Showing results by narrator "Jilly Bond" in All Categories

Sisters-in-law Kate, Heather, and Olivia are all hiding something. It's not easy being part of the high-achieving Fox family: the expectations and demands of their husbands and children; the jealousies and rivalries; and the endless Sunday lunches. So when mysterious Sasha enters their lives, bloodied from a painful divorce, buried frustrations rush to the surface. Three sisters-in-law. One devastating divorcee. Whose husband is about to play with fire?

Migrants and millionairesses, refugees and aristocrats all looking for a way to improve their lives. After WW1 a world of opportunity was opening up for women.... Before convenient air travel, transatlantic travel was the province of the great ocean liners and never more so than in the glory days of the interwar years. It was an extraordinary undertaking made by many women. Some traveled for leisure, some for work; others to find a new life, marriage, to reinvent themselves or find new opportunities. Their stories have remained largely untold - until now.

November 1919. A relaxing few weeks by the seaside with her husband, Sidney, could almost convince Verity Kent that life has returned to the pleasant rhythm of pre-war days. Then Verity's beloved great-aunt, Ilse, lands on their doorstep. After years in war-ravaged Germany, Ilse has returned to England to repair her fragile health - and to escape trouble. Someone has been sending her anonymous threats, and Verity's Secret Service contacts can only provide unsettling answers.

Stick and Fetch are on holiday, but even in a rickety old seaside hotel there are plenty of crimes to solve and mysteries to unravel. Such as, who is Major Mayhem? Why is that door frightened? And where could the small-bottle-of-shampoo robbers be hiding? This lovable pair is on the case and undeterred despite plenty of mishaps, misdeeds and misunderstandings along the way. A fun-filled adventure featuring two hapless investigators with a lot of hair.

A person or persons unknown bludgeon Stafford Mills to death with his own silver candlestick. Suspects abound and suddenly sleepy Osborne-Tye seems a sinister place. The clues pile up. So to the suspects, and the search for the killer becomes quite a challenge. Then a second body is discovered, turning everything on its head. Can DI Guido Black and D Sgt Eden Hudson unravel the clues and unpick the alibis to crack their first murder?

In 1921, Françoise Frenkel - a Jewish woman from Poland - opens Berlin's very first French bookshop. It is a dream come true. The bookshop attracts artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets - even the French ambassador himself. It brings Françoise peace, friendship and prosperity. Then one summer's day in 1939, the dream ends. It ends after Kristallnacht, when Jewish shops and businesses are smashed to pieces. It ends when no one protests. So, just weeks before the war breaks out, Françoise flees to France.

In 1421, Henry V and his young bride, Catherine de Valois, are blessed with the birth of a son - but their happiness is short-lived. Catherine is widowed, and when her father, the French king, also dies, her son inherits the crowns of France and England.

England, 1435. Eleanor Cobham has married into the highest ranks of the aristocracy; she is now the Duchess of Gloucester. She and her husband, the Duke Humphrey, set up a court of their own to rival the royal court in London, surrounding themselves with fascinating and influential people. But Eleanor craves the one thing she lacks: a son and heir - and through him a possible route to the throne of England.

Meet Sally Stick and her dog (and best friend), Fetch. Together, they're Stick and Fetch: Detectives. A girl. A dog. A detective agency. Sally loves nothing more than investigating a good mystery - and her shaggy canine companion, Fetch, loves nothing more than to be at her side when she does. There's just one small problem: they always gets the wrong end of the stick! The hapless pair remain undeterred, however, dashing from one crime scene to another on their bicycle, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake...yet always emerging blissfully unaware. A fun, madcap trio of stories featuring two lovable heroes with a lot of hair.

When Judith Summers' husband and father both died within the space of two weeks, she found herself floundering. Life for her and her eight-year-old son, Joshua, seemed relentlessly bleak. Then George bounced into their lives. A loving Cavalier King Charles Spaniel with film-star looks, George reawoke their joie de vivre.

Nattie is now happily married to Hugo, and they have two beautiful children, but her heart has never truly been hers to give.... The love of her life was lost to her years ago, but now Ahmed is back, and although he knows Nattie is married, he just can't stop himself from making contact. Desperate to find out what happened but torn between Ahmed and her family, Nattie ends up meeting him in secret. But will her lies cause more trouble than the truth?

When recently widowed Kat writes to her four old school friends, inviting them to live with her on a cocoa plantation in the South Pacific, they swap icy pavements and TV dinners for a tropical breeze and an azure-blue ocean. Leaving behind loneliness, dead-end jobs and marriages that have gone sour, they settle into the Women's House, surrounded by palms and cocoa trees and locals with the puzzling habit of exploding into laughter for no discernible reason. Each of the women has her issues to resolve and secrets to keep.

Just before D-Day in 1944, on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, an elderly woman walks into a police station. She has information, she says, about human remains recently discovered nearby. The bodies could have stayed buried for ever - like the pain and passion that put them there. But Mary Holmes is finally ready to tell the truth. The young constable sent to take her statement is still suffering from the injuries that ended his army career. As he tries to make sense of her tale, William finds himself increasingly distracted.

Binny Cornwallis has lost something. Something that wasn’t really hers in the first place. With her best enemy Gareth and her beloved dog Max she turns detective to track it down, but the Cornwallis family are anything but helpful. Little brother James and his friend Dill are having an adventure of their own and big sister Clem is acting very strangely. And on top of all this, Binny suspects their next-door neighbour may be a witch....

Sixteen-year-old Frances Stuart arrives at the Restoration court to find her innocence and beauty are highly prized commodities, envied by the women and desired by the men. Before long, King Charles II falls passionately in love with her and will stop at nothing to make her his mistress. But Frances is no conventional court beauty. She is determined to make her own choices in life and to be with the man she loves. Can she overcome the dangerous pitfalls of the King's obsession, the Queen's jealousy, and the traps set for her by the King's notorious mistresses?

At the age of 16, Catherine Tylney Long became the wealthiest heiress in England, and the public found their 'angel'. Witty, wealthy and beautiful, Catherine married for love. Her choice of husband was the charming but feckless dandy William Wellesley Pole, nephew of the Duke of Wellington. But their happiness was short-lived; just a decade later, William had frittered away Catherine's inheritance, and the couple were forced to flee.

Bogwoppit is a light-hearted, lively story, brilliantly told by Ursula Moray Williams, author of Gobbolino. Samantha opened the door, and something hopped and shuffled into the room. Something round and black and furry.... In the cellar of Park House, the old mansion where orphaned Samantha has been sent to stay with her disagreeable aunt Daisy, there are hundreds of bogwoppits - believed extinct, up till now.

A brand-new story of crushes, first love and friendship from the original Queen of Tween - Jean Ure! When Maya falls off her bike and into the arms of Jake Harper, her cousin, Mattie, thinks the crush that follows will be as short lived as the rest - especially as Maya is a year 8 nobody and Jake is a year 12 god. Mattie's pretty sure that Jake's taken, anyway. But if Jake's got a girlfriend, then why does he keep offering Maya lifts around town? And why does Maya accuse Mattie of being jealous of her?

With her awful secondhand uniform and stuck-up classmates, Binny's new school is horrible. And life gets even worse when a storm damages the roof of her house, forcing Binny and her family to move to the countryside whilst it's being fixed. Binny; her sensible older sister, Clem; and her rambunctious brother, James (and his chickens) begin adjusting to life in the country. Then one of James' beloved chickens vanishes, and Binny finds strange footprints in the mud. What kind of creature is lurking in the undergrowth?

September 1940. England is at war once again and London has become an ever-fragile place for widowed Livia Ripley and her two young daughters, Polly and Eliza. When Livia meets charismatic publisher Hugo Ballantyne, she is hopeful that her life is about to change for the better. But as clouds gather in the clear autumn sky, the wail of the siren heralds the arrival of the Luftwaffe.