Showing results by narrator "Penelope Freeman" in All Categories

Bringing the Keep Fit movement vividly to life in 1940s' London, Pam Evans' family saga will inspire and enthral anyone who has ever dared to dream of a better life. In the middle of a party to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of King George V, in 1935, Mollie Fisher's good-for-nothing husband walks out on his wife and baby girl. Luckily, Mollie has a loving family to turn to for help. Mollie's mother, Marge, is delighted to look after baby Esme while Mollie goes out to work.

Is it possible for a 10-year-old girl to fall in love? Jenny Mercer thinks so. Evacuated to Lincolnshire from the East End of London at the outbreak of war, she is frightened of the wide-open spaces and the huge skies. But the kindly Thornton family soon makes her feel welcome. And no one more so than Georgie, the handsome RAF fighter pilot who is caught up in the battle for Britain's survival. When Georgie is posted missing, presumed dead, Jenny is devastated.

When a young girl, Jill Harris, is murdered, the case soon becomes personal for Monika Paniatowski. She saw the victim looking distressed only hours before she was killed, and Jill was the same age as her own daughter, Louisa. Driven by guilt and pity, Monika throws herself into the investigation, but both the chief constable, who is away, and Colin Beresford - her right hand man - think she is too emotionally involved to handle it. What none of them know is that the killer is planning to strike again...

When Jean Sinclair's parents are killed in an accident she travels from the US to Scotland to trace her family roots, despite the disapproval of her fiancé, Don. There she meets Adam Crawford, a handsome but arrogant landowner and, despite her initial dislike, has a tempestuous physical union with him at a glamorous highland ball.

It is 1940 and Britain is at war with Germany. In London, eighteen-year-old Susan Banks longs to do her duty. Her secret ambition is to learn to fly - to serve her country and realise her dream. But she knows it is out of the question for a girl like her; a foundling, unwanted and unloved and dependent on strangers for her welfare. Just as she fears she will be trapped forever in a life of servitude and loneliness, she meets Tony Richards, a flying instructor based in Hampshire.

It is April 1939 and unaware that the German war machine is advancing towards the Channel Islands, seventeen-year-old Meg Colivet and her sister are enjoying a holiday in Oxford with their aunt. Here Meg meets charismatic German undergraduate Rayner Weiss and the couple fall passionately in love. But all too soon, Britain is at war with Germany, Guernsey has been occupied and Meg's family home requisitioned by the German army.

August 1939: Thirteen-year-old Poppy Brown is evacuated to a village in Dorset. Tired and frightened, she arrives with nothing but her gas mask and a change of clothes to her name. Billeted at a grand country house, Poppy is received with cold indifference above stairs and gets little better treatment from the servants. Lonely and missing the family she left behind in London, Poppy is devastated when she hears that they have been killed in the Blitz. Circumstances soon force Poppy to move to the suburbs and into the company of strangers once more.

Devastated after a miscarriage, Claire has distanced herself from her own life, and from her husband, Rob. Unable to deal with her own reality, Claire becomes obsessed with Daisy, a woman from the past, and as she traces her life, month-by-month, she starts to notice intriguing parallels between their lives....

Louise Charlton sees herself as plain and uninteresting beside her vibrant sister Sarah, a talented singer. When she falls in love with young Doctor Andrew Tate she is convinced he is not interested in her. While Sarah sails to America to pursue her musical career, Louise stays at home, duty-bound to care for her selfish manipulative stepmother.

It’s the early 1920s. Julia Howard’s father is a toy manufacturer who created a paper doll in her image. However, Julia longs to cast off her goody-goody reputation, but her plans to do so are thwarted by wealthy businessman Latham Miller. When Julia marries Latham to please her father, Latham proves to be a controlling man who has no intention of giving up his outside pleasures. But when Julia is reunited with an old acquaintance, the attraction that once existed between them grows into love.

Midsummer Madness follows the fortunes of talented actress Sophie Gresham as she struggles with the secret she is desperate to hide from her theatre company. Sophie is shocked when she realises that Joe Harrison, their tough guest producer from New York, is in fact the penniless actor she once helped out in the days when she had more heart than sense.

When sweet-talking Mick Brogan dies, his young wife Cathleen struggles to bring up their daughters in their rented rooms in 1960s North London. She is comforted by Father Jerry, her husband's cousin, and a priest generally acknowledged by the Irish community to be both a saint and the spit of Gregory Peck.

In the 1930s, Emma Pearson and her family offered a rural holiday to two orphaned children. Despite being unable to adopt John and Tommy as their own, the Pearsons stayed in touch over the years, treating them as family.

Wealthy, glamorous and bored, she longed for something more. Now a talented artist with a small business, Helen creates crazy patchwork crafts to support her young daughter, Megan. Penniless, content and single, she is almost unrecognisable. But when her past unexpectedly collides with her new life, Helen finds herself torn. She knows what the easiest choice is, but is it what she wants?

Soundings and Choc Lit present the audiobook edition of Christmas at Borteen Bay. Christmas is a bittersweet time for Pippa Freeman. There are good memories, of course - but some painful ones, too. Then her mother is implicated in a mysterious occurrence in their home town of Borteen, and Pippa wonders if she'll ever experience a happy Christmas again - especially when a family secret is revealed. But when police officer and old school friend Ethan Gibson offers his support, Pippa begins to realise that even though her life has been turned upside down, a happy and hopeful Christmas isn't impossible....

East Kent, 1876. With doting parents and siblings she adores, 16-year-old Rose Cheevers leads a contented life at Willow Place in Canterbury. A bright future ahead of her, she dreams of following in her mother’s footsteps and becoming a teacher. Then one traumatic day turns the Cheevers’ household upside down. What was once a safe haven has become a place of peril, and Rose is forced to flee with the younger children. Desperate, she seeks refuge in a remote village with a long-lost grandmother who did not know she existed.

Brighton, 1956.When Mirabelle's on-off boyfriend, Superintendent Alan McGregor, is taken off a gruesome murder case because the key suspect is an old school friend, Mirabelle steps in to unravel the tangle of poisoned gin, call girls and high stakes gambling that surrounds the death. It isn't long before McGregor's integrity is called into question and Mirabelle finds herself doubting him. So when a wartime hero's body turns up on the Sussex Downs, she is glad that McGregor is caught up in a mystery of his own as Brighton's establishment closes ranks. 

When Edward Price-Carpenter arrives in Wyford, Essex, he immediately catches Cassie Jordan's eye. Handsome and persuasive, the young man has come to oversee work on his father's racing yacht and takes lodgings in the Falcon Inn, where Cassie lives with her family. As romance blossoms between them, Cassie finds herself torn between the man she loves and Luke Turnbull, a childhood friend whom she is destined to marry.

After fleeing her divided Dutch homeland, Jannekyn van der Hest comes to Colchester, Essex, looking to make a new life for herself. Though she seeks comfort and community, she finds herself at the mercy of her cruel uncle, who condemns her to a demeaning life as a kitchen maid. As she struggles to regain her independence and make a life for herself in the cloth trade, Jannekyn will need all the courage and resourcefulness she possesses - especially when she falls in love with an Englishman, whose arrival turns Jannekyn's world upside down.

In Talyton St George, vet nurse Tessa Wilde is on the way to her wedding...It should be the happiest day of her life. But then her car hits a dog, and though the dog is saved, her wedding is not. Animal welfare officer and part-time firefighter Jack Miller spends his life saving animals and people. As one of Tessa’s oldest friends, he feels he has the right to rescue her from a marriage that can only end in tears.But does he? Tessa is sure she doesn’t need rescuing, least of all by Jack.