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

1915. Best friends Irene, Maggie and Annie are proud members of the newly renamed Women's Police Service. While Britain's men are away fighting in France, the girls are doing their bit by keeping the peace at home in London's East End. But out of the blue, Irene is given the opportunity to be stationed near an army barracks in Grantham, Lincolnshire. Having recently experienced some heartbreak and keen for the adventure, she decides to go. What could possibly go wrong?

Marcus Aquila and his patron Rutlius Scaurus have fought a superior enemy force to a standstill in Thracia, gaining the favour of the gods but paying a grievous cost in their family's blood. Battle-weary and mourning their losses, they are tasked with rooting out a spy ring operating in the lands into which their imperial master Severus's armies are advancing. Hunting down informers operating under the skilled and ruthless command of their sworn enemy Sartorius, spymaster to the usurper Niger, will not be easy.

1948, Berlin. World War II has ended and there is supposed to be peace; but Russian troops have closed all access to the city. Roads, railway lines and waterways are blocked and two million people are trapped, relying on airlifts of food, water and medicine to survive. The sharp eyes of the Russian state police watch everything. Anna and Ingrid are both searching for answers - and revenge - in the messy aftermath of war. Both are living in the shadows of a city where the line between right and wrong has become dangerously blurred. But they cannot give up in the search for a lost child.

Across the sea in England, Thomas Peach lives in quiet retirement. Some call him a magician, others a madman. But when his friend the poetess Arabella Farthingay falls prey to a sinister seducer, Mr Peach's fading powers are called on once more. He follows her to France - and into a world where reason contends with terror, brotherhood with bloodshed, and the last remnants of faith with the oldest enemy of them all...

Nell Gunn, Snowball and Esther will be back, along with more characters from Britain's biggest beauty factory, as they battle the twists and turns of war in Stratford. Will Nell find lasting love? Will Snowball reveal what forced him onto the streets? And will Esther be able to tame the wild child she takes under her wing as part of her new bursary? As flowers and vegetables blossom in the Shoot's new Dig for Victory allotment, can the inhabitants really bury their pasts?

Emperor Domitian is hosting a banquet for the senators in honour of fallen soldiers, and it's an invitation Aelianus and Justinus Camillus dare not refuse. On arrival, they enter a black-painted room furnished with couches resembling those found in mausoleums, complete with a tombstone bearing each of the senators' names. As the evening progresses the brothers conclude that Domitian has finally turned against them for their uncle's part in a plot to oust his father and start to wonder if they'll ever see the light of day again....

1265. England has a new master. Simon de Montfort's victory at the Battle of Lewes has made him king in all but name. He has vowed to restore the rights and liberties of the kingdom, but now even his friends grow wary of his power. As old alliances break down, new rebellions gather strength. The captive king's supporters muster, vowing to overthrow the new regime. Meanwhile Adam de Norton, who won the honour of knighthood on the field at Lewes, has reclaimed his ancestral lands. A peaceful and prosperous future lies before him - until he receives a summons he cannot refuse.

The audiobook tells the story of Stella Fortuna, born into rural poverty in a mountainside Calabrian village in the early 20th century. After being abandoned by their father, who had left to seek his fortune in L'America, Stella grew up with her beloved mother, Assunta, her brother, Giuseppe, and her sister, Tina. Tough, vivacious, and fiercely loyal, the sisters were always inseparable, going on to support each other through immigration, marriage, children, loss - and the seven (or eight, depending how you count them) near-death experiences Stella suffered throughout her life.

The author of the best-selling Empire sequence continues his new epic of the uprising of the Batavi in AD 88. The Rhine frontier has exploded into all-out war. Summoned back to their homeland by their new leader, Kivilaz, the Batavi cohorts, so recently proud soldiers of Rome, find their lands transformed. All Roman influences have vanished after a battle in which two legions were humbled by the rebels, then chased away to lick their wounds in their fortress, the Old Camp.

Summer, 1947. Kate Herrick, a war widow, returns to her childhood home for a final visit before the house is sold. But Rose Cottage is not the idyllic paradise she remembers from her youth and someone has been there before her. As Kate uncovers an old secret that haunts the home she thought she knew, she is forced to confront a dark truth from her own past.... Beyond the weedy garden with its riot of rose bushes, nothing had changed. And someone was crossing the bridge to approach the garden gate. Someone I knew well....

AD 273. Obsessed by the solar religions of the east, the emperor Aurelian sets out to obtain every sacred object within his realm. But one - a mysterious rock said to channel the power of the sun god - lies beyond his reach. Warrior-priest Ilaha has captured the legendary stone and is using it to raise an army against Rome. For imperial agent Cassius Corbulo and ex-gladiator bodyguard Indavara, stopping him constitutes their greatest challenge yet.

1264. Storm clouds are gathering as Simon de Montfort and the barons of the realm challenge the power of Henry III. The barons demand reform; the crown demands obedience. England is on the brink of civil war. Adam de Norton, a young squire devoted to the virtues of chivalry, longs only to be knighted, and to win back his father's lands. Then a bloody hunting accident leaves him with a new master: the devilish Sir Robert de Dunstanville, who does not hesitate to use the blackest stratagems in pursuit of victory.

Perseus grows up wanting to be a hero, but he cannot become one if his mother Danae still sees him as a boy. When his stepfather Polydektes casts him away on a voyage across the sea, Perseus is determined to fulfil the great destiny of the son of a god and the grandson of a king. But the line between heroism and monstrosity is thin, and when Perseus attempts to seduce first gentle Medusa and then beautiful Andromeda, before finally reuniting with Danae, they each learn of the dangers of resisting a boy prepared to risk it all for greatness.

Maggie and her new friends Annie, Irene and Sarah come from very different backgrounds, but they've got one thing in common: they've all signed up for the Women's Police Volunteers. They can't wait to show the men just what they're made of. But soon, Maggie realises she's in over her head. Hiding her involvement with the WPV from her tyrannous father is becoming ever more difficult, and when she bumps into an old acquaintance with a big chip on his shoulder, the dangers of her new life become all too clear....

Treason waits at the furthest reaches of Empire...When the deputy commander of Rome's Imperial Security Service is assassinated on the island of Rhodes, Cassius Corbulo swiftly finds himself embroiled in the investigation. Assisted once more by ex-gladiator bodyguard Indavara and servant Simo, his search for the truth is complicated by the involvement of the dead man's headstrong daughter, Annia.

In 1966, Sook-Yin is exiled from Kowloon to London with orders to restore honour to her family. As she strives to fit into a world that does not understand her, she realises that survival will mean carving out a destiny of her own. Thirty years later, in London, her daughter Lily can barely remember the mother she lost as a small child. But when she is unexpectedly named in the will of a powerful Chinese stranger, she embarks on a secret pilgrimage to Hong Kong to discover the lost side of her identity and claim the reward.

Victory is in sight for Kivilaz and his Batavi army. The Roman army clings desperately to its remaining fortresses along the Rhine, its legions riven by dissent and mutiny, and once-loyal allies of Rome are beginning to imagine the unimaginable: freedom from the rulers who have dominated them since the time of Caesar. The four centurions - two Batavi and two Roman, men who were once comrades in arms - must find their destiny in a maze of loyalties and threats, as the blood tide of war ebbs and flows across Germania and Gaul.

The year is 1845, and Emily, Charlotte and Anne Bronte are sat around the dining room table, laughing merrily as the rain of their Yorkshire summer falls outside. When their brother, Branwell, returns from The Bull Inn, he brings with him the most shocking revelation: that Elizabeth Chester, wife of Robert Chester and mistress of Chester Grange, has gone missing - but the bloody scene found in her bedroom suggests she may have been murdered.

Celebrated singer Genevieve Dumont is both a star and a smokescreen. An unwilling darling of the Nazis, her position of privilege allows her to go undetected as an ally to the resistance. When her estranged mother, Lillian de Rocheford, is captured by Nazis, Genevieve is shaken. She knows it won't be long before the Gestapo succeeds in torturing information out of Lillian that will derail the upcoming allied invasion. The resistance movement is tasked with silencing her by any means necessary - including assassination.

London, 1963. The Beatles, Carnaby Street, mini skirts. But the new mood hasn't reached the drab and fearful corridors of MI5 and MI6. Many agents joined the secret service to fight the Nazis. Now they are locked in a Cold War against the Russians. And some of them are traitors. The service has been shaken to its core by the high-profile defections of Cambridge-educated spies Burgess, MacLean and now Philby. Appalled at such flagrant breaches of British security, the Americans are demanding a rigorous review.