Showing results by narrator "Anna Cordell" in All Categories

It's 1913 and a young, carefree and recklessly innocent girl, Mina, goes out into the forest on the edge of the Baltic sea and meets a gang of rowdy young men with revolution on their minds. It sounds like a fairy tale but it's life.

Tracey Curtis-Taylor has created headlines around the world with three epic flights in a 1942 Boeing Stearman biplane. Paying homage to two historic female aviators, she flew from Cape Town to Goodwood in 2013, from London to Australia in 2015 and, two years later, completed a transcontinental flight across the USA, after surviving a plane crash during the expedition. But her daring exploits came at a huge personal cost. Tracey tells, in breathtaking detail, the remarkable story of how she overcame extreme adversity to complete her three epic journeys.

Angelina Green never knew her mother, who left her in a cardboard box by the East London docks on a freezing November night when she was a tiny baby. Saved by a local orphanage, she knows she owes her life to the kindness of others. And she’s determined to repay her debt by working as a nurse. Strong, kind and patient, Angelina is a natural on the ward. But when war breaks out in 1914 and she is sent to The Front, her courage is tested like never before....

Guardian Angel is that rare memoir that grabs you by the shoulders with an urgency that screams, “Pay attention!” It leaps to life with an immediacy and relevance that few books achieve. Beginning with her solitary childhood in London, it took years for Melanie Phillips to understand her parents’ emotional frailties and even longer to escape from them. But Phillips inherited her family’s strong Jewish values and a passionate commitment to freedom from oppression.

The day Louisa and James bring their newborn son home from the hospital marks a new beginning for all of them. To hold their child in their arms makes all the stress and trauma of fertility treatment worth it. Little Cory is theirs and theirs alone. Or so they think.... After her mother’s suicide when she was a child, Louisa’s life took an even darker turn. But meeting James changed everything. She can trust him to protect her and to never leave her. Even if deep down she worries that she has never told him the full truth about her past - or the truth about their baby.

Following the death of her mother, Becky begins the sad task of sorting through her empty flat. Starting with the letters piling up on the doormat, she finds an envelope post-marked from Cornwall. In it is a letter that will change her life forever. A desperate plea from her mother's elderly cousin, Olivia, to help save her beloved home. Becky arrives at Chynalls to find the beautiful old house crumbling into the ground and Olivia stuck in hospital with no hope of being discharged until her home is made habitable.

When Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert was liberated in 1945, a Jewish American soldier gave her a banknote on which he’d written ‘Good luck and happiness’. And when her great-grandson, Dov, decided to use social media to track down the family of the GI, 96-year-old Lily found herself making headlines round the world. Lily had promised herself that if she survived Auschwitz, she would tell everyone the truth about the camp. Now was her chance.

Summer, 1929. The Hinton Dysart estate is dying from lack of money, and Kit Dysart, the heir, sees no way out. Then, at his sister's wedding, he meets the vibrant Daisy Chudleigh and her cousin, the heiress Matty Verrall. In love with Daisy but troubled by his family's decline, Kit chooses to marry Matty, though neither Kit nor Daisy is able to forget the other. When Matty, growing increasingly unhappy in her troubled, empty marriage, decides to re-create the estate's garden, she discovers solace and a gift of which she never dreamt.

When Izzie Dean’s beloved nan, Molly Blackshaw, passes away, Izzie returns to the Blackpool bungalow where she grew up, to say good-bye once and for all. When Izzie’s homecoming reunites her with her first love, Justin Swift, every emotion that Izzie has repressed since the day he broke her heart comes rushing to the surface. But then an unexpected discovery changes everything.

Enid Elliot Linder was the daughter of a butler and a lady’s maid in service in some of England’s grandest country houses. Evoking the lost world of a childhood ‘below stairs’, Linder’s touching memoir describes how her life changed as Britain headed towards war. After the family moved to a Marylebone tenement, her father sought work in London restaurants whilst battling personal demons. Meanwhile Linder’s aunt was nanny to a high-ranking member of the British Union of Fascists as they grew in influence.

Ellie White is found dead at the bottom of her own garden, propped up against a stone fountain. Detective Inspector Bethany Smith arrives at the scene of the crime still dressed in her funeral attire. Her head thick with emotion. Her colleagues think she's mad. But she wants to be there. She needs to be there. Even if what she sees makes her skin crawl. The next day another body is discovered. The victim has suffered a similar gruesome fate. Left for dead at the bottom of his garden where the creepy-crawlies can get to him.

A poignant, Edwardian family saga set in a hotel business in Torquay. When laundress Mercy Seaton’s chance meeting with Peter Lisburne at the annual Torquay regatta leads to a whirlwind proposal, she’s swept into her husband’s glittering world at ‘I do’. But all that glitters is not gold, and Mercy’s discomfort in the drawing rooms of Edwardian society leave her adrift in a world she’s ill prepared for. Combined with the onset of war, Mercy’s life becomes an ever-changing landscape of uncertainty.

"There is a fish on the sand; I see it clearly. But it is not on its side, lying still. It is partly upright. It moves. I can see its gills, off the ground and wide open. It looks as though it’s standing up." A few decades into the twenty-first century, in their permanently flooded garden in Cornwall, Cathy and her wife Ephie give up on their vegetable patch and plant a rice paddy instead. Thousands of miles away, ex-pat Margaret is struggling to adjust to life in Kuala Lumpur, now a coastal city. In New Zealand, two teenagers marvel at the extreme storms hitting their island.

Hardly out of childhood, Amy Kennedy and fellow orphans Seth, Jay and Daisy are sent from the Lambeth Workhouse in London to the Devon port of Brixham to be taken into service, the girls as maidservants, the boys as apprentices on a trawler. Although her initiation into her job is hard, Amy quickly finds her feet, and shortly her horizons are brightened by an attentive young man, Daniel Newton, the son of a prosperous sea captain.

Frustrated that she spends all her time as either a mum to a football-obsessed teenager or a wife to a workaholic husband, Hannah wants something for herself. When the chance comes to take over the post office in Little Maudley, a charming Cotswold village, Hannah grabs it with both hands. She’ll have a career at last and also get her son, Ben, away from his trouble-making mates. But village life is not so picture-perfect after all.

Maddy Shillabeer’s prospects are limited. As the only woman in a household of men, in a town with precious few romantic possibilities, she’s resigned herself to a life of familial duty. That is, until the arrival of mysterious stranger Patrick Howard. It’s clear Patrick has seen a world Maddy can only imagine, and she’s awed by his charm and beguiling tongue. In no time at all Patrick has skillfully climbed the social pecking order in Duncannon...and worked his way into Maddy Shillabeer’s heart.

Isabelle's archaeologist father dies leaving a puzzle: a mysterious African amulet. But what is it? And why did he want her to have it? On impulse she takes a plane to Morocco to find out. But has Isabelle's curiosity got the better of her? Almost killed in an accident which damages the amulet (revealing more of its secrets), she realises she must be careful.

The land, sea and skyscapes of the UK are constantly shifting. Species, landmarks and ways of life slip in and out of existence, and firm ground is often just out of reach. Weaving together stories drawn from literature, local history and her own family heritage, Oxford professor Fiona Stafford leads us along coastlines and through forests and fens, revealing the forces, both natural and human, which leave places unrecognisably changed.

Sergeant Belinda 'Billy' Kidd is driving home from the airport, jet-lagged and ready to resign from a career that has left her traumatised. Menopause has robbed her confidence too - now she's a traffic cop who's afraid to drive. When brake lights haemorrhage up the motorway, the cars grind to a halt. Moments later she finds a dead driver in a black sedan. He has a metal skewer in his neck. But how? The killer can't have left the scene without being spotted by the dozens of witnesses - so he must still be there, among them.

Lidia was just three years old when she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother, grandparents and foster brother. They were from Belarus, their ‘crime’ that they supported the partisan resistance to Nazi occupation. Lidia was picked by Dr Josef Mengele for his experiments and sent to the children’s block where she survived eighteen months of hell. Injected with infectious diseases, desperately malnourished, she came close to death. Her mother - who risked her life to secretly visit Lidia - was her only tie to humanity.