Showing results by narrator "Anna Cordell" in All Categories

Two little girls stand with their heads bowed in my living room. I’m told they’re my granddaughters. Daisy is nine, and Alice seven. Daisy is the spitting image of her mother. This is the first time I’ve met them since my daughter and I fell out after she married that waste of space, Vince. They’ve come to live with me because their mother — my daughter — was murdered. In her own home while they slept close by. I think Vince killed her. But the police can’t prove it. I’ve always known he was no good. He treated my daughter like dirt. I said he’d cheat on her — but she wouldn’t listen.

Julian Jessop, an eccentric, lonely artist and septuagenarian believes that most people aren’t really honest with each other. But what if they were? And so he writes—in a plain, green journal—the truth about his own life and leaves it in his local café. It’s run by the incredibly tidy and efficient Monica, who furtively adds her own entry and leaves the book in the wine bar across the street. Before long, the others who find the green notebook add the truths about their own deepest selves - and soon find each other In Real Life at Monica’s Café.

It’s 1913 when Mina, the young and carefree daughter of a Jewish merchant, roams into a forest on the edge of the Baltic Sea looking for mushrooms. Instead, she encounters a gang of unruly, charismatic Bolsheviks—an adventure that will become the stuff of familial lore for generations to come. Intending to save her from further corruption, and in an act that forever changes the trajectory of their family’s life, Mina and her eldest brother, Jossel, board a ship to England.

On Yom Kippur, 1944, fighting to stay alive as a prisoner in Auschwitz, Lily Ebert made a promise to herself. She would survive the hell she was in and tell the world her story, for everyone who couldn’t. Now, at ninety-eight, this remarkable woman—and TikTok sensation, thanks to the help of her eighteen-year-old great-grandson—fulfills that vow, relaying the details of her harrowing experiences with candor, charm, and an overflowing heart.

As the Nazis’ relentless bombs fall during the Blitz of Coventry, six-year-old Rose Sherbourne finds herself orphaned and under the guardianship of a Cornish farmer's daughter, Elenor Cardew. Elenor knows that the only way to protect spirited Rose is to leave the city and make a new life for themselves away from harm. But soon Elenor discovers that Hitler’s firestorm is not the only thing she must fear when she learns a devastating secret about Rose....

Six strangers with one universal thing in common: their lives aren’t always what they make them out to be. But what would happen if they told the truth instead? Julian begins The Authenticity Project - a small green notebook containing his ‘truth’ - to pass on and encourage others to share their own. Little does he know that this small act of honesty will impact all those who come into contact with the book and lead to a life-changing world of friendship and forgiveness....

All the neighbours were laughing, drinking out of plastic glasses and getting along. I almost felt happy. Almost forgot about the terrible argument earlier and the sinister messages I’d been receiving from a strange address all week, threatening to expose the lies behind my perfect life. As we finished with the red and gold fireworks and welcomed everyone back to our house, I believed that everything would be okay. But I didn’t know who I was inviting in.

Jo was the last person to see Martha Scott alive. She was helping Martha unlock a repressed memory. But during the session, Jo unlocked more than she bargained for. An alter personality introduced himself as the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper - and thanked Jo for setting him free to kill again. As Ferguson’s team race to find Martha’s killer, a series of copycat killings begin, replicating ‘The Autumn of Terror’ in 1888. But if Jack is just a figment of Martha’s damaged mind, who killed her?

We begin with the footsteps of a family walking along a beach 950,000 years ago. From here, Montefiore takes us on an exhilarating epic journey through the families that have shaped our world: the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads.

Hazel and Jamie are happily married. Or so it would seem. Behind closed doors, things are far from normal. Jamie has an unhealthy obsession, and Hazel is more worried about herself than her husband. So when Millicent injects herself into their lives, with Jamie firmly in her sights, the trio end up on a path that will end in death. Everyone has secrets. Everyone has a dark side. But who is good, who is bad, and who is going to get away with murder?

A biography of the remarkable, and in her time scandalous, seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.

In a beautiful house in the wilds of Cornwall, Daphne du Maurier is on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Tangled in a self-destructive love affair that threatens to unravel her marriage, she is also distracted by worry for the family friend whose shadow looms over her childhood: J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. Daphne tries to escape into writing her new book, but the line between fiction and reality blurs dangerously when her own characters start manifesting before her eyes—in particular a woman called Rebecca who looks suspiciously like her husband's alluring ex-girlfriend.

Unconscious bias affects us all. From the smallest assumption to the most sweeping generalization, the way we think about others can unknowingly influence our behaviour and shape our culture. Acting as your mentor and guide, this book will take you through the most common forms of prejudice, including gender, race, size, age and sexuality. It also explores the psychology behind our biases and provides actionable tips and simple exercises to help you combat implicit judgements.

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. It was this moral foundation that ultimately turned her against the warped and tyrannical attitudes of the Left, requiring her to break away not only from her parents - but also from the people she had seen as her wider political family.

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.

Can their friendship survive the darkest days of war? When Abigail arrives for a new start in Bristol in the late 1930s, she knows life won’t be easy - particularly as she is the unmarried mother of three-year-old Emily Grace. But as the war starts to take over the city and threaten their very existence, will Abigail’s new friends, Carrie and Eileen, be enough to keep herself and her daughter safe?

Sergeant Belinda 'Billy' Kidd is driving home from the airport, jet-lagged and ready to resign from a career that has left her traumatized. Menopause has robbed her confidence too - now she's a traffic cop who's afraid to drive. When brake lights hemorrhage up the motorway, the cars grind to a halt. Moments later she finds a dead driver in a black sedan.

Dr. Liz O'Riordan is a breast cancer surgeon who has battled against social, physical and mental challenges to practice at the top of her field. Under the Knife charts Liz's incredible highs: performing like a couture dressmaker as she molded and reshaped women's breasts, while saving their lives; to the heart-breaking lows of telling ten women a day that they had cancer. But this memoir is more than just an eye-opening look at the realities of training to be a female surgeon in a man's world

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.

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.