Showing results by narrator "Helen McAlpine" in All Categories

Carly Cooper is 30, single and after coming close to saying ‘I do’ to six different men, she’s wondering if she accidentally said ‘goodbye' to Mr Right. But there is a problem. Her ex-boyfriends are scattered all over the world and Carly lives in 1999: an era before Facebook, Google, smartphones, 4G and Broadband, when it was impossible to track people down with a few clicks of a mouse. On a mission to discover if she walked away from her 'happy ever after', Carly quits her job, her flat, her whole life and sets off on a quest to track down all the men she has ever loved.

The only people who’ve been inside our house are the ones I thought I could trust. Someone close is watching me, speaking to Olivia and trying to make me look like a bad parent. I don’t care what my husband says. I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life, but my precious child means everything to me. They have no idea how far I’ll go to protect my daughter…

Laney Cochrane loves her life. With her friends Millie and Tash, she runs a proposal agency, organising the perfect setting for their clients to pop the question. Finding that forever love is something Laney knows all about. Her marriage to Cameron is blissfully content, and she has never doubted they’ll live happily ever after. Then Cara Deacon walks into their office. When Cara enlists their help to set up a romantic engagement to her boyfriend, they visualise a breathtaking scene under a moonlit Manhattan sky. 

Welcome to the gorgeous little Scottish village of Christmas, where snow is falling, presents are being wrapped and the locals are writing their festive wish lists. Will this finally be the year that Belle’s dreams come true? Thirty-year-old Belle Albany is feeling lonely this Christmas. Another whole year has passed and her life is... exactly the same as it was last December. She longs for true love and a little bit of winter magic – but she’s almost given up on finding it in the sleepy Scottish community where she lives.

Helen Grant is a mystery to her daughter. An extrovert with few friends who has sought intimacy in the wrong places; a twice-divorced mother-of-two now living alone surrounded by her memories, Helen (known to her acquaintances as 'Hen') has always haunted Bridget. Now, Bridget is an academic in her forties. She sees Helen once a year, and considers the problem to be contained. As she looks back on their tumultuous relationship - the performances and small deceptions - she tries to reckon with the cruelties inflicted on both sides. But when Helen makes it clear that she wants more, it seems an old struggle will have to be replayed.

Maddileh is a knight. There aren’t many women in her line of work, and it often feels like the sneering and contempt from her peers is harder to stomach than the actual dragon slaying. But she’s a knight, and made of sterner stuff. A minor infraction forces her to redeem her honor in the most dramatic way possible, she must retrieve the fabled Fireborne Blade from its keeper, legendary dragon the White Lady, or die trying. If history tells us anything, it's that “die trying” is where to wager your coin.

They climbed up from the streets of Glasgow to the top of the world. Now these Hollywood icons are heading for a fall. Three stars, three tales of struggle and success. Now they’re discovering that in Hollywood, happy endings don’t last for ever. Sometimes they’re just the calm before the storm.

Megan Melvick has spent years avoiding her inheritance, the dark and disquieting family estate Benbrae, now home only to her distant aristocratic father and her sister, Melissa, dying quietly in an upstairs bedroom. Trapped behind her unreliable hearing aids and vulnerable to what others want her to see, Megan is unable to find the answers she wants: why is there a new woman on her father's arm? And why has their absent mother not returned to say a final goodbye to Melissa?

From the best-selling author of the Sarah Midnight Trilogy comes an instant classic - a beautiful and poignant love story about letting go and moving on. Eilidh Lawson’s life has hit crisis point. Years of failed fertility treatments, a cheating husband and an oppressive family have pushed her to the limits. Desperate for relief, she seeks solace in the only place she’s ever felt at home - a small village in the Scottish Highlands.

When Maud and Daisy receive a letter from Daisy’s cousin, Clara, sharing her fears that two sudden deaths in her local choir weren’t accidental, at first Daisy thinks her cousin is overreacting. But Maud’s detective senses tell her something is afoot, and so they make haste to the Highlands to investigate.

Two weeks, four friends and one big bucket list of secrets to unravel. Val Murray and her best friend, Josie, had been planning a ‘Thelma and Louise’ bucket-list-style holiday. Now Josie is gone, and Val needs to make the trip before it’s too late. But Val doesn’t want to do it alone, so she enlists the help of her nieces, Carly and Carole, and their best pal, Jess, who jump at the chance to join Val on a trip of a lifetime. What Val doesn’t realise is that Carly, Carole and Jess are all at turning points in their own lives, nursing crushing secrets, lies and betrayals.

The year 1819, Isle of Mull, Scotland: When Allan MacDougall tells his sweetheart, Harriet Campbell, he loves her on the eve of his departure to the New World, it breaks her heart. Because there is no way for her to go with him. She promises to wait for him, even though it could be years before they are reunited. They vow to write, but when crucial letters go astray, they feel further apart than either could have imagined.

Emma Gray was just 23 when she moved to an isolated farm in Northumberland, becoming Britain's youngest solo shepherdess. In the seasons that followed, Emma fell in love with its rolling fields, sycamore trees and sturdy farmhouse, where she tended her sheep and trained her dogs - and even found romance along the way. But when Emma finds herself suddenly alone again, heartbroken, mourning the loss of loved ones and recovering from a serious accident, she can't help but wonder if her isolated existence is still such a sensible idea.

As the sun rises on a hot summer’s day, four lives are about to be changed forever.... Today, Maisie McTeer decides to track down the ex who jilted her at the altar. Today, she’ll find out that revisiting the past can also rewrite her future. After losing her husband, Harriet Bassett can no longer bear her lonely life. Today, a familiar face in a crowd will spark a quest to discover if there’s something and someone worth living for.

Innocent in the ways of the world, an ingenue when it comes to pop and fashion, the Elect of God of a small but committed Stirlingshire religious cult: Isis Whit is no ordinary teenager. When her cousin Morag - Guest of Honour at the Luskentyrian's four-yearly Festival of Love - disappears after renouncing her faith, Isis is marked out to venture among the Unsaved and bring the apostate back into the fold.

When 23-year-old shepherdess Emma Gray breaks off her engagement, the chance to take over an isolated Northumberland farm seems just the fresh start she needs. But while the beautiful scenery certainly offers plenty of scope for contemplation, a night out with an eligible bachelor soon seems more remote than the farm itself. And once you add fugitive sheep and freak blizzards into the mix, Emma's dreams of a happy future at Fallowlees Farm quickly begin to fade. 

Colm O’Flynn was loved by his close circle of family and friends, however his death came too soon for everyone to make peace with their past. Shauna, his second wife, adored him. But one night she broke their marriage vows and didn’t get time to ask Colm’s forgiveness. Jess was the first Mrs O’Flynn. Her heart is set on someone new, but will the last one-night stand she shared with Colm come back to haunt her? Colm’s best friend, Dan, is recently divorced. Can he take a second shot at happiness if it means betraying the one person who always had his back?

1889: Kitty Gray dreams of attending university and becoming a doctor, but when she is married off to Charles Maclean, one of Glasgow's richest and most eligible bachelors, her aspiration suddenly slips far from reach. Exiled to her new remote home in the Scottish Highlands, with its gargoyles, gothic arches and turrets, Kitty seeks solace in creating a restorative herb garden. Combining her medical knowledge and new-found fascination with herbalism, Kitty spends her days absorbed in a world of herbs and their healing properties until a devastating tragedy strikes...

A teenage mother, today a young grandmother, Jen McAdam was a victim of the OneCoin global cryptocurrency fraud, which stole tens of billions of dollars from ordinary people around the world. Unlike Madoff or Enron, who relieved the world’s wealthiest investors of their cash, the exploiting genius of the OneCoin scam was targeting the poorest people in the world, the “unbanked”—those who struggled to live or get mainstream banking support. The fraudsters believed their victims couldn’t and wouldn’t fight back. They didn’t reckon on Jen McAdam, a modern-day Erin Brockovich.

When Maud McIntyre receives a letter from a maid called Rose, sharing her suspicions that something strange is happening in the house where she works, she and her assistant Daisy immediately travel to the Highlands to investigate.