検索キーワード： ナレーター "Anne Dover" すべてのカテゴリー

It is 1937, and Alice, Edith and Marg continue to face hardships every day, growing up on one of the poorest streets in Blackpool. Penniless, their friendship has helped them survive this far, but it'll take more than that to see them through the dark days ahead. Alice is coping with a violent father. Marg is left reeling after a dark secret about her birth comes to light and threatens to destroy the life she knows, and Edith is fighting to protect her alcoholic mother from the shame of their neighbours and keep her brother on the straight and narrow.

The war is over, but peace hasn't quite settled between newly reunited sisters Babs and Beth. Tilly and her daughters have encountered enough pain to last several lifetimes, but their struggles are far from over. Will they be able to put their past behind them and look forward to a happy future?

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.

Yorkshire, 1864. The daughter of a wealthy Yorkshire landowner, Anna Thornton leads a privileged life but longs to be accepted for the independent woman she is. When she meets Matt Cowan, she thinks she has met her soul mate. However, he’s not the man she thinks he is. After he sets sail for South America, Anna discovers she’s pregnant. Heartbroken, she flees her family home to keep her child’s illegitimacy a secret. As she starts to settle into her new life, Brenton O’Mara - who has turned his back on his father’s wealth - seeks work as a labourer at Anna’s new home....

When Jennifer Tucker arrives in the sleepy Devonshire village of Burracombe, she's searching for more than a place to settle.... Like the rest of the nation, the Burracombe villagers are shocked when King George VI dies suddenly. But the arrival of a stranger in the village on the very same day goes almost unnoticed - they all have their own concerns. As Jennifer Tucker looks for a family she hadn't even realised existed, the village gradually becomes involved in her search, and more than one person is led to question their own ideas about families and what they mean.

Working at a tiny village school in rural Yorkshire has its own unique set of challenges - but when teachers Lydia Knight and Jake Immingham are tasked with getting the children to put on a Christmas play for the local elderly people’s home, they know they’re in for a tricky term! But in between choreographing sugar plum dance routines, reindeer costume malfunctions and trying to contain Rory Scott’s wannabe rap star aspirations, Lydia realises that, even as a teacher, she isn’t past being taught a couple of things - and one of those things is a much-needed lesson in Christmas spirit.

In the year of her 100th birthday, Dame Vera Lynn's fascinating and life-affirming wartime memoir from the forces' sweetheart of her adventures entertaining the troops in far-flung Burma. "I was just 27 years old when I went to Burma. It was an experience that changed my life for ever. Up until that time I had not really travelled anywhere at all, apart from one touring visit to Holland with a band I was singing with before the war, and I had certainly never been in an aeroplane. But I wanted to make a difference, to do my bit." And she did.

It is 1900, and Adeline Warburton and Arnold Haslington have fallen deeply in love. But though both are from wealthy families, their social status is too far apart for their families to approve of the match. And when Arnold marries another, Adeline’s reaction is immediate and altogether unexpected, as she travels to make a new life in China. But although they are separated by thousands of miles, the consequences of their youthful passion continue to haunt them and their children - Addy’s daughter, Nala, and Arnold’s son, Philip. As the years pass and the children grow, violent forces are set to bring them together, unaware of the secrets from the past that bind them.

When war broke out, 17-year-old Christie could have stayed down on the family farm in Norfolk, where she was wanted and needed. So why had she joined up? Come to that, why had Meg from Cheshire, and Sue, very much the big city girl from Liverpool, and Shanna, the life-toughened product of a broken home in Glasgow? Mixed reasons. Very mixed backgrounds. But no time to think now. Not with the sergeant shouting and the station air-raid siren beginning to wail....

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.

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?

Married Love is a collection of short stories to treasure, a masterful new work from one of the UK's most accomplished storytellers. Lottie announces that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is 19 but looks five years younger. Her fiancé is Edgar Lennox, a lecturer at Lottie's university, 45 years her senior. We follow as Lottie's life unfolds; it is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments.

Polly Longden's china-doll looks belie a strong and fiery personality. When typhoid strikes her home city of Lincoln, she needs every ounce of that strength in order to cope. With the death of her mother, thirteen-year-old Polly has to give up her ambition of becoming a teacher to care for her family. When their father, too, falls victim to the typhoid, his only hope is to go to hospital, leaving Polly to cope alone. Thankfully she has the support of her neighbours: Bertha Halliday and her son, Leo, a young policeman.

Val Neyler, driving an ambulance through the blazing heart of London, is in an impossible position, for the man she loves is a fighter pilot with the Luftwaffe. And Jenny, whose husband, Simon, is flying Spitfires, finds herself working as a landgirl on a Devon farm. Cara, by contrast, develops her social life, and Maude, in the WAAF, falls in love with two men at once.... And Tina, matriarch of the family, loves them all, scolds them all, and tries to understand the new generation growing up in the troubled times of war.

Yorkshire, 1927. Eclipse fever grips the nation, and when beloved theatre star Selina Fellini approaches trusted sleuth Kate Shackleton to accompany her to a viewing party at Giggleswick School Chapel, Kate suspects an ulterior motive. During the eclipse, Selina's friend and costar Billy Moffatt disappears and is later found dead in the chapel grounds. Kate can't help but dig deeper and soon learns that two other members of the theatre troupe died in similarly mysterious circumstances in the past year.

In 1998, Helga Schneider, in her sixties, was summoned from Italy to the nursing home in Vienna in which her 90-year-old mother lived. The last time she had seen her mother was 27 years earlier, when her mother asked her daughter to try on the SS uniform which she treasures, and tried to give her several items of jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider rejected.

For 10 years Delia has had to fend for herself and her son, Jack, and as a young unmarried mother, life has never been easy. Every new coat and pair of shoes was bought with what little money she could scrape together as a singer on the stage. But when the theatre work dries up, Delia faces a dilemma: continue the search for employment with no knowing whether she'll find the stability and security her son needs or return to the place that should be home...where only spite and hatred await them.

York, 1879. Greta Costello must rely on her wits to survive. She finds refuge as a Saturday girl for an old jeweler, Saul Abrahams, and her eye for detail, her long fingers, and her appreciation of beauty persuade Saul to train her as a pearl stringer. This skill will lead her through hardship and pain toward a new life. Scotland, 1879. Jem Baillie knows the immense power of a perfect pearl. His father was a fisher on a tributary of the Tay River in Perthshire, Scotland, and together they found the rarest of pearls, a great white pearl they call Queenie.

Hilary Napier has had enough of secrets. The engagement party at the Barton is finally a chance for her and David to celebrate their good news. But the course of true love never did run smooth. At the school, Frances and James are readying the children for the play at the annual Summer Fair and doing their best to ignore their feelings for each other. Will the chaos-causing Crocker twins make it to the dress rehearsal? And, more importantly, will Frances find a way to let herself love again?

Scarborough, 1880. Young Jeannie spends her days watching her mother and the other harbour girls sitting at the water's edge - mending nets, gutting herring - and waiting for her friend Ethan Wharton to come in on his father's fishing smack. As she was growing up, Jeannie always expected to marry Ethan, who is loyal and dependable. But then she meets Harry - a stranger who has come to visit from Hull for the day - and she falls for him.