Showing results by narrator "Imogen Church" in All Categories

A spate of pornographic polaroids and a violent accident bookend Josephine's last year at St John the Divine, an elite all-girls English boarding school. Divines are known for flipping their hair, harassing teachers, chasing boys and chain-smoking cigarettes. Joe and her friends are fiercely loyal, sharp-tongued and witty in the way that only teenage girls can be. When Joe is forced to board with Gerry Lake, the class pariah, she feels the ground beneath her shift. An unlikely friendship with a townie named Lauren further upends her world, as does a tragedy that changes everything.

When sisters Celine and Pip get a call telling them their reclusive mother has died, the two women assemble at her riverside home in Arundel to pick up the pieces. But someone is missing - their sister, Vanessa, brutally murdered years ago and the victim of an unsolved case. As the sisters confront ghosts from the past, the discovery of another body in similar circumstances throws new light on Vanessa's death.

Rebecca is 42, has a beautiful child and a wonderful husband. But she just hasn’t been feeling herself recently.... Rebecca thinks a great night out should involve a packet of Marlboros, six double vodkas and snogging a colleague. Not gormlessly drinking a zero-alcohol No-hito while Instagramming a vegan chicken wing. Rebecca wants to ride on a Harley-Davidson, crowd surf till dawn, then collapse in a heap after swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniels...not sit in a soul-destroying meeting surrounded by 'blue sky thinking' and men half her age who interrupt all the time.

Holly Lawrence always wanted to be a spy, but the experience proved more dangerous than anything she imagined. Now, Holly lives in hiding under an assumed name. She avoids relationships and trusts no one. But Holly’s new life begins to unravel when she encounters a young mother and her two-year-old child...a child who reminds her of a past she has tried hard to forget. This time, someone is spying on her, and Holly will need to decide how far she is willing to go to survive....

Connie Granger has escaped the devastation of her bombed out city home. She has found work in the Women's Timber Corps, and for her, this remote community must now serve a secret purpose. Seppe, an Italian prisoner of war, is haunted by his memories. But in the forest camp, he finds a strange kind of freedom. In each other they find the means to imagine their own lives anew, and to face that which each fears the most. But outside their haven, the world is ravaged by war and old certainties are crumbling.

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.

It took years for Giselle to complete the journey from Orleans to New Orleans. Her mother had given birth to her a week or so earlier than her parents had expected, while the family were staying at their country villa in Orleans, in the French provinces by the curve of the Loire river. Throughout her childhood she would hear people, relatives and friends, speaking of New Orleans in America and she always imagined it as a newer, cleaner version of the sleepy regional city where she was born.

I always knew I was different from other women... An eminent psychiatrist has established there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. When Dominik died, I experienced none of these. I initially found myself reeling in shock, and then all I could do was miss him, miss him, and miss him over and again.

London, 1862. A city of over three million souls, of stinking fog and dark, winding streets. Through these streets walks the poet Christina Rossetti, haunted and tormented by the ghost of her uncle, John Polidori. Without him, she cannot write, but her relationship with him threatens to shake London itself to the ground. A fascinating and vivid recreation of the stews and slums of Victorian London - a city of dreadful delight. But it is the history of a hidden city, where nursery rhymes lead the adventurer through haunted tunnels and inverted spires.

Junko is bad at athletics. Really bad. Other students laugh because they think she is small and weak. Then her teacher takes the class on a trip to a mountain. It’s bigger than any Junko’s ever seen, but she is determined to make it to the top. Ganbatte, her teacher tells her. Do your best. After that first trip, Junko becomes a mountaineer in body and spirit. She climbs snowy mountains, rocky mountains and even faraway mountains outside of her home country of Japan.

Alicia was born to dance. From the moment she slips on pointe shoes for the first time, she’s determined to become a professional ballerina. A few years later, Alicia moves from Cuba to the United States to follow her dreams. Then, Alicia begins to lose her sight. How can a ballerina dance if she can’t see where she’s going? Stuck in bed and only able to practice with her fingertips, Alicia doesn’t give up. She finds a way to get back on stage, dancing into the hearts of audiences as one of the world’s most famous prima ballerinas.

Sarah is the first person in her family who wasn’t born into slavery in Delta, Louisiana. But being free doesn’t mean that Sarah doesn’t have to work. She cooks, she cleans, she picks cotton, she does laundry and she babysits. And when she works, she wraps up her hair. One day, Sarah’s hair starts to fall out! It’s itchy, crunchy, patchy and won’t grow. Instead of giving up, Sarah searches for the right products. And then she invents something better than any shampoo or hair oil she’s used before.

Growing up in 19th-century London, England, Ada is curious about absolutely everything. She is obsessed with machines and with creatures that fly. She even designs her own flying laboratory! According to her mother, Ada is a bit too wild, so she encourages Ada to study math. At first, Ada thinks: bleh! Who can get excited about a subject without pictures? But she soon falls in love with it. One day, she encounters a mysterious machine, and from that moment forward, Ada imagines a future full of possibility - one that will eventually inspire the digital age nearly 200 years later.

Wangari lives in the lush, green land of rural Kenya, where the soil is perfect for planting, the trees tower into the sky and the streams are full of mysterious creatures. All day, she plays beneath her favourite fig tree, and at night, she gathers around the fire with her family to listen to her mother's stories. Then Wangari grows up and goes away to school, and things start changing at home. Farmers chop down the trees. Landslides bury the stream. The soil becomes overworked and dry, and nothing will grow. People go hungry.

Sea, sky and smugglers coves... paradise for some but despair for beautiful Rebecca. Her father plans to marry her off to a tyrant. Intrigued by a soothsayer's words, she tumbles at the feet of bad boy Jac, an apprentice smuggler, good with women and horses. Desire mounts as powerfully as Rebecca s determination to rewrite her destiny. Is the local witch the answer to her prayers? Mystic Morwenna is Jac s ex-lover. Can she be trusted? The lovers must face greater danger before innocence is traded for passion.

How well can you really know another person? And how far would you go to find out the truth about him or her? When Julia learns her sister has been violently killed, she knows she must get to the bottom of things. Even if it means jeopardising her relationship with her husband and risking the safety of her son. Getting involved with a stranger online. Losing control. Perhaps losing everything. Set in Paris and London, Second Life is about the double lives people lead--and the dark places in which they can end up.

Trapped and alone in a remote house in the country, one woman must find a way to defeat a captor who has no intention of letting her go. The last thing she remembers is standing outside the empty house. One she was employed to pack, ready for removal. Her job is her life. It is her compulsion to take care of an owner’s precious possessions, to do whatever it takes to help them move on. Now she is cold, dirty, damp, trapped in its cellar with no chance of escape, miles from anywhere. His prisoner.

While her milliner mother Rosamund is abroad in Paris, 12-year-old Vinnie Fyfe is left behind in Brighton. She finds comfort in eccentric Aunt Bets, her new friend Temitayo and the Brighton Aquarium—where the arrival of a giant octopus will change her life forever. At first terrified, then fascinated, Vinnie begins to produce drawings of the incredible creature, and is sure that a bond is developing between them. But meanwhile, there is a dark and dangerous mystery afoot—involving Rosamund's real reasons for disappearing so suddenly.

Liv Reese wakes up in the back of a taxi with no idea where she is or how she got there. When she's dropped off at the door of her brownstone, a stranger answers—a stranger who now lives in her apartment and forces her out in the cold. She reaches for her phone to call for help, only to discover it's missing, and in its place is a bloodstained knife. That's when she sees that her hands are covered in black pen, scribbled messages like graffiti on her skin: Stay awake.

1816. A massive volcanic eruption has caused the worst storms that Europe has seen in decades, yet Percy and Mary Shelley have chosen to visit the infamous Lord Byron at his villa on Lake Geneva. It wasn't their idea: Mary's eighteen-year-old step-sister, Claire Clairmont, insisted. But the reason for Claire's visit is more pressing than a summer escape with the most famous writers in the world. She's pregnant with Byron's child - a child Byron doesn't want, and scarcely believes is his own.