Showing results by narrator "Anne Dover" in All Categories

1901. Tina Rose is the beloved daughter of a wealthy Jewish family while Edward grew up with an abusive father in the wilds of New Zealand. Despite their differences, the two fall madly in love when Edward arrives in England, looking for a better future. However, the consequences of their love affair are terrible for Tina, as she is shamed by the father she adores, and Edward is sent away. Against all the odds, Tina and Edward find each other again.

Kay Duffield's fiancé is about to leave the country, and her own duty with the WAAF is imminent when she becomes a bride. The precious few days she spends with her new husband are quickly forgotten once she starts work as a balloon operator. There she makes friends with shy Emily Bevan, who has left her parents' hill farm in Wales for the first time; down-to-earth Biddy Bachelor, fresh from the horrors of the Liverpool bombing; and spirited Jo Stewart, the rebel among them, whose disregard for authority looks set to land them all in trouble. The girls stay friends through good times and bad, through romantic encounters and, ultimately, tragedy.

A short story from British Library Crime Classic The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories. A Christmas Eve party at Clevere Hall ends in tragedy when the host is found stabbed to death. Major Ceely certainly wasn’t short of enemies, but who hated him enough to commit the crime?

Along a blacked-out wartime street a girl is scurrying, a basket on one arm. As sirens begin and bombs crash down, she is filled with panic and, with a heavy heart, abandons her burden in a sheltered doorway, meaning to return later. Even as she disappears in the resulting chaos, the bundle in the basket begins to wail.

It is a cold December night and Sylvie Dugdale is weeping as she walks by the Mersey. She fails to notice an approaching figure, and jumping to one side to avoid collision, she finds herself struggling in the ice-cold river. Constable Brendan O'Hara, just coming off duty, sees the girl's plight and dives in to rescue her. He is dazzled by her beauty but discovers that Sylvie's husband is in prison, and the closeness that Brendan soon longs for is impossible. But he is able to help her escape from Liverpool....

One Of The Old Guard focuses on a small rural community as anxious lovers, parents, grandparents and children wait for loved ones to return home from the front.

It is the late 1850s, and a tired woman holding a baby walks from Hull to one of the big houses in Anlaby - the home of the wealthy Rayners. She knocks at the door and shoves the baby at young James Rayner. The father was 'young Mr Rayner', and the mother is dead. Then she vanishes. The respectable shipping family of Hull are shattered.

Nine hours and eleven minutes... That's how long it's been since Ella Hope was left for dead. She lies, unable to move and praying for somebody to find her, as she counts down the minutes and wonders who could have hated her so much to have hurt her so badly. Was it the man she went on a date with the previous evening, the man linked to the deaths of two other women? Or somebody else, somebody who wants her out of the picture so much they're willing to kill? Whoever it is, they will pay.

High above the Mediterranean, on the French Riviera, stands a beautiful pink stucco villa. Once a playground for the rich and glamorous, now—in the aftermath of World War I—it is a convalescent home for sick and wounded nurses. Scottish Flora Garvie is here recovering from four traumatic years on the ambulance trains. And here she will meet again charismatic but troubled Kit Carlyle, a regimental chaplain who no longer believes in his calling and certainly doesn't believe himself worthy of Flora's love.

Coming up 16, Tilly Trotter is different from the other girls. Tall for her age and coltish, she is not afraid of taking on 'man’s work' to help out the grandparents who raised her in a cottage at the edge of the Sopwith Estate. Testing times lay ahead for Tilly, often hard to endure and even bringing her the undeserved taint of being suspected of witchcraft. She only loves one man, farmer Simon Bentwood, and is heartbroken to discover he is betrothed to another. A spurned suitor takes a terrible revenge, and a betrayal forces her into the cruel drudgery of the local mine.

The extraordinary true story of surviving the unimaginable … In 1945, seven-year-old Barbie and her sister Eva were trapped, terrified, in wartorn Germany. With their father missing, and hundreds of miles from their mother, news of the approaching army left them confronted with an impossible choice: to face invasion, or to flee on foot.Eva, aged nineteen, was determined to find her mother.

Following the untimely death of her husband, Beatrix and her three children are finally free. While Ambrose has already determined his path in life, eldest son Laurie's future is less certain. Meanwhile, headstrong and independent Alicia is defying expectation and excelling at school. There, she befriends the enigmatic Olivia Snowdon and they quickly become inseparable. But Olivia's family past is shrouded in mystery and as she begins to dig deeper secrets come tumbling out.

Lizzie is an orphan living with her aunt Annie, uncle Perce and two boy cousins within a stone's throw of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Lizzie loves her aunt but is hated by her uncle. She makes friends with Geoff Gardiner, another orphan, and is teaching him to swim in the Scaldy when Clem Gilligan rescues the pair of them from drowning. Clem works on the canal boat, The Liverpool Rose, with Jake Pridmore and his wife, plying between the great cities of Leeds and Liverpool. Lizzie's situation at home starts to worsen and eventually she is forced to flee. Her first instinct is to make for the canal, but finding Clem is not so easy....

A classic Gerald Durrell title reissued by Penguin to celebrate the centenary of his birth. The Manor of the title is Les Augrès Manor in Trinity, Jersey. Inside, we find a remarkable collection of pen portraits of some of the creatures of Gerald Durrell's Zoo. We also discover some of the timeless lessons Durrell learned about making real and sustaining his childhood ambition of having his own zoo - and why conservation matters more than ever.

Ten years ago, deeply in love, I would have done anything for Thomas Kirkwood. But on the night of our graduation, fuelled by drink and drugs, Thomas’s lifeless body was found floating in the Kirkwood family lake. That weekend changed everything, and I swore I would never return to Kirkwood manor. Now, ten years later, I have been invited back to the place that holds such terrible memories for me, to a memorial weekend for Thomas, organised by his still-grieving mother Ada. But this is no ordinary weekend. This is a reunion to catch a killer.

It is 1937, and Alice, Edith and Marg continue to face hardships every day, growing up on one of the poorest streets in Blackpool. Penniless, their friendship has helped them survive this far, but it'll take more than that to see them through the dark days ahead. Alice is coping with a violent father. Marg is left reeling after a dark secret about her birth comes to light and threatens to destroy the life she knows, and Edith is fighting to protect her alcoholic mother from the shame of their neighbours and keep her brother on the straight and narrow.

Cornwall, 1960, and a whole new world for young Connie Vickers as she holidays with her brand-new fiance William. But a strange encounter with a beautiful blonde boy on the beach leads to a terrible tragedy, the consequences of which are to affect Connie and William for the rest of their lives.

At the age of 21, Monica Baldwin - the niece of Stanley Baldwin - entered one of the most strictly enclosed contemplative orders of the Roman Catholic Church. At the age of 48, and after struggling with her vocation for many years, she left the convent. But the world Monica had known and forsaken in 1914 was very different from the world into which she emerged at the height of the Second World War.

1860: Harriet Miles is trying to take care of her seriously ill mother, and just when she thinks things couldn’t get any worse she is fired from her job at the hostelry. The last thing she expects after her mother dies is a marriage proposal from a man she barely knows, but her only alternative is the workhouse. And so begins her new life with Noah Tuke. But instead of marital bliss, Harriet finds herself in the cramped farmhouse Noah calls home, and in this overcrowded and angry household she meets with hostility and bitterness. The only person who offers her friendship is Noah’s brother, Fletcher.

Among millions of Holocaust victims sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944, Priska, Rachel and Anka each passed through its infamous gates with a secret. Strangers to each other, they were newly pregnant and facing an uncertain fate without their husbands. Alone, scared and with so many loved ones already lost to the Nazis, these young women were privately determined to hold on to all they had left: their lives and those of their unborn babies.