Showing results by publisher "Hodder & Stoughton" in Historical Fiction

London, 1952. Dick Bourton is not like the other probationer policemen in Notting Hill. He's older, having fought in Europe and then Korea. And he's no Londoner, being from Cotswold farming stock. Then there's Anna, the exotically beautiful White Russian fiancée he has brought back to these drab streets and empty bombsites. She may as well come from a different planet. The new copper also has a mind of his own. After an older colleague is shot by a small-time gangster they are chasing in a pea-souper fog, something nags at Bourton's memory.

Written by Grazia magazine's Features Director, this is a novel about a woman who is trying, and so far failing, to conceive. A hugely funny, searingly honest comedy about what to expect when you're not expecting. Olivia and Felix are trying for a baby. They even moved to the suburbs in anticipation of their future family. But despite approaching her cycle and their sex life with military precision, there's still no sign of what felt like the sure next step, whilst friends' broods seem to be growing by the week.

A provocative thriller posing a dangerous question: what if federal income tax is illegal? The 16th Amendment to the Constitution legalized federal income tax, but what if there were problems with the 1913 ratification of that amendment? Problems that call into question decades of tax collecting and could even bring down the US economy?

Everyone loves Johanna Bell

When Finley arrives in Crescombe for the summer, he suspects he's not alone in his attic bedroom. Before long, he is uncovering secrets the remote seaside town has kept for almost two centuries: about ghosts and curses, about a ruthless old smuggling family, and about the young women whose bodies have washed up along the town's rocky shoreline, just below his porthole window. Yet the more Finley learns, the further he's bonded to those who have gone before him - and the closer he comes to meeting the same watery end.

2025: Lee can't remember exactly where he hid the body, but he can remember the blood. Hiding out at his father's centuries-old home in Japan, Lee knows something is wrong with him, and he knows it has something to do with his mother's disappearance almost a decade ago. 1877: A female samurai, Sen, stalks the borders of her home to protect her family from slaughter after the abolition of the samurai class. She's not sure how they'll ever survive, not without her father, who has returned from war with a different soul behind his eyes.

Diana 'Steve' Escott-Stevens knows what she is getting herself into. For 12 months she has fed and looked after agents preparing for a mission in France. She knows that only half of them will come back. But she is young, brave and moreover speaks fluent French. When she applies to become an agent for the Special Operations Executive she is readily accepted and sent off for training to prepare her for the field.

Liverpool 1942. Seventeen-year-old Frankie Franconi falls in love with charismatic British officer Nick Harper as quickly and certainly as the bomb that falls on their shelter. He is impressed by her good looks and intelligence, and the fact that, like him, she speaks fluent Italian. When she insists on staying to help rescue others who have been trapped he realises that she has courage, too. He gives her a business card with a Baker Street address, and suggests she put her skills to good use.

August, 1940. The war is raging in Europe, but on the home front conflict still seems far away. Dot, living with her mother-in-law and dreading the day that her thuggish husband comes home on leave, is fighting her own battle to contribute to the war effort. Peggy has found confidence as an Air Raid Precaution Warden, despite the jeers of the men she works with - but beneath her pluck she fears for her close-knit family, scattered by the war. And glamorous Vivian, the former debutante, is running away from her own heart and into danger as a volunteer ambulance driver.

Caribbean, 1720. Two extraordinary women are on the run—from their pasts, from the British Navy and the threat of execution and from the destiny that fate has written for them. Plantation owner's daughter, runaway wife, pirate—Anne Bonny has forged her own story in a man's world. But when she is involved in the capture of a British merchant ship, she is amazed to find another woman amongst the crew, with a history as unconventional as her own. Dressed as a boy from childhood, Mary Read has been a soldier, a sailor, a widow—but never a woman in charge of her own destiny.

London 1929. Very much not a land fit for heroes. Frenchie knows his occasional work for MI5 serves only the ruling classes. But he needs to feed his children. Scruples died in the trenches. When Ramsay MacDonald, Britain's first Labour prime minister, is blackmailed by a former lover, Frenchie must go to Paris to buy her silence. It is clear there are many people who would see MacDonald fall—the Conservatives, their friends in the press, even some of his own colleagues. But his own secret service? When Frenchie hears the other side of the story, everything changes.

1944: Leo Stern arrives at the Nazi camp at Borek with his wife, Irena, and his two daughters. The Sterns are spared from the gas chamber when they witness a murder. But in a place that humanity has deserted, Leo is forced to make unimaginable choices to try to keep his family alive. 1961: For 17 years, Hanna has been unable to remember her identity and how she was separated from her family at the end of the war, until the discovery of a letter among her late uncle's possessions reveals her real name—Hanna Stern—and leads her to Berlin in search of her lost past.

Yorkshire, 1890. Having lost her father and brothers in tragic circumstances, Olwen Malkon is forced to leave her childhood home to live with her uncle's family. In his chill vicarage, however, she fears that she is also losing her mind, as strange dreams take her into the life of Ælfwyn, a woman from a distant past whose fate is overshadowed by menace and betrayal. In the grip of these afflictions, Olwen finds sympathy with the local doctor, John Osbourne, who is intrigued by her case.

Oswald de Lacy, Lord of Somershill, sits at his mother's deathbed. Before she dies, he must make a confession. He needs to tell of the days when he was 18 years old, the third, disregarded son of the family, sent off to become a monk, working in the infirmary while plague raged outside the monastery. Of how he was sent to a nearby village and witnessed the death of a local girl, and how he swore to investigate...and how he was drawn into a crime so dark and terrifying, it haunts him - and his family - still.

A Lincolnshire village on a glorious summer's morning in 1940, the countryside as still as a painting. In the blue sky above, the fate of the whole war will soon rest with the RAF and their desperate effort to win the Battle of Britain. If they fail, Hitler's next step will be invasion. And as the scene comes to life before us over the next six months, this shadow of war will not disappear - the conflict will take husbands and sons away and bring in evacuees from the city and soldiers to defend the coast.

Just before D-Day in 1944, on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, an elderly woman walks into a police station. She has information, she says, about human remains recently discovered nearby. The bodies could have stayed buried for ever - like the pain and passion that put them there. But Mary Holmes is finally ready to tell the truth. The young constable sent to take her statement is still suffering from the injuries that ended his army career. As he tries to make sense of her tale, William finds himself increasingly distracted.

In a forgotten corner of Paris stands a building. Within its walls people talk and kiss, laugh and cry; some are glad to sit alone while others wish they did not. A woman with silver-blonde hair opens her bookshop downstairs, an old man feeds the sparrows on his windowsill, and a young mother wills the morning to hold itself at bay. Though each of their walls touches someone else's, the neighbours they pass in the courtyard remain strangers. Into this courtyard arrives Edward.

A heart-warming, exhilarating novel about one young woman's determination to follow her dreams of becoming a pilot in the early 20th century. In Edwardian England, aeroplanes are a new, magical invention, while female pilots are rare indeed. When shy Della Dobbs meets her mother's aunt, her life changes forever. Great Auntie Betty has come home from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, across whose windswept dunes the Wright Brothers tested their historic flying machines.

Sentenced to death for a simple confidence trick, Mary Jebb escapes the gallows...but her reprieve is harsh: seven years in the unforgiving penal colony of Botany Bay. Yet Mary is determined not to be forgotten, sending two pennies, engraved with a promise, to the two men who sealed her fate. Timid artist Grace Moore jumps at the opportunity to marry handsome gentleman Michael Croxon - happy if only to get away from her drunken father.

How can the mysterious disappearance of Anne Flint in 1816 and the drowning of a young girl in a chalk stream so long ago possibly affect the life of schoolteacher Harry Flint some two centuries later? Having left his job and with a failed marriage behind him, Harry begins to research his ancestors. The deeper he digs, the more he realises that the past is closer than he had ever imagined.