Showing results by narrator "Fiona Hardingham" in All Categories

As a consequence of his actions during the Ludus uprising, Fallon's love, Cai, has been stripped of his decurion rank and cast down to serve as one of Caesar's gladiators. Amid fighting for Cai's freedom, Fallon soon learns Caesar's enemies are plotting against him and planning to get revenge on his fearsome gladiatrices. When Caesar is murdered by these conspirators, Fallon and the girls lose any sort of protection they once had. Fallon also realizes the foreign Queen Cleopatra is now in grave danger.

In ancient Ireland, an island ruled by kings and druids, the nuns of Saint Brigid are fighting to keep their monastery alive. When the bones of Brigid go missing from their church, the theft threatens to destroy all they have worked for. No one knows the danger they face better than Sister Deirdre, a young nun torn between two worlds.

When Anikka Lachlan's husband, Mac, is killed in a railway accident, she is offered - and accepts - a job at the Railway Institute's library and searches there for some solace in her unexpectedly new life. But in Thirroul in 1948, she's not the only person trying to chase dreams through books. There's Roy McKinnon, who found poetry in the mess of war but who has now lost his words and his hope. There's Frank Draper, trapped by the guilt of those his medical treatment and care failed on their first day of freedom.

Wendy Darling: Seas finds Wendy and Michael aboard the dreaded Sudden Night, a dangerous behemoth sailed by the infamous Captain Hook and his blood-thirsty crew. In this exotic world of mermaids, spies, and pirate-feuds, Wendy finds herself struggling to keep her family above the waves.

Irréelle fears she’s not quite real. Only the finest magical thread tethers her to life - and to Miss Vesper. But for all her efforts to please her cruel creator, the thread is unraveling. Irréelle is forgetful as she gathers bone dust. She is slow returning from the dark passages beneath the cemetery. Worst of all, she is unmindful of her crooked bones. When Irréelle makes one final, unforgivable mistake by destroying a frightful creature just brought to life, Miss Vesper threatens to imagine her away once and for all.

Strange things are happening in Village Drowning, and a terrifying encounter has 11-year-old Rye O'Chanter convinced that the monstrous, supposedly extinct Bog Noblins have returned. Now Rye's only hope is an exiled secret society so notorious its name can't be spoken aloud: The Luck Uglies. As Rye dives into Village Drowning's maze of secrets, rules, and lies, she'll discover the truth behind the village's legends of outlaws and beasts…and that it may take a villain to save them from the monsters.

Once Ananke was an experimental military spacecraft. But a rogue computer virus transformed it - her - into something much more: a fully sentient artificial intelligence, with all the power of a god - and all the unstable emotions of a teenager. Althea, the ship's engineer and the last living human aboard, nearly gave her life to save Ananke from dangerous saboteurs, forging a bond as powerful as that between mother and daughter. Now she devotes herself completely to Ananke's care.

Cello is in crisis. Princess Ko's deception of her people has emerged, and the Kingdom is outraged: The Jagged Edge Elite have taken control, placing the Princess and two members of the Royal Youth Alliance under arrest and ordering their execution; the King's attempts to negotiate their release have failed.

When famed poet Hugh de Bonne is discovered dead of a heart attack in his bath one morning, his cousin Robert Highstead, a historian turned postmortem photographer, is charged with a simple task: transport Hugh’s remains for burial in a chapel that has been locked and abandoned for 16 years, housing the remains of his beloved wife, Ada. However, Ada’s grief-stricken niece refuses to open the chapel for Robert unless he agrees to her bargain: Before he can lay Hugh to rest, Robert must record Isabelle’s story of Ada and Hugh’s ill-fated marriage over the course of five nights.

The Man in the Iron Mask has all the hallmarks of a thrilling adventure story: a glamorous and all-powerful king, ambitious ministers, a cruel and despotic jailor, dark and sinister dungeons - and a secret prisoner. It is easy for forget that this story, made famous by Alexandre Dumas, is that of a real person, Eustache Danger, who spent more than 30 years in the prison system of Louis XIV’s France - never to be freed. This narrative brings to life the true story of this mysterious man and follows his journey through four prisons and across decades.

Sixteen-year-old Anna Arden is barred from society by a defect of blood. Though her family is part of the Luminate, powerful users of magic, she is Barren, unable to perform the simplest spells. Anna would do anything to belong. But her fate takes another course when, after inadvertently breaking her sister's debutante spell - an important chance for a highborn young woman to show her prowess with magic - Anna finds herself exiled to her family's once powerful but now crumbling native Hungary.

Lady Claire Trevelyan had been looking forward to glittering balls, congenial society, and relief from pursuit during her stay with Lord and Lady Dunsmuir in the Canadas. Well, perhaps not entirely. Being pursued by a handsome airship captain is rather diverting, especially when it appears her erstwhile employer, Andrew Malvern, is becoming much too distracted by a certain blond mechanic.

Virginia St. George - of the dragon-slaying St. George dynasty - has the brains and bloodline that define her family's legacy, but she's never been good at following in their footsteps. She doesn't have the powerful magic every St. George is born with or the sword-wielding skills of the paladins - like her sister, Celeste - who bravely combat their fire-breathing foes. Even worse, a past tragedy has left Virginia with a crippling fear of dragons...and facing arranged marriage to an aging nobleman eager for heirs.

Alina yearns for freedom. She and her husband, Liviu, are teachers in their 20s, living under the repressive regime of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in the Socialist Republic of Romania in the 1970s. But after her brother-in-law defects, Alina and Liviu fall under suspicion and surveillance, and their lives are suddenly turned upside down - just like the glasses in her superstitious aunt Theresa's house that are used to ward off evil spirits.

For her 16th birthday, Vaela Sun receives the most coveted gift in all the Spire - a trip to the Continent. It seems an unlikely destination for a holiday: a cold, desolate land where two nations remain perpetually locked in combat. Most citizens lucky enough to tour the Continent do so to observe the spectacle and violence of battle, a thing long vanished in the peaceful realm of the Spire.

Her father may have sacrificed his own life to save hers, but heiress Gloria Meriwether-Astor is finding it difficult to forgive him. After all, how many young ladies of her acquaintance will inherit wealth, beauty, and a legacy of arms dealing? Now the Royal Kingdom of Spain and the Californias is about to declare war on the Texican Territory and Gloria simply will not allow it. In company with Alice Chalmers and the crew of Swan, along with a lost young Evan Douglas seeking to make reparation for his own sins, she takes to the air.

Rye O'Chanter was shocked to discover that her father was the leader of the notorious band of outlaws known as the Luck Uglies. Now she too has been declared a criminal in her own village, and she must flee to the strange and remote Isle of Pest while her father faces off against the Luck Uglies' bitterest rivals, the Fork-Tongue Charmers, on the mainland.

Ananke may have the powers of a god, but she is consumed by a very human longing: to know her creators. Now Ananke is on a quest to find companionship, understanding, and even love. She is accompanied by Althea, the engineer who created her and whom she sees as her mother. And she is in search of her "father", Matthew, the programmer whose code gave her the spark of life.

Thirty-year-old Celeste Hamilton's life is at a crossroads: she has just left a disastrous marriage, and her estranged mother has recently died, leaving the family's rose business in jeopardy. Reluctantly, Celeste returns to the family home, a moated manor house in Suffolk, to help her two younger sisters sort out the estate and revive the business.

Lost in the frozen wilderness, Briony leads her friends ever northward, in search of a rumored cave wherein lies their only hope of returning home to the kingdom of Tiralaen with Prince Elyan, the rightful heir to the throne, to save her people from civil war. What she discovers instead is an impossible kingdom of opulence and decadence beyond her wildest imagining. Here, an ancient goddess is about to awaken once more...and she has never forgiven Briony's people for their intrusion into this world, nor the centuries of bloodshed that followed.