Showing results by narrator "Kate Handford" in All Categories

1955: In an apartment on the Lower East Side, school teachers Dovie and Gillian live as lodgers. Dancing behind closed curtains, mixing cocktails for two, they guard their private lives fiercely. Until someone guesses the truth. 1975: Twenty years later in the same apartment, Ava Winters is keeping her own secret. Her mother has become erratic, haunted by something Ava doesn't understand—until one sweltering July morning, she disappears.

You only let her go for a second… Now she’s gone. Erika Rice is in an elevator with her four-year-old daughter Alice when all the lights go out. It jerks to a stop on a deserted floor of apartments and the little girl runs out into the corridor. But before Erika can follow her the doors slam shut again. Now her daughter is nowhere to be seen. Erika was about to take Alice away for a fresh start, far from her troubled past, when the child vanished. How could a four-year-old disappear into thin air? And with no one to help her, will Erika ever find her daughter?

Brooklyn, New York. Bea has grown up in the heart of the Irish community, always hearing stories of home. When she discovers a letter from her younger self, written years before, it sends her deep into her own family history. Kilmore Quay, Ireland. Years earlier, Lucy Mernagh leaves her much-loved home and family in search of the New York dream. The Big Apple is a world away from the quiet village she grew up in, and the longing for home aches within her.

For Samantha Miller's young fans—her 'girls'—she's everything they want to be. She's an oracle, telling them how to live their lives, how to be happy, how to find and honour their 'truth'. And her career is booming: she's just hit three million followers, her new book Chaste has gone straight to the top of the best-seller lists and she's appearing at sell-out events. Determined to speak her truth and bare all to her adoring fans, she's written an essay about her sexual awakening as a teenager, with her female best friend, Lisa.

When the body of a woman is found in the frozen Neponset River, just where it meets the sea, Jessie Novak and her partner Detective Sam Dallas rush to the scene. When Jessie sees a flash of a familiar silk scarf, she’s shocked to realize the girl in the ice is Sheila Logan, who she worked closely with for years at Boston City Hospital. Jessie desperately wants to find out how this young and talented nurse ended up an innocent victim. But who would want to kill her?

Maura was perfect. A perfect liar. One humid summer evening, Officer Maura Walsh is lead to her table at a local restaurant - it’s a trendy place with cocktails on the menu, full of office workers leaning across the bar to flirt. She’s prettier than most of the women here, but everybody gives her a wide berth. She doesn’t eat or drink anything. She doesn’t meet anyone’s eye. An hour later, Maura is dead. Her silky red hair swirls in the dirty puddles beneath her body. The dank walls of a forgotten alley are the last thing she ever saw.

The girl in the photo was laughing, her head thrown back, her lips painted a bright red. Jessie could feel the simple joy reflected in that moment. And as she looked closer, she saw the same gold cross and chain that had adorned the first victim’s neck. When a young woman falls to her death from a parking garage, the Boston police department rule it as a suicide. But when Jessie Novak examines the scene, she isn’t so sure... The girl’s delicate hands are bruised and her fingernails torn: evidence of a struggle.

As well as being a master of the macabre, Shirley Jackson was also a pitch-perfect chronicler of everyday family life. In Life Among the Savages, her caustically funny account of raising her children in a ramshackle house in Vermont, she deals with rats in the cellar, misbehaving imaginary friends, an oblivious husband and ever-encroaching domestic chaos, all described with wit, warmth and plenty of bite.

Running brings together an ensemble of outsiders who get by as runners - hustlers who sell tourists on low-end accommodations for a small commission and a place to stay. Bridey Sullivan, a young American woman who has fled a peculiar and traumatic upbringing in Washington State, takes up with a queer British couple, the poet Milo Rollack and Eton drop-out Jasper Lethe.

Shirley Jackson skewered the trials of domestic life in 1950s America with wry wit and uncanny precision. In this sequel to Life Among the Savages, her four offspring have now grown into fully fledged demons. As their house starts to burst at the seams, the Jackson clan somehow manage (without really planning it) to move into a larger home, only to take the chaos - absent furniture, vanishing children, misbehaving refrigerators, an avalanche of books - right along with them.

In Pepper Street, an attractive suburban neighbourhood filled with bullies and egotistical bigots, the feelings of the inhabitants are shallow and selfish: what can a neighbour gain from another neighbour, what may be won from a friend? One child stands alone in her goodness: little Caroline Desmond, kind, sweet and gentle and the pride of her family. But the malice and self-absorption of the people of Pepper Street lead to a terrible event that will destroy the community of which they are so proud.

She's a waitress. He's a chef. They used to be best friends, but now, they're in love and living together in a studio apartment. She's also a selkie, Odysseus, and a cowgirl called Quick Fingers. He's a really good man. When he asks her to marry him, Hero panics. She is lots of things but one thing she doesn't want to be is anybody's wife.

Katherine has everything under control. After years of struggling to conceive with her partner, she finally gives birth to Rose, her IVF miracle child. But she's afraid that Rose may not be her daughter, her pale skin not matching Katherine's own. Tess never got her happy ending. Just like Katherine, she was also a hopeful IVF mother, but her daughter, Hanna, was stillborn. Now divorced, broke and stuck in a dead-end job, she's beginning to lose all hope. But when Rose is ten months old, both women get a call from the fertility clinic. There was a mistake: their eggs were switched.

When Mattie Gokey is given a bundle of letters to burn by Grace Brown, she fully intends to do so. But when Grace is found drowned the next day, Mattie finds that it is not as easy to get rid of those letters as she had thought. And, as she reads, a riveting story emerges - not only revealing Grace's secrets but also Mattie's hopes and ambitions for the future and her relationships with her friends and family.

Ellie Wasserman is barely holding it together. She's a thirty-year-old widow living with her needy in-laws, her little brother won't adult without her help, and instead of working on her own cookbook, she's ghostwriting one for the chaotic, impulsive Kieran O'Neill. Or would be, if he'd ever answer her emails. But to own her own home like she's always dreamed of, she needs to finish this book... As their deadline gets closer and the heat between them builds, can these two driven, lonely people let go of their past hurts and make something truly sweet together?

Katherine is a woman full of obsessions. Everything clean, everything perfect, all the time. After seven years of trying—and failing—to conceive, she finally gives birth to Rose, her IVF miracle child. But she’s afraid that Rose may not be her daughter; her pale skin doesn’t match Katherine’s own.

For 35-year-old Charlotte Emory, leaving her husband seems to offer the only way out from the mundaneness of every day life's earthly possessions and emotional complications. In the bank, she withdraws enough money to escape a life and a marriage gone sour. But Charlotte is about to escape in a way she never expected, as a young bank robber takes her hostage, and they head south for Florida in a stolen car.

October 2016: In America, the election is a few weeks away. Journalist Grace Elliot has just landed a scoop that she believes will make her career. A porn star is willing to talk about her affair with the man some hope and many fear will become the next president of the United Stares. But no one will touch it. Instead, Grace is sent to Europe, where she discovers a story so big, so explosive that it could decide the American election and launch a new Cold War.

On a cold day in 1997, student Sara Morgan was killed in the woods surrounding her liberal-arts college in upstate New York. Her boyfriend, Blake Campbell, confessed, only to be acquitted following a plea of temporary insanity. In the wake of this senseless act of violence, the case comes to haunt a strange and surprising network of community members, from the young woman who discovers Sara’s body to the junior reporter who senses its connection to convicted local serial killer John Logan.

After saving the inn at Havenfall from the wicked Silver Prince, Maddie thought all her problems were over. But danger still looms, and Maddie soon realises there’s more work to be done to protect Havenfall, the safe haven between worlds that her family has run for centuries. Maddie must embark on a dangerous mission: to venture into the icy Realm of Fiordenkill and put an end to the black market trading of souls that threatens the balance of the Realms.