Showing results by publisher "Soundings" in Literature & Fiction

As she puts the final stitches in her wedding dress, Sarah Love receives news which wrecks her future plans. Heartbroken, she leaps at a chance to make a fresh start. Within a week she has crossed the Irish Sea, and is lodging with other young women in a house in Newcastle, just a short walk from Harrison's, the rundown sewing shop where she will work for troubled spinster, Lucy Harrison. Putting the past behind her, she channels her energies into rebuilding Harrison's into a thriving business and her wonderful sewing and design skills soon lead her down a new path in life.

When the family castle is besieged by an ancient enemy, Ursula rides for help to Aylmer, who has asked for her hand in marriage. Ursula admires and respects Aylmer, who is much older than she. He loves her dearly and promises to help lift the siege. Aylmer offers the services of Benedict de Huste, a young man with a tragic past whom Aylmer regards as an adopted son. Together Ursula and Benedict fight a double battle.

1324: a disastrous autumn looms large. As the leaves begin to fall there are those who wish to bring the kingdom down as well. In Dartmouth, a man is found lying dead in the road. Dismissing his death as a drunken accident, the locals turn their attentions to more worrying matters - piracy. Rumours abound that spies are being sent to the great traitor Roger Mortimer. If this is true, civil war in England is inevitable. The kingdom’s most powerful and ruthless men demand that Sir Baldwin de Furnshill and Bailiff Simon Puttock uncover the truth, and quickly. 

When King Edward II is informed that his wife, Queen Isabella, has defied him and remained in France with their son, he flies into a rage. It is Sir Baldwin de Furnshill and his friend Bailiff Simon Puttock who have broken the news to him and are now no longer in the king’s favour. They return to their homes in Devon, but they find that outlaws hold sway in the land. Sir Robert, a knight from the King’s household, has turned outlaw from his castle near Crediton. When a pair of clerics are found murdered, Baldwin and Simon are asked to investigate. 

It is 1963, and in her mansion in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Joana idles her days away, banished by her husband and alienated from her family. Meanwhile, in Barcelona, her daughter, Carla, is in trouble. Hating all her parents stand for, Carla has embraced the student movement against the Franco regime, but her father has been watching her, and her beloved fiancé is arrested. Terrified and powerless, pregnant Carla runs to her grandmother Maria, but they know their movements are still being followed. Why did her daughter, Joana, marry into the Franco regime and abandon her family? Maria has never understood.

When Ellie Roberts inherits a cottage on a remote Scilly Isle, she's shocked. She's never heard of the previous owner, Patience Ellis, so why did she leave Ellie her legacy? Overwhelmed with unanswered questions, Ellie travels to the isolated island. The house feels strangely familiar, and she has a memory of her beloved mother in the window seat overlooking the sea. The mother she lost when she was only a child. Determined to find out more, Ellie meets enigmatic local Branok Shore.

Verity Templeton, 18 and fiercely independent, travels to London with her aunt for the season. During a weekend with her friend Charlotte Huntington-Smythe an encounter with Charlotte's brother shows her another side of the family. Then she meets Brandon Summerville, the handsome, arrogant, wealthy man about town Charlotte is in love with. Will she be able to resist his obvious charm? When a secret from the past turns her life upside down she doubts everything she's believed in. Her fight to find the truth brings more heartache. 

1893. Wigan is in the grip of a harsh winter and a devastating national miners' strike. Arthur Morris, a wealthy colliery owner whose determination to cut the miners' pay is one of the main causes of the strike, is found brutally murdered in an alleyway. A sinister letter prompted the victim to leave his dinner guests and hurry out into the freezing night to Scholes, a rough working-class district where he is universally hated.

London, Autumn 1916. When he slips out of a house in the early hours, Simon Wilder is too preoccupied to realise that he is being stalked. As he walks along the street, lights begin to dim as a warning that there's another Zeppelin attack. British aeroplanes attack the Zeppelin. Suddenly, it bursts into flame and lights up the whole sky. The crowds cheer as the great fireball drops slowly down and crashes in a field but the one person unable to watch is Simon Wilder.

Sent to the workhouse as a child, all Ella Hathaway can remember is a voice whispering, 'Dearie, promise you will never forget what you saw. Your Ma was killed deliberate...and someone oughter pay for it.' When wealthy spinster Letitia Fairchild witnesses Ella being ill treated, she takes her in as a scullery maid. But as Ella grows up, she is determined to find the truth about her mother's death and appeals to Letitia for help, revealing her only personal possession, a black silk purse. Intrigued, Letitia agrees to begin a quest to solve the mystery of Ella's past.

Jack Blackjack spends the night at a Devon tavern, agrees to a game of dice - and ends up accused of murder. To make matters worse, the dead man was the leader of the all-powerful miners who rule the surrounding moors. But who would frame Jack for murder...and why? Jack realises that the only way to clear his name - and save his skin - is to unmask the real killer. But knowing nothing of the local ways and customs, how is he to even begin? As Jack's attempts to find answers stirs up a hornet's nest of warring factions within the town, events soon start to spiral out of control.

It’s 1969, and free-spirited artist Elin Morgan has left Wales for a sun-drenched Greek island. As she makes new friends and enjoys the laidback lifestyle, she writes all about it in her diary. But Elin’s carefree summer of love doesn’t last long, and her island experience ultimately leaves her with a shocking secret.... Twenty-two years later, Elin’s daughter, Alexandra, has inherited the diary and is reeling from its revelations. The discovery compels Alexandra to make her own journey to the same island, following in her mother’s footsteps. 

Karen Slocombe isn’t sure why she visited SuperFare that day - as a committed member of the Food Chain group and a regular stallholder at local farmers’ markets, it’s a place she would normally avoid. Luckily for Karen, she leaves moments before a bomb explodes. Only a few days later, Karen finds herself in the midst of another horrific crime. When friends from the Food Chain group start warning Karen not to tell the police certain details, her suspicions are instantly aroused. Could the two events be linked?

1920s. When her father dies, Ellie Douglas has little option but to go into service. Her position takes her out of the life of Frank Rafferty - childhood friend and now a member of one of Glasgow's notorious gangs - and into the world of Evander Tait - son, heir and black sheep of the Tait household. These two men dominate Ellie's entire life. No one approves of her friendship with Evander and the bond she shares with Frank is misunderstood by everyone.

When Anna Harvik goes to Norway in 1946 this beautiful country is still recovering from five cruel years of Nazi Occupation. Her late husband was a pilot in the Royal Norwegian Air Force and she has come to visit his homeland and meet his family, in spite of being in doubt about how she will be received. She stays with Molly, who with other English war-brides makes her welcome.

France, 1963. Taken out of his home town as part of a nationwide “initiative”, Inspector Lucas Rocco finds himself in the village of Poissons-Les-Marais, Picardie – and answerable to his former army CO Francois Massin. On his first day he finds a murdered woman wearing a Gestapo uniform lying in a British military cemetery. When the body is removed from the mortuary before Rocco can finish his investigation, he traces the paperwork to the dead woman’s father, industrialist Philippe Bayer-Berbier.

Clara Fitzroy refuses to conform to convention. Her reckless behaviour has devastating consequences and an ill-judged liaison threatens to destroy everything she's hoped for. Clara has to make a decision that will change her life. Will she make the right one? She asks Daisy Carter, the hotel housekeeper, for help, but Daisy has problems of her own. A family relationship brings grief and heartache and a well meaning action ends in disaster. A life-changing moment, a heartbreaking choice.

When spirited Verity Bowman is left a sizeable legacy by her uncle on condition that she spends six months 'in a wholly rational manner', neither she nor her long-suffering attorney Charles Congreve have any idea where it will lead them. Nor, it has to be said, does anyone else. Set in Newmarket and London, A Rational Proposal is the first in the Furze House Irregulars series featuring women of spirit, women of courage, women who don't see why, in this male-dominated Regency era, they should not also play their part in bringing wrongdoers to justice. 

When Mary Corbet walks into private investigator Jennie Redhead's rundown Oxford office one pleasant spring day in 1974, she is a desperate woman. Although she's convinced her daughter has been murdered, she can get neither the police nor her husband to agree with her. Jennie is not convinced either, but more out of compassion than conviction agrees to take the case. The only clue she has to go on is a fragment of an obscure 17th-century poem she finds in Linda's bedroom. 

Rose Jolliffe is an idealistic young woman living on a farm with her family in Saskatchewan. After Canada declares war against Germany in World War II, she joins the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force as an aerial photographic interpreter. Working with intelligence officers at RAF Medmenham in England, Rose spies on the enemy from the sky. When her commanding officer, Gideon Fowler, sets his sights on Rose both professionally and personally, her prospects look bright. But can he be trusted?