Showing results by narrator "Esther Wane" in All Categories

With poetic precision and psychological acuity, Norah Vincent’s Adeline reimagines the events that brought Virginia Woolf to the banks of the River Ouse, offering us a denouement worthy of its protaganist. Channeling Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T. S. and Vivienne Eliot, Lytton Strachey, and Dora Carrington, Vincent lays bare their genius and their blind spots, their achievements and their failings, from the inside out. And haunting every moment is Adeline, the name given to Virginia Stephen at birth, which becomes the source of Virginia’s greatest consolation, and her greatest torment.

Veronica Pullman's comfortable suburban life comes to a shuddering halt when her young daughter, Grace, tragically dies in a car accident. Months later, unable to come to terms with her daughter's death, detached from her husband and alienated from her friends and family, a chance encounter on a rainy street pushes her into an unlikely new friendship. Scarlet is everything Veronica could've been: feisty, adventurous, unpredictable. But as she approaches what would have been Grace's 10th birthday, it becomes clear to Veronica that the friendship she thought was saving her life could be costing her everything.

When Jess Tidy was Mark Winter's student, she made a shocking accusation. Mark maintained his innocence, but the damage was done. Karen Winter stood by her husband through everything, determined to protect her family. Now, 10 years later, Jess is back. And the truth about that night is finally going to come out....

December 1952. As the young Queen Elizabeth II prepares to deliver the first of her traditional Christmas Messages, dedicated staff work behind the scenes to prepare for festive celebrations at the Sandringham Estate. Among the hard workers are Jack Devereaux and Olive Carter – old friends who are about to be reunited. Over the course of five years, while Olive works as a royal correspondent and Jack is a chef in the Queen’s household, their paths will cross time and time again. But as the two grow closer, their relationship is threatened by a secret that Olivia is afraid to reveal.

On the hottest day of the summer, we wait for Molly on the riverbank, desperate to slip into the cool water. But as the sun starts to fade, it’s clear she isn’t coming. We’ll never see our friend again....

When Edgar dies in a Far East prisoner-of-war camp, it breaks the heart of fellow prisoner Starling, the man who loved him. When he visits Edgar’s family after the war, Edgar's mother, Clementine, mistakes him for another man, and he fails to correct the mistake. Playing the role of someone else and being in Edgar’s home with those who loved him stirs powerful and disorientating emotions in Starling. Edgar’s loss has driven his sister, Aida, to seek solace in the arms of a series of men–but the meeting with Starling sparks a powerful and complex connection.

Tom is a successful author, but he’s struggling to finish his novel. His main distraction is an online admirer, Evie, who simply won’t leave him alone. Evie is smart, well read, and unstable. She lives with her father, and her social-media friendships are not only her escape - they’re everything she has. When she’s hit with a restraining order, her world is turned upside down, and Tom is free to live his life again, to concentrate on writing. But things aren’t really adding up.

On her 47th birthday, Sydney Smith stands on a rooftop and prepares to jump.... Sydney is a cartoonist and freerunner. Feet constantly twitching, always teetering on the edge of life, she's never come to terms with the event that ripped her family apart when she was 10 years old. And so, on a birthday that she doesn't want to celebrate, she returns alone to St Ives to face up to her guilt and grief. It's a trip that turns out to be life-changing - and not only for herself.

Listeners will discover lost and forgotten women who wrote horror every bit as effectively as their male contemporaries. They will learn about their lives and careers, the challenges they faced as women working in a male-dominated field, the way they overcame those challenges, and the way they approached the genre - which was often subtler, more psychological, and more disturbing.

Greyhounds, streaks of lightning, were bred to be the fastest dogs on earth. Yet for decades, tens of thousands were destroyed, abandoned, and abused each year when they couldn't run fast enough. Scrappy Marion Fitzgibbon, whose empathy for animals made her relentless, became obsessed with saving these dogs - despite the overwhelming power of dog-racing proponents - when she became head of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

It is 1916 and Rasputin has finally been killed by those who have long feared his influence over Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra. But for Princess Militza, famed as one of the 'Witches of St Petersburg', and her daughter Nadezhda, life is about to become extremely dangerous. Revolution is bubbling and with it will come the murder of the Romanov imperial family. Now the rest of the court is also on the run, fleeing from the mob. Against this violent and turbulent backdrop, Nadezhda, the witch's daughter, finds in exile and captivity an extraordinary and unlikely love.

Fast Friends is a warm and funny romantic novel from Sunday Times best-selling author Jill Mansell. For fans of Lucy Diamond, Cathy Kelly and Marian Keyes. When bored housewife and mother Camilla Stewart impulsively invites her old school chums for dinner, she hardly imagines that the evening will shatter her comfortable existence. But Roz Vallender and Loulou Marks are no ordinary guests.

But if her torturers at the court of King James knew of her love for Tom Wintour, one of the executed members of the gunpowder plot, it would mean certain death. Pregnant with Tom's child, hiding under the reluctant protection of her spiteful and ambitious brother, Frances lives in fear - until she is offered the chance to make a respectable - if loveless - marriage and return to court. She will not be expected to sleep with her husband. The only price she must pay for safety is to give up the cause for which her lover died.

Frances Gorges seems destined to be happy at last. King James has apparently lost his appetite for hunting witches, so the medical skills and herbal knowledge that saw Frances accused of witchcraft no longer seem to hang over her like a death sentence. The king would rather be hunting stag and boar - and Frances' beloved husband, Thomas, is firmly established in the royal household as the Master of Buckhounds. Their family is growing and their estates are secure. But life at court is never without intrigue, jealousy and danger for long, and a new arrival turns the world upside down.

Masha's life has stopped. Once a spirited, independent woman with a rebellious streak, her life has been forever changed by a tragic event 12 years ago. Unable to let go of her grief, she finds solace in the silent company of the souls of her local Victorian cemetery and at the town's lido, where she seeks refuge underwater - safe from the noise and the pain. But a chance encounter with two extraordinary women - the fabulous and wise Kitty Muriel, a convent girl-turned-magician's wife-turned-70-something-roller-disco-fanatic, and the mysterious Sally Red Shoes, a bag lady with a prodigious voice - opens up a new world of possibilities, and the chance to start living again.

When Juliet Carlisle returns home to her family's gorgeous, crumbling manor house in the English countryside, she doesn't expect to stay long. But she's intrigued by the new cookery school being launched on the grounds… that is until she meets the guy who's been hired to run it. Though undeniably handsome, disgraced celebrity chef Léo Brodeur immediately strikes Juliet as bossy and rude. Juliet has enough troubles in her life without adding a snooty French chef to the mix.

Elly Griffiths has always written short stories to experiment with different voices and genres and to explore what some of her much-loved creations such as Dr Ruth Galloway might have done outside of the novels. This collection gathers them all together in one splendid volume. Here are bite-sized tales to please and entertain every thriller taste as well as all Elly Griffiths' fans.

How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressing question for the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, whose prewar memories were vague or nonexistent. In this beautifully written account, Rebecca Clifford follows the lives of 100 Jewish children out of the ruins of conflict through their adulthood and into old age.

Hotel Portofino has been open for only a few weeks, but already the problems are mounting for its owner Bella Ainsworth. Her high-class guests are demanding and hard to please. And she’s being targeted by a scheming and corrupt local politician, who threatens to drag her into the red-hot cauldron of Mussolini’s Italy. To make matters worse, her marriage is in trouble, and her children are still struggling to recover from the repercussions of the Great War.

In this gothic, virtuoso debut collection, Mike McCormack dispenses nightmares both stylish and macabre. "A Is for Ax" offers alphabetized look at the killing of a parent, while the title story tracks a chilling sibling rivalry. Other works here offer multiple-quiz on the road to Calvary, a door-to-door saleswoman trafficking in strange and menacing feats, and a self-mutilating artist pushing himself to the limit. These sly and dangerous stories show us a young writer who was already a master of wicked formal play, and whose sly takes on life and death remain profoundly unsettling.