Showing results by narrator "Jilly Bond" in All Categories

A brand-new audiobook by the number one best-selling author Katie Fforde containing never before published Christmas short stories. Perfect for anyone who loves romance, humour and happy-ever-after endings.

Each week, six women meet at The Bluebell Inn. They form an unlikely and occasionally triumphant ladies darts team. They banter and jibe, they laugh. But their hidden stories of love and loss are what, in the end, will bind them. There is Mary, full of it but cradling her dark secret; Lena - young and bold, she has made her choice; the cat woman who must return to the place of her birth before it's too late. There's Maggie, still laying out the place for her husband; and Pegs, the dark-eyed girl from the travellers' site bringing her strangeness and first love....

As a child Jude suffered a recurrent nightmare; now her six-year-old niece is having the same dream. A successful auctioneer, Jude is asked to value a collection items belonging to Anthony Wickham, a lonely 18th century astronomer, and she leaps at the chance to escape to the untamed beauty of Norfolk. With the help of Euan, a local naturalist, Jude begins to untangle Wickham's tragic story, but she discovers threatening links to the present.

In a castle in the mountains outside Rome, Lucrezia Borgia is born into history's most notorious family. Her father, who is to become Pope Alexander VI, receives his first daughter warmly, and her brothers, Cesare and Giovanni, are devoted to her. As Lucrezia matures into a beautiful young woman, her brothers are ever more protective and become fierce rivals for her attention.

They whisper her name in the ballroom’s shadows – the Marquis’s mistress! It will take all of Alice Sweetly’s acting skills to play this part: smile until it no longer hurts, until they believe your lies, until you believe. If the Marquis of Razeby thinks he can let his mistress go easily, he is so very wrong. Each night she appears before a rapturous Covent Garden audience, taunting him with her beauty.

When you don't know The Rules it's hard to stay safe. After a traumatic incident, Aster finds that her blood work comes back with some unusual readings. Unsurprising, as she's the last of an alien race called the Kibsu. But Aster doesn't know this. Immediately, Aster finds herself the focus of a hunt, with her mortal enemies, the Trackers, on one side, and the American government on the other. There seems to be nowhere she can run. But help often comes from the most unexpected quarter.

Agreeing to a fake betrothal should suit both society dressmaker Belle Marchmain and landowner Adam Davenant fittingly - clearing Belle's debts and keeping Adam's husband hunters at bay. Even if blue-blooded Belle, with her extravagant clothes and razor-sharp tongue, despises the very air that nouveau riche Adam breathes! If Adam wants a wife who's agreeable, he has his work cut out. Yet when his demanding mouth caresses Belle's, for the first time ever she's lost for words.

Sophie lives in Gorom-Gorom, with her carnivorous-plant obsessed dad. Despite living there for two years and speaking the local language, Sophie finds it difficult to make friends. So when she meets Gidaado, a young griot (story-teller), she agrees to join him and his albino camel, Chobbal, on a journey to his village.

Discover the new goals and new rules that are the route to a healthier, better looking and better functioning body. For life. From Gwen Stefani and Cameron Diaz to Jennifer Aniston and Naomi Watts, a new breed of 40- and 50-plus women are redefining not just what an ageless body looks like but what's entailed in achieving it.

Leningrad in 1952: a city recovering from war, where Andrei, a young doctor and Anna, a school teacher, are forging a life together. Summers at the dacha, preparations for the hospital ball, work and the care of 16-year-old Kolya fill their minds. They try hard to avoid coming to the attention of the authorities, but even so their happiness is precarious. Stalin is still in power, and the Ministry for State Security has new targets in its sights.

Sunset Hall is a house share for the old and unruly, led by Agnes Sharp. It's an eventful day when this group of idiosyncratic seniors gets a visit from the police to inform them of some shocking news. A body has been discovered next door. Everyone puts on a long face, but they are secretly relieved the body in question is not the one they're currently hiding in the shed (sorry, Lillith). It seems the answer to their little problem with Lillith may have fallen right into their lap.

Lamorna Cove - a tiny bay in Cornwall, picturesque, unspoilt. A hundred years ago it was the haunt of a colony of artists. Today, Mel Pentreath hopes it is a place where she can escape the pain of her mother's death and a broken love affair, and gradually put her life back together.

Ambitions clash when the village launches an allotment project. Morag wants to plough hers with a horse; Beth buys a gleaming mini-tractor; Alexandra arrives with a Chanel spade & film crew, while Mary endures the advice of a champion vegetable-grower.

After years working all hours as a senior practice nurse, Joy has taken a well-earned retirement. She'd been looking forward to it, to leisure and time and no alarms, but now that it's happened, she's not sure what to do with herself. Her husband Terry is buried in his business, and seems to be talking to her less and less - at home she feels, increasingly, rather in the way. But when a new neighbour, Sara, and her small son move into their remote Devon village, Joy befriends her, and inspired by Sara starts to look into the history of their beautiful Angel cove.

Enter Rosamunde Pilcher's world of simple joys, of crisp country air and crackling log fires, the pleasures of family reunions and rediscovered friendships. Through thick mist and a cold east wind, Lavinia returns to Scotland. Up at the big house, Mrs Farquhar is dying. Seeing Lachlan again, Lavinia remembers her childhood holidays there: swimming in the loch, the picnics, bottle-feeding the lambs down at the farm and the evenings when they danced reels. Most of all, she remembers Mrs Farquhar's grandson Rory.

Compton Magna and Nether Bagot sit high on the Fosse Hills to either side of the Gloucestershire/Warwickshire border, just half a mile apart. They form the backdrop to this rich story of secrets and rivalries, as glamorous Ronnie Ledwell returns to take up the reins of her father's horse breeding stud farm, years after she scandalised family and friends by eloping with her lover. News of her return will well and truly set the cat among the pigeons....

Two years ago, Miff Ferguson chose to opt out of the rat race. Since then he's been living rough and happily so. That is until now. For, as the first signs of winter approach, everything changes. While looking for shelter, Miff stumbles across the dead body of a young woman inside a dilapidated warehouse. Quickly realising he's not alone, and what's worse he's been spotted, Miff becomes embroiled in a game of cat and mouse with a killer that forces him to abandon his life on the streets and take refuge with his aunt and uncle in the village of Weston St Ambrose.

As children, Gareth and Helen went ignored and utterly unsupervised in their isolated English farmhouse while their mother obsessively tended to her beloved, exquisite garden. When they were little, Gareth would occupy himself by trapping insects under glass and Helen would find ways to entertain herself - but the older they grew, the more sinister their lives became, with no attentive parent to shield them from the predators of the world. Decades later, Helen is in the same crumbling house, unhappily married and looking after their bedridden mother, and Gareth finally returns home.

Sitting on a California beach at summer's end, Jane Marsh thinks back to her childhood at the estate called Elvie in a remote corner of Scotland. She remembers not only the heather-covered hills and the lonesome loch but her grandmother...and, of course, Sinclair. She has secretly dreamed of marrying rakishly handsome Sinclair and settling at Elvie forever. Then an urgent visit from her grandmother's lawyer becomes the catalyst for her return to Scotland, where waiting for her is passion, not gentle love....

Compulsively listenable and stylistically stunning, Black Dog Summer begins with a murder, a farmstead massacre, in the South African bush. Thirty-eight-year-old Sally is but one of the victims. Her life brutally cut short, she narrates from her vantage point in the afterlife and watches as her sister, Adele; her brother-in-law and unrequited love, Liam; her niece, Bryony; and her teenage daughter, Gigi, begin to make sense of the tragedy.