Showing results by narrator "Annie Aldington" in All Categories

Frances Sweet can’t really remember her real parents. Brought up by her uncle, her cousins Ruby and Mary have always treated her like their little sister. As the war continues to keep her cousins separated from the men they love – Frances is growing up fast enough to catch the eye of dashing American soldier Declan. But she also has a greater longing – to find the mother who abandoned her years before.

The gripping new Second World War novel from Sunday Times top ten best-selling author of While We're Apart. After the death of her parents in a bombing raid, Mary Jones discovers a secret in the pages of her father’s diaries. Her search for the truth brings her to Cliffehaven on the south coast. Here she finds work at the Kodak factory, sifting through the airgraphs, which are being sent from all over the world by the men and women in the armed forces and by their loved ones.

Dara Tailor has had to grow up fast. With a mother addicted to cocaine, Dara must look after her seven younger siblings, until social services split them up for ever. Grace Perry has led a sheltered life. Until her widowed mother is attacked and left for dead and Grace is taken into care. At Holly Brookes Children's Home, the two girls unite in the face of horrific abuse and form an unbreakable bond of loyalty. But when their loyalty is tested can they rely on each other to do the right thing? Friendship - it's all about trust.

London, 1942. Charlotte Fenimore is back home on a week's leave from the Women's Auxiliary Airforce. She had planned for a week of rest and recuperation. She hadn't planned to fall deeply in love with an irascible detective called Dan Chalmers, a wounded hero of Dunkirk who believed no woman would ever look at him again.

1964 - London. Dolly Vincent is born to an East End gangster but is sent away for her own protection. Mad Mick is hell-bent on his revenge and will stop at nothing to kill her. Estranged from her family, she becomes a successful barrister, but after defending a young Italian man she finds herself caught up in a secret held by a high court judge. Tortured and left for dead, she flees London and heads to New York. Only the Vincents know where she is...but even they don't know the truth.

'I'm not working on a factory floor or digging for victory, but in my own small way I do what I can for those I love.' It's 1943, and Peggy Reilly is at her best when the troubles of war come knocking at the door of Beach View Boarding House - especially when it concerns her younger sister, Doreen. Doreen is divorced from Eddie, but his letters have taken on a more threatening tone of late.

Fun-loving Maisie is devoted to her young family and her work at Woolworths. But her happy life with her RAF officer husband and their baby daughter leads her to think of the family she left behind. With the war now into its fourth year, what will she find when she sets about searching for them? Sarah and her husband, Alan, are blissfully happy and long for a sibling for their daughter. But dark days lie ahead for this close family.

Living hand to mouth ever since her mother’s tragic death, Amelia sells the last of her treasured possessions to avoid being cast out of her home onto London’s streets. Her estranged grandfather unexpectedly bequeaths a small struggling factory making mourning dresses and Amelia dares to dream… Drawing sketches by candlelight, she longs to sew elegant gowns from fine silks and beautiful ribbons for the rich. As the cold winter wind begins to bite, Amelia’s future hangs by a thread – can she keep her hopes alive?

Before leaving prison, having served 12 years, Harper Kane makes a promise - to find out what happened to an inmate’s missing teenage daughter. But first, she must secure a well-paid job and a place of her own to take back custody of her son. What she falls into is a frightening discovery of human trafficking. Forced to make an inconceivable decision, Harper will use everything she has learned inside to protect her family, even if that means resorting to murder.

Abandoned by their parents and left to fight for themselves, headstrong Rosalind Carey has no choice but to take charge of her younger brothers and sister in Devonshire’s grand Rockwood Castle. But their once much-loved home is crumbling like the family that lives within it. Living hand to mouth and desperate to provide for the estate that depends on them, the Carey family are one debt away from ruin. Until the day comes when the dashing Piers Blanchard appears on their doorstep from Cornwall, claiming he is Rosalind’s distant cousin and that Rockwood Castle is his.

Christmas is coming to the village of Rockwood. But the happiest time of the year is marred by the news that Rosalind Blanchard’s husband, Piers, is close to death after a shipwreck at sea. The fate of her beloved family home, the crumbling Rockwood Castle, is once more in her hands. She must find the strength to keep her family together.

Winifred Foley grew up in the 1920s, a bright, determined miner's daughter - in a world of unspoilt beauty and desperate hardship, in which women were widowed at 30 and children died of starvation. Living hand to mouth in a tumbledown cottage in the Forest of Dean, Foley - 'our Poll' - had a loving family and the woods and streams of a forest 'better than heaven' as a playground. But a brother and sister were dead in infancy, bread had to be begged from kindly neighbours and she never had a new pair of shoes or a shop-bought doll.

February 1941. Julie Harris is working in London’s East End as a midwife when a bombing raid destroys her family and the house she grew up in. All she has left is her motherless baby nephew William. Determined to uphold her promise to her sister to keep William safe until his father, Bill, returns from the war, she accepts a post as a midwife in Cliffehaven on the south-coast of England.

After a tip-off, a man's body is exhumed from a shallow grave in Edinburgh. Murder surely, yet he died from natural causes, so, case closed? Indeed was there ever a case? But Chief Constable Skinner and his people keep on digging. Who was the man, why was he buried so reverentially, and by whom? Meanwhile corruption is discovered within the force, and an investigation launched.

Excitement is running high in the Adams family. Mr Finch, after a long career in secret government work, is to be knighted - which means that Chinese Lady will become a real 'Lady'! What with having to find a new outfit suitable for the occasion, and worrying about whether she'll have to curtsey to the king, the redoubtable matriarch of the Adams family scarcely knows if she's coming or going.

Banished from her father's home, wheelchair-bound Esther Kerral is horrified when he forces her into an arranged marriage with Morgan Cosmore, the son of a local factory owner. Both fathers hope the union will save their ailing businesses; little do they know that each is as bankrupt as the other. Poor Esther must struggle as best she can not only to survive a loveless marriage, but also to build up a business of her own in a man's world.

Shocked beyond measure at her wrongful imprisonment, Phoebe Pardoe finds it hard to adjust to the harshness of life in the infamous Handsworth Prison. She struggles to maintain her unconquered spirit, little suspecting that her arrest is the work of her jealous Aunt Annie. Phoebe has a guardian angel in the form of Sir William Dartmouth, who eventually engineers her release. But even so, cruelly disinherited, Phoebe must strive to make a living for herself in a man's world.

Best friends Sarah, Maisie and Freda are brought together by their jobs at Woolworths. With their loved ones away on the front line, their bonds of friendship strengthen each day. Betty Billington is the manager at Woolworths and a rock for the girls, having given up on love...until a mysterious stranger turns up one day - could he reignite a spark in Betty?

Meet Margaret Small: 75, plain spoken, Whitstable native and a Cilla Black super fan. Shortly after the death of her idol, Margaret begins receiving sums of money in the post, signed simply 'C'. She is convinced it must be Cilla, but how can it be? To solve the mystery of her benefactor Margaret must go back in her memories almost 70 years, to the time when she was 'vanished' to a long-stay institution for children with learning disabilities.

Michael Flynn is untouchable in a world of power, money and violence. He fights for what he wants and he takes it, whatever the cost. He learns the rules of the life from the best, and when his mentor, legendary Face Patrick Costello, is taken out, no one questions that Michael Flynn is his natural successor. For Michael, loyalty - and crime - pay. Michael Flynn rises to heights beyond anything the criminal underworld has seen. He owns everyone, and he rules his empire with an even but fierce hand. No one would dare challenge him.