Showing results by narrator "Carole Boyd" in All Categories

Clare Hanrahan has nothing left to lose the day she stumbles into Lew Earnshaw’s arms. Her family is gone and her own life hangs by a thread after a desperate season seeking work. By the time Lew and his kindly neighbours have nursed Clare back to health, he is hopelessly in love with the frail Irish girl. But though she will always care for Lew, another man comes between them. Martin Heywood could not be more different from the gentle, idealistic weaver.

Laughter is unique to man. This delightful anthology presents some of the funniest extracts in English literature. It opens with Anglo-Saxon riddles and continues with medieval memories, Tudor comic turns, and Restoration buffoonery.

When Lily Elliott's father dies she loses everything - not just a beloved protector and his wonderful ship the Lily-Jane, but also the way of life she has always known. As her mother sinks into a dream-world and the money which had always seemed sufficient turns out to have been mostly debts, Lily watches, bewildered, as destitution comes ever closer for the Elliott women and their loyal housekeeper. Then two rescuers appear.

Lally Fraser, widowed at 20, seeks comfort with dashing young mill owner Roly Sinclair. But when she finds she is expecting his baby, she turns to his dour brother Harry for help. Secretly in love with her, Harry offers her marriage. Roly, though, is anything but pleased. Threatening scandal or worse, he sets out to destroy them both. And when Harry is injured in a vicious attack, Lally must take charge of the mills to protect her children and the man she is growing to love from his worst enemy - his own brother.

Angie is 18 years old, and, with the help of a mini skirt, a pair of false eyelashes and a tube of pale pink lipstick, has made herself into a beauty. She's living in London in the Swinging Sixties, and knows she's in the best city in the world at the best possible time. She's got that world at her pretty, white-booted feet as she dances the night away with every handsome bloke on the booming, strobe-lit floor of the Canvas Club.

When Elizabeth Price engages private detective Roland ‘Orlando’ Gibbons to find out the truth about her husband’s suspected affair, she unwittingly sets off a chain of correspondence that reunites four formerly close-knit couples. They all live just a few suburban streets away from each other, they are all still married, so how – and why – did they become so estranged? In a series of letters, each protagonist is far more self-revealing than they would ever be in person.

Rose Beechworth is mistress of a charming country house - her own, left to her by her wealthy father. In the summer of 1914, Alice Weatherly turns Rose's world upside down. The young heiress longs to kiss Captain Charlie Summers goodbye and so she takes Rose to Liverpool's Lime Street station and into the heart of Charlie's brother Harry.

In the summer of 1952 when two lonely people arrive in the seaside hamlet of West Bay. Strangers from very different backgrounds, they are there for the same reason: to find peace and the chance to start a new life. Tom Arnold has left a highly paid job after his family died in a car accident. Kathy Wilson is recovering from a painful divorce. For both Tom and Kathy, it seems there is hope of rebuilding their lives. Yet even now, someone means to wreck both Tom's and Kathy's search for happiness.

Catherine Dessin, a young French girl living in Paris during the occupation, falls for an older, married German officer. The novel examines the tensions this causes within her family of patriots and resistance workers. Meanwhile Klaus, the German officer, who is Oxford educated and a professed Anglophile, faces his own moral dilemma as he comes to realise, through his love for Catherine and a tragedy in his own family, the true nature of the regime he is serving.

Queen Bees looks at the lives of six remarkable women who made careers out of being society hostesses, including Lady Astor, who went on to become the first female MP, and Mrs Greville, who cultivated relationships with Edward VII, as well as Lady Londonderry, Lady Cunard, Laura Corrigan and Lady Colefax. Told with wit, verve and heart, Queen Bees is the story of a form of societal revolution and the extraordinary women who helped it happen.

London, 1583. When young, aspiring playwright William Shakespeare encounters Lucy Morgan, one of Queen Elizabeth I’s ladies-in-waiting, the two fall passionately in love. He declares Lucy the inspiration for his work, but what secret is Will hiding from his muse? Meanwhile, Lucy has her own secret - and one that could destroy her world if exposed. No longer the chaste maid so valued by the Virgin Queen, she also bore witness to the clandestine wedding of Lettice Knollys and Robert Dudley, a match forbidden by the monarch.

The narrator is a young governess, sent off to a country house to take charge of two orphaned children. She finds a pleasant house and a comfortable housekeeper, while the children are beautiful and charming. But she soon begins to feel the presence of intense evil.

A heartwarming story set in 1940s Liverpool and Ireland about the hurdles two sisters, Chrissie and Grace, must cross on their journey to finding the happiness they seek. It's 1945 and the war is finally over. For the Devlin family in Liverpool, the wartime years have been almost too much to bear. But at long last sisters Grace and Chrissie can return to their normal lives. Level-headed and hard-working, Grace wants nothing more than to meet a nice man and settle down.

This is a collection of Marie Joseph's most outstanding short stories, previously published in magazines in the 1960s and 1970s. There is the young mother who eventually discovers nothing can compare with Christmas at home with her husband and children; a couple who are brought together again with unexpected help from a feline source; and a younger sister's wedding which brings faint misgivings and memories from the past. With compassion, insight and humour these stories explore the themes of love....

Life in 1920s Liverpool for sisters Gloria and Betty Jenkins is secure and comfortable. Elder sister Gloria finds romance with the boy next door, until her wealthy, but snobbish and interfering Aunt Sybil steps in, offering her the opportunity of a lifetime. A trip to New York gives Gloria everything she desires - including a wealthy husband. Meanwhile, Betty chooses a career at sea, which offers challenges, personal danger and romance.

It is New Year's Eve 1936 when Wesley Battersby leaves his pretty wife Amy to go and live with Clara Marsden. Ashamed and frightened, Amy struggles with loneliness and hardship while Wesley is spending his money on buying the love of the flighty Clara. But Amy's warmth and vitality win her friends who give her renewed courage and confidence.

It was a small Lancashire town on the eve of the General Strike. A town where the gap between the rich and the poor was about to erupt into a bloody field of battle. Libby and Carrie were more than sisters. Mirror images, they were different sides of the same heart, impossible to separate or divide. Until they both fell in love with Tom.

In a small Lancashire cotton town in the 1930s, Daisy Bell dreams her life away. At twenty-six, still a spinster and heiress to her mother's potato pie shop, she's resigned to a lonely old age. But toiling over the bake-house fire she dreams of a better world- a world of glamour and romance as seen on the silver screen. Then she meets Sam, a dashing Clarke Gable look-alike and chauffeur to a wealthy London businessman- and suddenly her life is changed forever...

From best-selling novelist Marie Joseph - a collection of heartwarming, life-enchancing stories that show her at her very best. In them Marie Joseph explores the many aspects of love as it was in the sixties and seventies - its nostalgia, tendernesses, pitfalls and moments of never-to-be-forgotten happiness.

Polly married Harry Pilgrim out of love. A love, she believed, that would meet every test that life could make. But a girl in love cannot always see what the future will bring...She had never had an easy life. But then when it seemed that the worst must be over, Harry lost his job and was forced to move down south to look for work. Leaving Polly to discover that loneliness and poverty could drive her into the arms of another man...