Showing results by narrator "Lucy Paterson" in All Categories

If you will be a great man's mistress, you must pay the price.... The Savoy, 1372. Widow Lady Katherine Swynford presents herself for a role in the household of merciless royal prince John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, hoping to end her destitution. But the Duke's scandalous proposition leaves her life of pious integrity reeling.... Seduced by the glare of royal adoration, Katherine becomes John's mistress. She will leave behind everything she has stood for to play second fiddle to his young wife and ruthless ambition.

Woman in the Wilderness tells how one woman learned to dig deep and push the boundaries in order to discover what really matters in life. Miriam is a young Dutch woman living in the heart of the mountains with her New Zealand husband. She lives simply in a tent or hut and survives by hunting wild animals and foraging edible plants, relying on only minimal supplies. For the last six years she has lived this way, through all seasons, often cold, hungry and isolated in the bush. She loves her life and feels free, connected to the land and happy.

Caroline Cliburn was to be married next Tuesday, and yet she suspected that gratitude was the wrong reason to become a bride. Perhaps that was why she and her younger brother Jody had taken the long drive north to Scotland in search of her missing brother Angus.... When a sudden spring blizzard leaves them stranded by the roadside, it is the snow that gives both her and a lonely young Scot one last chance to find the healing warmth of love.

The Safe House is a scintillating psychological thriller by the Top Ten bestselling author, Nicci French. You open your home and your heart to a victim. But your house is anything but safe.... Samantha Laschen is a doctor specialising in post-traumatic stress disorder. She's moved to the coast to escape her problems and to be alone with her young daughter. But now the police want her to take in Fiona Mackenzie, a girl whose parents have been savagely murdered.

Can one woman's marriage survive her best friend's divorce? Fans of Veronica Henry and Erica James, this is the next book to add to your reading list. It's time to get back to where it all began.... Octavia Sheldon thought she'd have a different life. One where she travelled the world with an exotic husband and free-spirited children in tow. But things didn't turn out quite like that.

It's been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she's wanted nothing more than to live a normal life: nice flat, steady job, even a few friends. But when one of those friends, Laura von Hoven - free-spirited beauty and wife of Nadja's boss - kills her lover and begs Nadja for her help, Nadja can't seem to be able to refuse.

On a sultry afternoon in 1936, a woman accidentally interrupts an attempted murder in a London hotel room. Nina Land, a West End actress, faces a dilemma: She's not supposed to be at the hotel and certainly not with a married man. But once it becomes apparent that she may have seen the face of the man the newspapers have dubbed "the Tie-Pin Killer", she realises that other people’s lives could be at stake.

The new novel by Sunday Times best seller Harriet Evans will transport you to a Dorset beach house, where you can feel the sand between your toes. Enter the home of Tony and Althea Wilde - the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor of their generation and with a marriage every bit as stormy. This glorious tale of tangled family secrets and lies will leave you warm and glowing. Tony and Althea Wilde. Glamorous, argumentative...adulterous to the core

Rebecca Neumanner's marriage is on the brink of collapse as her desire to be a mother becomes an obsession. Then she receives news from her estranged family in Rhodes. Called back to the beautiful Greek island of her birth, she realises how little she knows of the grandmother she has eluded for over a decade. Bubba has never spoken of the Nazi occupation during her youth, but there have always been whispers. What desperate measures did she take that terrible day in 1944 when her family was ripped apart? Can the rumour she had blood on her own hands really be true? But Bubba intends to take her secrets to the grave.

Are you brave enough to wake the sleeping tiger? Selina Bruce has impulsively left behind her lawyer fiancé in London and flown alone to a tiny island off the Spanish coast. She is searching for the father she has never known, but what she finds is an unexpected truth about herself and the man she plans to marry. For exotic San Antonio offers Selina more than the penetrating brilliance of the noonday sun. It offers the mysterious George Dyer, who holds the key not only to her past...but to her heart.

On a cold evening, Zeb, a single mum in her thirties, is found wandering aimlessly on a remote road. She is dazed, confused, and bloodied. She doesn't know where she is or how she got there. She has travelled far from home and someone has attacked her. Memory loss means she can trust no one, and, with her assailant unidentified, Zeb is desperate to be reunited with her son and to ensure his safety. But what will her search for the truth uncover? Will it bring answers or more questions? And what if the person she can rely on the least is herself?

What do the attacks in London Bridge, Manchester and Westminster have in common with those at the Charlie Hebdo offices, the Finsbury Park Mosque attack and multiple US shootings? They were all carried out by men with histories of domestic violence. Terrorism begins at home. Terrorism is seen as a special category of crime that has blinded us to the obvious - that it is, almost always, male violence. The extraordinary link between so many tragic recent attacks is that the perpetrators have practised in private before their public outbursts.

In Wild, Amy Jeffs journeys—on foot and through medieval texts—from landscapes of desolation to hope, offering the listener an insight into a world at once distant and profoundly close to home. The seven chapters, entitled Earth, Ocean, Forest, Beast, Fen, Catastrophe, Paradise, open with fiction and close with reflection. They blend reflections of travels through fen, forest and cave, with retelling of medieval texts that offer rich depictions of the natural world.

Can you ever re-create that first great love? Victoria Bradshaw fell in love with London playwright Oliver Dobbs when she was just 18. But he left her and disappeared from her life. Now, years later, he is a widower standing on her doorstep with his two-year-old son in his arms. And Victoria is foolish enough to want to take him back. Their early spring journey to a castle in Scotland becomes an odyssey of emotional discovery....

Nina, in the final days of her illness, asks her best friend Marie to look after her family when she's gone. And Marie does everything she can to step into Nina's shoes after her friend's tragic death. She tries to do the best by Nina, tries to be there for Nina's young children, tries to support Nina's grieving husband, tries to keep their lives on track despite their terrible loss.

"I don’t exactly know how to tell you this, but you're not the only one who is single again." Single together for the first time, 34-year-old Meg and her warm-hearted mother Sally decide to cancel Christmas, and run away to a tiny cottage on the Cornish coast. For Meg, it is the perfect place to heal, while for her mother it has a special, and secret, place in her heart. Meg and Sally find that they’re not only getting to know themselves, but also each other. However, unable to resist getting involved in the village Christmas celebrations.

Esther is out with her two friends, bemoaning her lack of relationship, when she finds a magazine from the noughties. Seeking comfort – and a laugh – she turns to the dating advice only to find an article that feels a little too close to home. According to the journalist, there are seven people a woman will date before finding the one: The First Love, The Work Mistake, The Friend with Benefits, The Overlap, The Missed Chance, The Bastard and The Serious One. Her friends laugh but Esther realises each of her exes fits these roles perfectly.

After an acclaimed career in ceramics making things and breaking things, it is now Jay herself who has cracked. Recovering from a breakdown, she and her husband, Simon, move to the desolate edges of the Yorkshire moors, where they find and fall in love with the Two Houses: a crumbling Victorian property whose central rooms were supposedly so haunted that a previous owner had them cut out from the building entirely.

Born to swim thousands of miles in the ocean, the giant sea turtles are now trapped in a tank of golden-green water at London Zoo. But not for much longer. Two lonely people, a bookseller and a children's illustrator, have begun thinking turtle thoughts. As they come together to hatch a plan to release the turtles into the sea, their diaries reveal how they find their own lives changing in imperceptible and quite unintended ways.

Enter Rosamunde Pilcher's world of simple joys, of crisp country air and crackling log fires, the pleasures of family reunions and rediscovered friendships. Through thick mist and a cold east wind, Lavinia returns to Scotland. Up at the big house, Mrs Farquhar is dying. Seeing Lachlan again, Lavinia remembers her childhood holidays there: swimming in the loch, the picnics, bottle-feeding the lambs down at the farm and the evenings when they danced reels. Most of all, she remembers Mrs Farquhar's grandson Rory.