Mostrando resultados por narrador "Anne Dover" en Todas las categorías

Dana and Caitlin meet on the ferry from Ireland, both in search of new lives in Liverpool, having left their secrets behind in Ireland. But Dana is ambitious, and when the opportunity comes to own their own tearoom she persuades her friend to join her. No one is willing to rent property to a couple of girls, so when Caitlin’s new man-friend says he’ll back them, they are delighted. Soon the tearoom is thriving.

The moment artist Riana Evans sees the dilapidated mansion in Wales she longs to buy it, despite its unhappy past – 20 years ago, five maids died there in mysterious circumstances. So she is delighted when the house’s elderly and eccentric owner sells it to her for a pittance. The house’s “ghosts” prove good for business – inspiring her paintings and providing welcome atmosphere for a series of successful ghost-spotting weekends.

The choice was hers - fame and fortune or true love. Poppy Mazzini, born in Hull over her father's grocery shop, lives up to the promise of her fiery red hair and Italian ancestry. Her lovely singing voice and good looks lead her to her great ambition - to go on the stage and see her name top of...

After the death of her mother during childbirth, Beth is left to care for her father and two older brothers. When she discovers that she is pregnant, she leaves the family home in a Yorkshire mill town to live with her aunt. A tragic accident leaves her in the colourful world of the Romany Gypsies, where she gives birth to her son, Joshua. She keeps his birth secret, but when he is falsely accused of murder many years later, she is forced to reveal her secrets to save him from the hangman’s noose.

It's December 1953. As the village prepares for the festivities, for many people, a happy Christmas is by no means certain. Recovering from a car-crash, Stella Simmons, the winter wedding that she and her sweetheart had planned seems impossible. Elsewhere in the village, Jackie Tozer is dreaming of America and Hilary Napier, who thought the war had robbed her of her chance at happiness, has to ask herself if she could ever imagine leaving her life at the big house. The darkest time of the year finds everyone asking questions with no easy answer.

1957. Newly-wed Val Walker is looking forward to starting a family. Her best friend, the previously flighty Cissie, is expecting her second child, content to settle down to full-time motherhood. Their mutual friend Janice is engaged to boyfriend Paul. But life doesn't always turn out as one would expect. Val doesn't find it as easy as she'd expected to fall pregnant. Cissie is jealous when her husband, Walter, takes an interest in a new female colleague. Janice feels guilty for leaving her widowed father and young brother behind in Blackpool to start a new life in Yorkshire.

Babs and Beth are identical in looks but very different by nature. Kidnapped by gypsies a decade ago as young girls, Beth has accepted their plight, but Babs has always yearned for their real mother, Tilly, and their beloved hometown of Blackpool. Convinced the best thing for them is to be reunited with Tilly, Babs tries to persuade Beth to escape. But Beth is too afraid, and Babs knows if she wants to find their mother, she'll have to do it alone.

Seventeen-year-old Maddie has grown up in a boarding house on one of Blackpool's poorest streets. Life is busy, but happy, as she works alongside her mother taking care of their visitors. But when war breaks out, her happiness is shattered as her fiancé is called up to fight for his country, and suddenly Maddie's future is filled with uncertainty.

For Amelia and her brothers and sisters, the grim past which their mother, Emily, had endured seemed very far away. As pretty as a picture and now learning to be a teacher in York, Amelia looked forward with pleasure to becoming acquainted with the young men clamouring to get to know her, and especially the two gentlemen who had come all the way from Australia to meet her family. Ralph Hawkins, bringing with him his friend Jack - a handsome half-aboriginal Australian who was determined to make a good living for himself - arrived in Hull looking for his roots.

Liverpool, 1938. It’s Christmas in the Courts, and single mother Rosheen Clarke and her mischievous twin daughters, April and May, have no idea of the cataclysmic events which will soon overtake them. When war is declared, April and May are evacuated to the countryside, and Rosheen joins the WAAF, where she befriends fellow Liverpudlian Cassie Valentine. While Rosheen worries about what trouble the twins will cause next, Cassie is fighting her love for her childhood friend, Andy.

When Sally Westwood moves into a large Victorian house that she has been left by a stranger, she is unaware that her benefactor died at the hands of her grandson, who is expected to inherit. The house holds a secret that Sally must reveal before she and her husband are out of danger. Mystery and intrigue surround them. The story goes back to the previous century, revealing something that is hidden in the house. Something that a man would kill to get his hands on.

Blackpool, 1922. Martha and Trisha may have escaped poverty, but their fortunes have yet to turn. Happy on her wedding day, Trisha's new fairy-tale romance soon darkens as her husband, Walter, keeps her at arms length. Between his secrecy, and her mother-in-law's coldness, Trisha feels a stranger in her own home, and lonelier than ever. Meanwhile a spectre from Martha's past threatens the happiness she has found with Joshua and Bonnie. When she is called to help in her past love's hour of need, she must decide whether to risk exposing a secret that could cost her the trust of her daughter.

Martha is seventeen and alone in the world. Of Irish decent, her flashing green eyes see into your soul. Foretelling the future is a gift passed down by her late grandmother and is how she earns her living on Blackpool Promenade. Though she spends hours in a little tent, waiting and hoping for a customer. Trisha is Martha's neighbour and quickly becomes her dearest friend, but she is pregnant and married to a brutal man. And when tragedy strikes, she finds herself alone, her future uncertain.

When Ethan Postlethwaite, his wife, Grace, and their daughter, Amy, announce that they will be leaving the family home in the Yorkshire Dales, Grace’s parents are heartbroken. Hoping for a new life prospecting for gold in the wilds of Canada, the young family say goodbye and set sail across the Atlantic in search of a brighter future. The journey there proves hard and treacherous; upon arrival, it becomes apparent that the riches they had been promised in the gold fields have already been plundered.

It wasn't a privileged childhood, but it was a happy one. Sybil and Lizzie Cream, brought up in a fisherman's cottage on the edge of the cold North Sea, were content to leave privilege where it belonged: with their friends the Wintertons. Christina Winterton was the same age as Sybil, and the two girls were inseparable, but it was Lizzie whom Ralph Winterton, three years older, found irresistible. Then war came to East Anglia, and so did Manchester-born Fenn Kitzmann, now of the American Army Air Force.

1961. Lucia once dreamed of a man who would love her. She has lost hope because what man would, when she's responsible for so many siblings? Everything changes when Tim Murphy enters Lucia's coffee bar. She knows of Tim's troubled past, but she accepts Tim's offer of a date. But has Tim really changed his ways, and will his past catch up with him?

Thousands of short stories were published during the First World War, which coincided with the heyday of the fiction magazine in Britain. Much of this material has never been republished since the end of the war and is virtually lost to the modern audience. This new collection is an important work of recovery, introducing little-known magazine short fiction - which was primarily written for a civilian readership - by major writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle as well as more neglected authors.

Women’s contribution to the war effort was constantly changing, and The Despatch-Rider follows one young woman’s determination to contribute in a practical way.

Despite the war, life had to go on at home, and in this short story, the voluntary work carried out by women on the home front is brought to the fore.

January 1936. Sarah, a young executive at a Yorkshire mill, returns home to attend her grandfather's funeral, blissfully unaware of the shock that awaits her when his will is read. The twists and turns of the next few weeks see her meeting an old flame and find her striving to unravel the mystery of a long-hidden family secret. But what of Daisy, the terrified child she meets on the train?