Showing results by narrator "Mary Woodvine" in All Categories

A laugh-out-loud, uplifting comedy about finding the courage to be yourself, the importance of dreams, and learning to grab life by the glitter balls. Dance like nobody’s watching. Love like you’ll never get hurt... Laura Watkin’s heart isn’t broken, she’s just forgotten how to use it. After years on her own, the highlight of single mum Laura’s week is watching Strictly Come Dancing with a glass of Pinot Grigio and a large helping of imagination. With her daughter Sophie going travelling, Laura knows the time is right to do something for herself for a change.

As Halloween approaches in the Cotswold village of Wendlebury Barrow, Sophie Sayers, new to the village, is suspicious of the fierce new vicar and his ban on the villagers' seasonal celebrations. Especially when he plans to replace them with a traditional Guy Fawkes' Night party, and invites everyone to bring a guy (scarecrow) to burn on his giant bonfire. Sophie thinks the vicar's not the only one with dark secrets to hide.

How Lauren thought her summer holiday would go: Priceless mother-son memories of swimming and sunshine before Charlie leaves for university. How things actually are, now they’re here: Charlie refusing to speak to her, locked in a darkened room in their Corsican cottage, and a creeping sense of dread contemplating the rest of her life alone. Although Charlie has decided that holidays with mum are now deeply uncool, Lauren is determined not to waste this trip. Then she meets James, who was supposed to be holidaying with his daughter but is now, like her, unexpectedly flying solo.

Socialite Nora is determined to find her place in the Home Office's Air Raid Precautions Department while matchmaker Hazel tries to mask two closely guarded secrets with irrepressible optimism, and German expat Marie worries that she and her family might face imprisonment in an internment camp if war is declared. When Germany invades Poland and tensions on the home front rise, Marie is labelled an enemy alien, and the three friends find themselves fighting together to keep her free at any cost.

When Sophie Sayers joins a writers' retreat on a secluded Greek island, she's hoping to find inspiration and perhaps a little adventure. Away from her rural English comfort zone, she also takes stock of her relationship with her boyfriend Hector. But scarcely has the writing course begun when bestselling romantic novelist Marina Milanese disappears on a solo excursion to an old windmill. First on the scene, Sophie is prime suspect for Marina's murder.

Jamie Allenby wakes alone and realises her fever has broken. But could everyone she knows be dead? Months earlier Jamie had left her partner, Daniel, mourning the miscarriage of their baby. She'd just had to get away, so she took a job on a distant planet. Then the virus hit. Jamie survived as it swept through our far-flung colonies. Now she feels desperate and isolated, until she receives a garbled message from Earth. If someone from her past is still alive - perhaps Daniel - she knows she must find a way to return.

Samantha Jackson has been missing for 18 years when she gets back in touch with her sister. Sam needs Freya - now a grown woman with a family of her own - to take in her son. But Dino is not a happy child, despite the warmth of Freya's family he cannot settle. He startles at loud noises and he's prone to angry, violent outbursts. He's one of the family, Freya knows he is, but why doesn't it feel like that? In order to keep her daughters safe, Freya is forced to go in search of the truth. What is going on with Dino, and what really happened to her sister the night she left?

Rose Fell's friends think she's taking a big risk when she leaves the security of home and career to move to the beautiful but isolated village of Grosso, near Genoa. But after a year of emotional turmoil Rose no longer has any ties back home, and she relishes the challenges of a new start. Making a home, however, in the ravishing, haunted landscape of Italy's Riviera coast turns our to be lonelier than Rose had anticipated. And it is only when she is asked to write a profile on one of her reclusive neighbours, the once-glamorous film star Elvira Vitale, that Rose feels her new life is really beginning.

When a handsome but clearly delusional man named Dan bursts into Frida's office and insists that she is fated to save the world, she has him ejected faster than you can say 'prenup'. But a creepy meeting, a demon or three and one attempted kidnapping later, Frida is beginning to face the inconvenient truth: Dan is in fact The Oracle, the gods of Greek mythology are real and Frida herself appears to be everyone's only hope. The world is doomed.

Bridget's life is small and safe: she loves her husband and her son and works hard to keep her own business afloat. Then one day her world is changed forever. The music teacher who abused her walks into a shop with the teenager he's clearly grooming. Bridget is sent spiraling back into her past. Anthony begins to stalk Bridget, trying to ensure her silence - until suddenly she snaps. And now Bridget must find a way to deal with the aftermath of her actions....

Alone at Christmas, will she find somewhere to call home? No more than 18 years old, alone and heavily pregnant, Kathleen stumbles through the snow, desperate for somewhere to rest her weary head. As the Christmas bells chime around her, she glimpses a man through the haze before collapsing into his arms.

A heartwarming novel from the queen of family saga, Sheila Newberry. London, 1925. On Paradise Corner, just past the tram stop, Florence runs a pie shop, famous for miles around. Warm and comforting, just like her pies, Florence is always there as a helping hand or a shoulder to cry on, especially to her full house of family and friends. There's six-year-old niece Josefina, left with Florence by her wayward sister, Stella. Rose Marie, Florence's younger sister, in search of adventures of her own.

When Monica is offered a three-month placement in LA, she knows that for the sake of her career she must accept it - even though it means leaving behind nine-year-old Ruby, toddler Luca and her husband, Daniel. She hires Ursula as a housekeeper and nanny during her absence, although the older woman is oddly reluctant to agree to a childcare position. What is the dark secret in Ursula's past which has left her so closed off and reserved? Will her growing attachment to Ruby bring it to the surface?

When a surrogate mother pretends the pregnancy has miscarried and bears a daughter, to whom does the child belong? To her runaway birth mother or her deceived father and his wife? Scout, born as a result of a surrogacy arrangement, is kept by her biological mother, Joanie, who has deliberately deceived both the clinic and Scout's intended parents by claiming to have had a miscarriage. When this deception comes to light 10 years later, a compelling moral dilemma unfolds.

Cracow, 1893. Thirty-eight-year-old Zofia Turbotyńska has assured her husband’s rise through the ranks to university professor and is now looking for something to fill her long days at home. To stave off the boredom and improve her social standing, she decides to organise a charity raffle. To recruit the requisite patronage of elderly aristocratic ladies, she visits Helcel House, a retirement home run by nuns.

Miranda's taken great care to create a calm and ordered world for herself, and in her job as property manager of a spectacular island castle in Cornwall, she's had the castle running like clockwork. But this summer, its sexy owner returns to claim his birthright—and Miranda's careful life will never be the same again. Dark, handsome and with a rakish reputation, Jago St Merryn not only looks like a pirate but is intent on flogging the Mount to a soulless leisure corporation. Miranda faces the battle of her life as she tries to persuade him to change his mind.

Hithechurch, a peaceful, out-of-the-way seaside town in Kent. When Charlie was young, she would visit with her family, making friends and playing down by the beach. Their favourite was telling scary stories; silly games of make-believe that would twist and weave old wife’s tales to scare each other. They would laugh and try to shake off the shiver than ran down their backs and made the hair on their necks stand on end.

For 95 per cent of history, humans were hunter gatherers. In our cranium is kit that was formed hundreds of thousands of years ago. Back then we would have met a few hundred people in a life-time; today it's countless thousands. Back then we were only required to care about what directly affected us; now the news plugs our emotions into the agonies of the world. Little wonder that so many of us are tired, wired, stressed and depressed. Paleo Life shows a different way, guided by the lifestyles of hunter-gatherers past and present.