Showing results by narrator "Wren" in All Categories

Following the death of her husband, the Countess of Wenlock was living in her magnificent house in London with her son, Donald, and her beautiful daughter, Salvia. One day out of the blue Donald suddenly drops a bombshell. He tells his mother and Salvia that he has lost all their money by trusting an American acquaintance of his who claimed that he would invest it all safely and produce big profits for the family. Donald leaves at once for America to follow the man and hopefully recover all or part of their money.

The Duke of Laverdale is ambitious to be appointed Master of the Horse and the new Queen Adelaide is determined that behaviour at Court should be moral after the licentiousness of King George IV. The Duke therefore ends his affaire de coeur with the enchanting Lady Sybil Mersham and drops his ballet dancer mistress as well. Up to now he has been determined not to be married, but he now decides to become respectable and find a suitable bride as befits his standing.

Young, happy and deeply in love, the future looks rosy for local beauty Lilliana Parker and her beau Robert, the dashing Earl of Sherborne. Their friends and family wait with baited breath for news of their inevitable engagement, certain that nothing can harm the charmed life of this golden couple. However, fate has other plans and the Earl is called to rejoin his Regiment in India on a mission that is both dangerous and vital to Queen and country.

Prince Serge of Tamrush, who himself had been sent a bride by Queen Victoria to save his Principality from invasion by the Russians, was now being asked by Prince Igor of Dubrik for the hand of his beautiful daughter Lavinia for the same reason. He decided not to tell Lavinia of Prince Igor’s request until after her birthday party. It was on that occasion she would meet Prince Igor for the first time and her father hoped that they would be attracted to each other.

The beautiful Ariana Dancer is orphaned and has led a cheerless life in London with her disagreeable Guardian, Uncle Konstantin Bardici. He has shown little interest in his niece and she has been left very much to her own devices. One day Uncle Konstantin suggests that Ariana marry an Albanian Prince - one who is seeking an English wife and who claims to have fallen in love with her portrait - and it does not take much to persuade her to agree.

The adventure of a lifetime...or two, or three. When Sara is gifted a beautiful antique chair as a wedding present, she is completely unaware that it is one of a unique pair. On the other side of the world, the chair's twin is presented to a reclusive artist, Jon, as a birthday gift. The two new owners are thrust into a mind-expanding adventure through the ages - medieval East Anglia, Scotland, France and India.

The lovely red-haired eighteen year old Lady Viola Francis is orphaned. She and her fortune are in the power of her stepfather, the sinister Sir Rudolph Vane. Violas late father, the Earl of Galhampton, was passionately interested in motor cars and from an early age Viola worked with him on his engines. Now she wants to fulfil his ambition to build one that can be sold to the growing numbers of people keen to acquire this new and expensive form of transport. Sir Rudolph, however, has other plans for her and her fortune and wants her to marry the ineffectual Lord Carncross.

The year is 1942 and the world is at war. Nancy Clancy left school at 14 to spend a year droving, just like her grandfather Clancy of the Overflow. Now 16, Nancy's family has sent her to Malaya to bring home her sister-in-law Moira and baby nephew Gavin. Yet despite the threat of Japanese invasion, Moira resists, wanting to stay near her husband Ben. But not even Nancy of the Overflow can stop the fall of Singapore and the capture of so many Australian troops. When their ship is bombed, Nancy, Moira and Gavin are reported missing.

The beautiful Vanessa Shotworth was being made extremely unhappy at the way she was being treated by her stepmother while her beloved father was away in India with his Regiment. When she was late for breakfast because she had been out riding on a lovely summer’s morning, she was humiliated by her stepmother by being told to scrub the kitchen floor or she will not be given anything to eat. Vanessa then decided to run away to her relatives in the North of England, having elicited the help of the faithful family butler, Bates.

Elvina Carrisford, has known little love and affection in her life. She is invited to be a companion to her cousin Delphine, who is to be engaged to the nephew of a French Prince. En route to her new home she meets an enigmatic and handsome stranger, who rescues her from a wild blizzard and takes her to a nearby cottage. Here she and Serge, the stranger, sit out the storm. He turns out to be the valet to an aristocratic traveller.

During a brush with the Sons of the Long Knives, Gwion earns the trust of Keridwen and is offered employment at her Castell in Gwynedd. There the goddess is brewing a potion of prophetic insight and secret wisdom, destined for her monstrous, shape-shifting son, Morvran. But an ill-timed accident on the final day of his task sees Gwion inherit all the potion's supernatural abilities. In a shapeshifting battle, Gwion is swallowed by Keridwen, and upon her return to human form the Goddess discovers that she is pregnant.

Jed Kelly has finally persuaded her great aunt Nancy to tell the story of her grandparents. The tale that unfolds is one of Australia's greatest romances—that of Clancy of the Overflow, who gave up everything for Rose, the woman he adored, and yet still gained all he'd lost and more. But Nancy's story is not the history that Jed expects. More tales lurk behind the folklore that surrounds Clancy—the stories of the women hidden in Australia's long history, who forged a nation and whose voices need to be heard.

Blue Laurence has escaped the prison of her aunt's mansion to join the Magnifico Family Circus, a travelling troupe that brings glamour and laughter to country towns gripped by the Depression. Blue hides her crippled legs and scars behind the sparkle of a mermaid's costume; but she's not the only member of the circus hiding a dark secret. The unquenchable Madame Zlosky creates as well as foresees futures. The bearded lady is a young man with laughing eyes. A headless skeleton dangles in the House of Horrors. And somewhere a murderer is waiting...to strike again.

Beautiful Lady Lucilla Welton is all alone in the world, having lost both her parents in a tragic accident. She has nowhere to go and so she stays with her cruel and distant Aunt Maud, who wants to marry her off as soon as possible. An ardent suitor is at hand – the rich Texan, Harkness Jackson – but his proposal is not one Lucilla could ever contemplate. She has already met the only man who will ever find the key to her heart – but the handsome Marquis of Castlebury is enthralled by another and for him, Lucilla seems to be no more than a casual friend.

Hippies wear beads, demonstrators march against the Vietnam War, and the world waits to see the first human steps on the moon's surface. But at Gibbers Creek, Jed Kelly sees ghosts, from the past and future, at the Drinkwater billabong where long ago the swaggie leaped to his defiant death. But is 17-year-old Jed a con artist or a survivor? When she turns up at Drinkwater Station claiming to be the great-granddaughter of Matilda Thompson's dying husband, Jed clearly has secrets. As does a veteran called Nicholas, who was badly wounded in the Vietnam War.

As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play. Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.

A body has been found in the burned-out wreckage of the church at Gibber's Creek—with older skeletons lying beneath it. The corpse is identified as that of Ignatius Mervyn, the man who attempted to kill Jed Kelly and her unborn child. Newcomer Fish Johnstone is drawn into the investigation, convinced that the police are on the wrong track. But as she digs beneath the warm and welcoming surface of the Gibber's Creek community, more secrets emerge. And Fish must also face her own mystery—the sudden appearance and then disappearance of her father, a Vietnamese refugee she never knew.

On a hot summer’s day in 1880 the beautiful Lady Rosella is cutting a basket of blooms in her beloved Rose Garden at her aunt’s house in Hampshire. It is her seventeenth birthday and no one remembers it except for Thomas, the gardener’s boy. Later she is driven to Winchester and has an unpleasant encounter with two raucous gentlemen in the local tavern before going on to fit her first ball gown that her aunt has given her the money for just before she died. But who is the lovely masked woman she glimpses in the mirror at the dressmakers, a glorious vision clad in rose-pink silk?

On Christmas Eve in 1967, a London woman unhappily transplanted to the Australian suburbs makes a decision that will change forever the lives of her four young children. Forty years on, those children are adept at concealing their shared pain. Deborah has a demanding political career, James is a successful artist, Robert a respected school principal. Only Meredith, the baby of the family seems struck. But as their father begins to lose his grip on reality, they find themselves floundering in an unfamiliar sea.

Italy, 1917. Australian journalist Rebecca Quinn is an unconventional woman. At the height of World War I, she has given up the safety of her Sydney home for the bloody battlefields of Europe, following her journalist husband to the front line as a war correspondent in Italy. Reporting the horrors of the Italian campaign, Rebecca finds herself thrown together with American-born Italian photographer Alessandro Panucci and soon discovers another battleground every bit as dangerous and unpredictable: the human heart.