Showing results by narrator "Sarah Lambie" in All Categories

Poland, 1942. After witnessing the destruction of her hometown in Warsaw, Anna Kowalski joins the Polish Resistance. She is tasked with smuggling as many children as possible out of the Warsaw Ghetto through the sewers and relocating them to safety. Through her work, Anna meets Johnnie Nowak, an RAF pilot who had managed to escape from a prisoner of war camp. He's not safe in Warsaw, so Anna leads him out of the city to protect him...

The dashing Duke of Selchester is on his way to visit Lord Upminster at Copple Hall when a stagecoach crashes into his own travelling carriage, buckling its wheel. Worse still, his beloved pedigree stallion, Salamanca, needs re-shoeing. Arriving on foot at the nearest village, he finds a beautiful Verena Winchcombe, who agrees to take him to the local blacksmith. It transpires that she has been awaiting the arrival of someone she calls 'the Odious Duke', who is due at Copple Hall.

Julia Blythe is starting again. After blowing the whistle on a fellow surgeon at her hospital, resulting in him being let go, she found herself illegally bullied from the job by her male colleagues who closed ranks against her. No longer willing to endure their campaign of smears and intimidation, she packs her family up and moves to Devon, to start a new life in a new hospital. To Nathan Sloan, who abuses his role as a surgeon as fully and freely as he can, she couldn’t be more perfect.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë—the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist—is a true classic. It transports us with a deft hand straight into 19th-century Haworth, Yorkshire and crafts an extensive account of Brontë’s life, quoting throughout from letters she sent and received. From her challenging, isolated childhood to her death shortly before the age of 39, newly married and pregnant, the enigmatic author of Jane Eyre is portrayed with enormous care.

Seventy-seven-year-old Dorothy Darling has lived in Shelley House longer than any of the other residents, and if you take their word for it, she’s as cantankerous as they come. But Dorothy has her reasons for spying. And none of them require justifying herself to Kat Bennett. Twenty-five-year-old Kat has never known a place where she felt truly at home, and crumbling Shelley House is no different. Her neighbors find her prickly and unapproachable, but beneath her tough exterior, Kat’s plagued by a guilty secret from her past.

Comforted by the gentle hum of the beehives at the bottom of the garden, Grace drains the last of her tea and walks slowly back towards the little hillside house she adores. Her marriage is over, but is it too late to start her life again? Beekeeper Grace thought throwing out her cheating husband would be the hardest thing she ever did. But when she opens the door to a property developer one morning, it’s clear that keeping her beautiful home and garden – her only sanctuary throughout her miserable marriage – will be the greatest challenge of all.

Deep underground, 39 women are kept in isolation in a cage. Aboveground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus? Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time and only vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the 40th prisoner - sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them aboveground.

Imperious, handsome and gallant in battle, the Duke of Kingswood has stolen the hearts of many society belles but he is determined never to marry. To continue the family line, he is counting on his cousin and heir presumptive, Richard, to marry well and produce a son. To the Duke’s horror, Richard falls for society siren and acclaimed beauty Lady Delyth Maulden and disaster turns to tragedy when Richard finds his beloved in the arms of another, shoots him and turns his gun on himself.

Begun in 1797, when William was at the height of his poetic powers, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals provide invaluable insight into the daily lives of Dorothy and William Wordsworth, William’s friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the incidents that inspired some of his greatest poems. Richly immersive and intimately domestic, the Journals transport the listener to life in the Lake District 200 years ago as Dorothy describes the Lake District countryside, her garden and neighbours, keeping house, going on walks, and the people she meets along the way

Despite the arranged marriages of her two sisters ending in misery, the Duke of Cumberworth insists that his beautiful daughter, Lady "Ila" Lavinia marries the rich and aristocratic Marquis of Rakemoore, his most serious rival at Race Meetings. Ila is appalled. Not only is she determined to marry for love, but she hears that the Marquis is only asking for her hand to avoid an arranged marriage to a German Princess. She decides to run away. Fleeing through the woods near her home, Ila witnesses a young boy being dragged away by his spooked pony and heading towards a cliff edge.

The murders have begun. Across England, a string of murders is taking place. Each different in method, but each horrifying and brutal. Jess Ambrose is plunged into the investigation when her house is set ablaze. With her husband dead and the police pointing at her, she runs. Her only hope is disgraced detective Nate Griffin, who is convinced Jess is innocent. Soon, Jess and Griffin discover the unthinkable: this murderer is copying the world’s most notorious serial killers. And now, imitation isn’t enough. The killer dubbed the Echo Man is ready to create his own masterpiece.

In August 1939, 30-year-old Hetty Cartwright arrives at Lockwood Manor to oversee a natural history museum collection whose contents have been taken out of London for safekeeping. She is unprepared for the scale of protecting her charges from party guests, wild animals, the elements, the tyrannical Major Lockwood and Luftwaffe bombs. Most of all, she is unprepared for the beautiful and haunted Lucy Lockwood.

Daydreamer and book-lover, Zosina, the eldest daughter of the Archduke Ferdinand of Blitzstein, is reluctantly obedient when her father announces that she must marry King Gorgy of neighbouring Dorsa to create an alliance between the two nations. On her first visit to Dorsa, Zosina is greeted by the beguiling and handsome Prince Regent. By contrast, her betrothed, the King, is wild and disagreeable. For the sake of her people, Zosina must go ahead with the marriage with a hope that someone warmer hides beneath the King's hard exterior.

Scotland, 1750, just four years after Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Rising of the Clans, it’s hard to know who’s loyal to the English and who is faithful to the Stuarts. And it’s beautiful seventeen-year-old Iona’s perilous mission to ascertain whether the Duke of Arkrae, head of Scotland’s most powerful clan, is a traitor or is he in cahoots with the English. Iona’s mission is to gain the trust of the Duke and his clan by claiming to be the sister he thought to have died as a child. As all around her doubt her claim and call her a "pretender", Iona struggles to hold her nerve.

Kyra Cal’Adra has spent the last four years on the Main, living in exile from her people, her power, and her past. A commrach, she’s welcome among the humans only for her rapier work. They don’t care about her highblood, which of the gleaming towers she came from, nor that her family aspires to rule the Isle. On the Main, superstitions and monsters are in every shadow, but Kyra is haunted by the ghost of Shen, the love of her life and lowblood servant she left behind. She survives by wit and blade alone in a land that would see her dead for who she is, for who she loves.

Travel agent Hester Monday has been keeping a secret. Thanks to her fear of flying, she hasn’t been on a plane in years. Now Hester wants to make a good impression on her newest client, Jake Oakenfield, who was heroically injured saving an old lady and is now laid up in a luxury hotel. For Jake, unable to return to New York, binge watching Netflix just won’t do. He wants Hester to invent the ultimate escape and re-create her most magical holidays abroad from the confines of his hotel room.

Pearl is the first of the four poems of the Pearl manuscript, a 14th century work contemporaneous with Chaucer, Langland and Gower. It is widely acknowledged as a masterpiece of medieval English literature. In the poem the grief-stricken protagonist describes the loss of a precious pearl in a garden. He falls asleep and in his dream sees a vision of a beautiful Maiden, who through complex imagery is gradually revealed as the pearl, a lost loved one, often interpreted as the Dreamer's young daughter, though never explicitly identified.

We’ve all experienced it. That creeping sensation of eyes on your back, the faint echo of footsteps following yours. Across the country, a madman is carefully choosing his victims. Once he has you in his sights, he won’t let go. You think you’re in control of your own life? Think again. Because The Puppet Master is coming for you, and he won’t stop until you’re dead…

Love, laughter, and lots of matchmaking mishaps. Sophie Johnson's life seems picture-perfect with her dream job at The Jane Austen Dating Agency and a relationship with the irresistible Darcy Drummond. But all is not as it seems. Darcy's awful mother is wrecking havoc, the agency is struggling, and then there's the amusing and disturbingly cute Henry Baxter who is making it hard for Sophie to focus. As the pressure mounts and her love life falters, Sophie must ask herself: Can she juggle it all and find her own happy ever after? Or is business and romance an impossible combination?

For students of Middle English, Andrew and Waldron's The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript has been the key edition of the four Pearl poems for over 30 years. With the changing needs of today's students in mind, the editors produced a complete prose translation of the four poems - the best known of which is "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". The near-literal translations are intended to facilitate understanding of the four poems - to lead readers to, rather than away from, the original texts.