Showing results by narrator "Antonia Beamish" in All Categories

Amara was once the beloved daughter of a doctor in Greece, until her father’s sudden death plunged her mother into destitution. Now Amara is a slave and prostitute in Pompeii’s notorious Wolf Den brothel or lupanar, owned by a cruel and ruthless man. Intelligent and resourceful, she is forced to hide her true self. But her spirit is far from broken. Buoyed by the sisterhood she forges with the brothel’s other women, Amara finds solace in the laughter and hopes they all share. 

Carmel Wakeford becomes separated from her mother at a local children's festival, and is found by a man who claims to be her estranged grandfather. He tells her that her mother has had an accident and that she is to live with him for now. As days become weeks with her new family, eight-year-old Carmel realizes that this man believes she has a special gift.... While her mother desperately tries to find her, Carmel embarks on an extraordinary journey, one that will make her question who she is - and who she might become.

Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"

Amara has escaped her life as a slave in the Wolf Den, the city’s most notorious brothel, but now her survival depends on the affections of her patron: a man she might not know as well as she once thought. At night in the home he bought for her, the house with the golden door, Amara’s dreams are haunted by her past. She longs for her sisterhood of friends—the women at the brothel she was forced to leave behind—and worse, finds herself pursued by the cruel and vindictive man who once owned her. To be truly free, she will need to be as ruthless as he is. 

When she was 9 years old, Melody Browne's house burned down, and it took all of her childhood memories with it. Now she's a single mother of a teenage boy living in Central London. She hasn't seen her parents since she left home at 15, but she doesn't mind. She's better off on her own. She works as a dinner lady at her son's school and has no idea where her humdrum life is heading. But one summer's night, a hypnotist inadvertently unlocks memories of her childhood, and her whole life is turned upside down.

He's a serial killer. A murderer of young women, all killed in brutal attacks. But despite Hamish Wolfe's conviction, he's always stuck to his story - he's innocent, and he's been wrongly imprisoned. And now he wants someone to investigate and, more importantly, to write his story. Maggie Rose is a notorious defense attorney and writer whose specialty is getting convictions overturned. At first Maggie is reluctant to even acknowledge Hamish's requests to meet, ignoring his letters. But this is a very charismatic and persuasive man, good looking and intelligent.

Norway, 1942. War rages, and, under cover of darkness, Rumi Orlstad and her fellow resistance fighters smuggle British agents, fugitives and supplies across the North Sea into Nazi-occupied territory. One night, when he braves a storm to complete an ill-fated mission, Rumi’s fiancé is lost to the dangerous waters. Broken-hearted, she withdraws from the clandestine group, vowing never to let her loved ones put themselves in the line of fire again. 

'Did you hear Amy has heartbreak?! What bad luck to catch it right at the end of winter.' When Ziella Bryars was in the midst of heartbreak, a conversation with her neuroscientist best friend changed everything. Frustrated by unhelpful advice from magazines and rom-coms, Ziella began diving deep into the latest scientific research to help her understand the pain of heartbreak and find a route to recovery. This warm and witty self-help book outlines the impact a relationship break-up has on our brains and bodies, and explores how a science-based approach can help us heal. 

Lisa, a single mother, devotes herself to raising her 16-year-old daughter, Ava. She doesn’t speak of her past or Ava’s absent father. Ava is getting tired of her overprotective mother. She wants to live like a normal teenager. As her life begins to unravel, Lisa knows that the only way she can protect herself and her daughter is to face her fears. Yet courage won’t be enough. She’ll need help from the only person she can trust - her best friend, Marilyn. Between them, they have to save Ava, and to do that, they have to be honest with each other. 

It’s love at first sight when Penelope Kite sees Le Chant d’Eau - The Song of Water - the stone farmhouse tucked high in the hills above the Luberon valley. For years, Penelope put her unfaithful ex-husband and her ungrateful stepchildren first. Now, she’s going to start living for herself. Though her dream house needs major renovations, Penelope impulsively buys the property and moves to St. Merlot. But Penelope’s daydreams of an adventurous life in Provence didn’t include finding a corpse floating face down in her swimming pool.

Paula has had Robert's back since they got together as drama students. She gave up her dreams so he could make it. Now he's one of the nation's most popular actors. And Paula's just discovered he's having an affair. She's going to remind Robert just what he's sacrificing, and then she's going to break his heart like he broke hers. It will be her greatest acting role ever. Revenge is sweet. Isn't it?

After an eventful first few months in Provence, it seems Penelope is finally settling into her delightful new life, complete with a gorgeous love interest in the mayor of St. Merlot. When Penelope and the mayor attend a glamorous gallery opening, Penelope’s biggest worry is embarrassing herself in front of her date. But the evening takes a horrifying turn when a controversial expat painter, Roland Doncaster, chokes to death.

Detlef Sierck, the self-proclaimed greatest playwright in the world, has declared that his next production will be a recreation of the end of the Great Enchanter Drachenfels - to be staged at the very site of his death, the Fortress of Drachenfels itself. But the castle's dark walls still hide a terrible secret which may make the opening night an evening to remember!

Mia Hamilton lived the perfect life with her husband, university teacher Zach, and their two-year-old daughter. But everything changed when Zach committed suicide on the same night one of his students vanished. Five years later, just when Mia is beginning to heal, stranger Alison walks into her life, saying her husband didn't kill himself. Fragile, slight Alison leads Mia on a path into Zach's past, and Mia begins to think she never really knew her own husband.

Casting off a northern winter and an orderly life, a family decides to sell everything and go to Italy to search for art and its meanings, for freedom from routine, for a different path into the future. The award-winning writer Rachel Cusk describes a three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rented villas, of the Piero della Francesca Trail and the tourist furnace of Amalfi, of soccer and the simple glories of pasta and gelato.

There are many secrets in the dark places of the Old World. From the cities of the Empire, where men huddle together in defiance of the darkness that sweeps across the land, to the vast, savage forests that house all manner of terrible beasts, everywhere you look there is a dark tale or ancient legend waiting to be unearthed. For the vampire Genevieve Dieudonné, several of these ancient horrors and blood-soaked nightmares are about to come to light, as she is plunged into battles for her life and her very soul across three linked novellas. 

Present day. As a love affair comes to an end, and with it her dreams for her future, artist Selena needs a retreat. The picture-postcard Sloe Cottage in the Somerset village of Ashcombe promises to be the perfect place to forget her problems, and Selena settles into her new home as spring arrives. 1682: Grace Cotter longs for nothing more than a husband and family of her own. Separated by three hundred years, two women are drawn together by a home bathed in blood and magic.

On the mean streets of Altdorf, Guard Captain 'Filthy Harald' Kleindeist investigates a series of gruesome murders that take him into the upper echelons of Imperial society and expose horrors beyond imagining. 

On the glittering shores of the Mediterranean in 1928, a dying author in exile races to complete his final novel. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a sexually bold love story, a searing indictment of class distinctions and a study in sensuality. But the author, D. H. Lawrence, knows it will be censored. He publishes it privately, loses his copies to customs and dies bereft. Booker Prize-longlisted author Alison MacLeod brilliantly recreates the novel’s origins and boldly imagines its journey to freedom through the story of Jackie Kennedy, who was known to be an admirer.

Before H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King and Anne Rice, Henry James wrote hair-raising stories that made horror a popular, sometimes controversial, widely-read literary form, and set the bar for all who followed. Stephen King considers James’ The Turn of The Screw one of the best horror novels ever penned.