship in peacetime, when war is declared Robert’s family makes it clear they no longer approve of the match. With no means of con...
When Rose was four the scandal broke about her head. She was really too young to understand what was happening - only that her mother was in disgrace and that they were leaving Aunt Mabe in America and returning home to England. The following May, Joanna - 'Jon' - was born. Rose and Jon were totally different. Jon was vivacious, fun, liked a good time, and always got what she wanted, even when what she wanted happened to belong to Rose. Rose was reserved, controlled, never wanted to leave her ho...
Set in Victorian Edinburgh and West Lothian, this novel is the story of Lorianna Blackwood and her daughter, Clementina. Lorianna was only 16 when she married Gavin Blackwood, a widower and a victim of his own repressed sexuality. Clementina is determined to fight her mother's kind of subjugation.
Poppy's family is gathering to celebrate her eightieth birthday. Her children, grandchildren and even one great-grandchild are converging on her Sussex home. As she prepares to welcome them all, her mind goes back over her life - to her tough childhood in Yorkshire, to her mother, who scrimped and saved to bring her up decently, to her three husbands and to Alun, the great love of her life who was taken from her by the war. Yes, she has had a full life - a lot fuller than her family realises. As...
When young Jinnie Howlett's widowed father, a tinker man, died a pauper, she was indeed fortunate already to be an inmate of a northern workhouse, for with no other relatives, she might otherwise have ended up on the streets, a fate for children of her age that was, in the latter years of the nineteenth century, all too common. When, close to her fifteenth birthday and after years of toil and drudgery and an unfortunate experience at a previous workplace, she was at last offered a position as a...
Manon Jenkins has had a cherished childhood in the sleepy village of Five Saints in the heart of Wales, but when her beloved father dies, she is left homeless and alone. The handsome blacksmith, Morgan Lewis, cares deeply for her, but she cannot make herself marry a man she doesn't love. She longs for Caradoc Jones, son of a famous Welsh cattle drover and, in desperation, she accepts a job as chaperon to Caradoc's spoilt sister Georgina, and joins the drovers on the road to Smithfield market in...
Laura, now wealthy and successful, had survived a bitter past and endured poverty, fear and pain. Then along had come the older and wiser Ben, who had smoothed her path and given her love and security - but now Ben had become a stranger beyond her reach. By the author of "Spinning Jenny".
The quarrel had begun many years before - in 1850 on a West Indian sugar plantation - but although Charles Martinez and Hanover Rudolph had been dead a long time, the resentment and grudges of that old enmity still separated the two most important families in Bristol. The Rudolphs and the Martinez disliked each other intensely - until the Michaelmas Ball of 1927. There, Jack Martinez, handsome roue and gambler, danced with spoilt, precocious Maude Rudolph and a spark was kindled. The two young l...
From a house on the edge of her family's dusty farmland airstrip near Chicago, the child Cassie O'Malley would sneak into the night to look at the planes sitting shimmering in the moonlight. Her World War I veteran father, Pat, wanted his son to be a pilot, not his reckless, red-haired daughter. But it was Cassie who had the gift. Ever since she could remember, Cassie felt the pull of getting in a cockpit and taking to the skies. Observing all the while was her father's junior partner, ...
Polly Anna never knew her father, and when her mother died, in poverty, when Polly Anna was just three, the workhouse was the only place for her. Helped by Jonty, a misfit and a cripple who became her best friend, she ran away with the fairground folk and travelled around as a horserider and acrobat - to Appleby Horse Fair, Nottingham Goose Fair and Hull Fair. Her friends became the circus people and the gypsies, and her home the caravans and tents of the travellers. Meanwhile, in a great house...
When Fred Carpenter suggests to his wife, Sally, that they should take a boating holiday on the Norfolk Broads, she is filled with trepidation. Nevertheless she summons her courage and they and their bull-terrier Bill set off, with Fred at the helm of Dogfish Three. Sally's misgivings are soon justified, as a series of disasters, human, nautical and canine, threaten to ruin their holiday. Then everything changes as they make friends with the boating fraternity and encounter the remarkable fif...
Sarah is devastated when her lover Dominic betrays her, and to help her recovery she takes a job writing the history of an old manor house, once the home of her father's ancestors, now owned by an American University. Here she becomes immersed in the poignant story of her family, and in particular of Robert, Lord Harlaston, who may have been her grandfather. Was he the callous seducer of an innocent village maiden, or was there some deeper, more passionate mystery in the story of Robert and Char...
HANNAH MASSEY Proud and canny, ignorant and intensely ambitious, Hannah Massey is a born ruler. Her kingdom may be only a working-class household in County Durham, but within its walls her iron will governs a predominantly male family and her word is unchallengeable law. Now, in late middle age, her ambition is still not satisfied. She wants to see her brood living in the house where she was in service as a young girl. The apple of Hannah's eye is her pretty younger daughter, Rosie, who has...
Tara Flynn has come a long way since she was a little girl growing up in the village of Ballygrace. Now mistress of Ballygrace House, the beautiful mansion overlooking the Tullamore countryside, Tara has everything she's always wanted - security, a beautiful home, and the love of a good man. But the Irish have an expression - 'the two days', meaning good and bad fortune. Tara may have everything she's ever dreamed of, but can she hold on to it? In Stockport, Tara's dear friend Biddy has problem...
Alan Carter was only married to Dora for a week before being called up to serve in The Great War on HMS Viper. Eighteen months later, convalescing from a shoulder wound, he discovers his wife has almost forgotten him - and fallen in love with an American soldier. Devastated, he leaves East London for Cornwall. When his shoulder is better, even if his heart is still broken, he goes back into service and puts everything into it - getting two medals for bravery in the process. After the war he deci...
Lonely Teardrops (A Champion Street Market Saga, #6) (Champion Street Market, #6)
by Freda Lightfoot
On the day of her beloved fathers funeral, Harriet's grandmother tells her that Joyce, the woman she has always called Mam, isnt her real mother after all. At least that explains why Joyce has always favoured Harriets brother, Grant blood is thicker than water. Her emotions in turmoil, Harriet discovers a streak of rebellion that puts into jeopardy everything she holds dear. Can she come back from the brink or will her life be full of lonely teardrops?
With the world at her feet, eighteen-year-old Cam Rogers has every right to feel bitter at the legacy she is left to deal with when a series of traumatic events take place that shapes her destiny for ever. Instead, though, she does her utmost to overcome the challenges that lie ahead and to make the best of what she's got. Rose Rogers is not so forgiving. Consumed with bitterness for the cruel way she feels that life has treated her, she does not care who she hurts or how she uses people, even...
When artist Fergus Vincent forsakes the slums of Lewin's Mead in Bristol he leaves behind him Becky, the street urchin whom he loved and married. As he sets sail on a warship bound for mutiny-torn India, Becky is left with the secret knowledge that she is carrying their child . . . But Becky has learned how to survive and she does not face the birth of her daughter, Lucy, alone. When a deadly cholera epidemic sweeps through Lewin's Mead and Becky is struck down she is cared for by Simon McAllist...