Showing results by narrator "Anna Cordell" in All Categories

Two little girls stand with their heads bowed in my living room. I’m told they’re my granddaughters. Daisy is nine, and Alice seven. Daisy is the spitting image of her mother. This is the first time I’ve met them since my daughter and I fell out after she married that waste of space, Vince. They’ve come to live with me because their mother — my daughter — was murdered. In her own home while they slept close by. I think Vince killed her. But the police can’t prove it. I’ve always known he was no good. He treated my daughter like dirt. I said he’d cheat on her — but she wouldn’t listen.

We begin with the footsteps of a family walking along a beach 950,000 years ago. From here, Montefiore takes us on an exhilarating epic journey through the families that have shaped our world: the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads.

With her West Highland terrier Hamish at her side, Lucy plans to relax and read up on the women of nearby Bletchley Park. But the villagers of Little Maudley have other ideas and she finds herself caught up in the campaign to turn a dilapidated telephone box into a volunteer-run library. Along the way, she makes friends with treehouse designer Sam and finds herself falling for the charms of village life. And it seems Bunty has a special connection to Bletchley and the telephone box, one that she's kept secret for decades....

Frustrated that she spends all her time as either a mum to a football-obsessed teenager or a wife to a workaholic husband, Hannah wants something for herself. When the chance comes to take over the post office in Little Maudley, a charming Cotswold village, Hannah grabs it with both hands. She’ll have a career at last and also get her son, Ben, away from his trouble-making mates. But village life is not so picture-perfect after all.

Six strangers with one universal thing in common: their lives aren’t always what they make them out to be. But what would happen if they told the truth instead? Julian begins The Authenticity Project - a small green notebook containing his ‘truth’ - to pass on and encourage others to share their own. Little does he know that this small act of honesty will impact all those who come into contact with the book and lead to a life-changing world of friendship and forgiveness....

Jo was the last person to see Martha Scott alive. She was helping Martha unlock a repressed memory. But during the session, Jo unlocked more than she bargained for. An alter personality introduced himself as the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper - and thanked Jo for setting him free to kill again. As Ferguson’s team race to find Martha’s killer, a series of copycat killings begin, replicating ‘The Autumn of Terror’ in 1888. But if Jack is just a figment of Martha’s damaged mind, who killed her?

Following the death of her mother, Becky begins the sad task of sorting through her empty flat. Starting with the letters piling up on the doormat, she finds an envelope post-marked from Cornwall. In it is a letter that will change her life forever. A desperate plea from her mother's elderly cousin, Olivia, to help save her beloved home. Becky arrives at Chynalls to find the beautiful old house crumbling into the ground and Olivia stuck in hospital with no hope of being discharged until her home is made habitable.

Guardian Angel is that rare memoir that grabs you by the shoulders with an urgency that screams, “Pay attention!” It leaps to life with an immediacy and relevance that few books achieve. Beginning with her solitary childhood in London, it took years for Melanie Phillips to understand her parents’ emotional frailties and even longer to escape from them. But Phillips inherited her family’s strong Jewish values and a passionate commitment to freedom from oppression.

Isabelle's archaeologist father dies leaving a puzzle: a mysterious African amulet. But what is it? And why did he want her to have it? On impulse she takes a plane to Morocco to find out. But has Isabelle's curiosity got the better of her? Almost killed in an accident which damages the amulet (revealing more of its secrets), she realises she must be careful.

Unconscious bias affects us all. From the smallest assumption to the most sweeping generalization, the way we think about others can unknowingly influence our behaviour and shape our culture. Acting as your mentor and guide, this book will take you through the most common forms of prejudice, including gender, race, size, age and sexuality. It also explores the psychology behind our biases and provides actionable tips and simple exercises to help you combat implicit judgements.

This cold call is murder. Detective Bethany Smith is called out to 21 Bladen Avenue, the home of Jason and Georgia Holt. It's one of the worst murder scenes she's ever seen.

Dr. Liz O'Riordan is a breast cancer surgeon who has battled against social, physical and mental challenges to practice at the top of her field. Under the Knife charts Liz's incredible highs: performing like a couture dressmaker as she molded and reshaped women's breasts, while saving their lives; to the heart-breaking lows of telling ten women a day that they had cancer. But this memoir is more than just an eye-opening look at the realities of training to be a female surgeon in a man's world

It's 1913 and a young, carefree and recklessly innocent girl, Mina, goes out into the forest on the edge of the Baltic sea and meets a gang of rowdy young men with revolution on their minds. It sounds like a fairy tale but it's life.

Hazel and Jamie are happily married. Or so it would seem. Behind closed doors, things are far from normal. Jamie has an unhealthy obsession, and Hazel is more worried about herself than her husband. So when Millicent injects herself into their lives, with Jamie firmly in her sights, the trio end up on a path that will end in death. Everyone has secrets. Everyone has a dark side. But who is good, who is bad, and who is going to get away with murder?

From the military kitchens which cook for soldiers and volunteers, to the chefs who shifted from fine dining to turning out hot meals and loaves of bread for families in need—food has become a central part of Ukraine's war effort. Food is a weapon, a lifeline, a means of survival. It's also a powerful symbol of national identity and memory for the millions of people who've been forced from their homes.

Can their friendship survive the darkest days of war? When Abigail arrives for a new start in Bristol in the late 1930s, she knows life won’t be easy - particularly as she is the unmarried mother of three-year-old Emily Grace. But as the war starts to take over the city and threaten their very existence, will Abigail’s new friends, Carrie and Eileen, be enough to keep herself and her daughter safe?

As the Nazis’ relentless bombs fall during the Blitz of Coventry, six-year-old Rose Sherbourne finds herself orphaned and under the guardianship of a Cornish farmer's daughter, Elenor Cardew. Elenor knows that the only way to protect spirited Rose is to leave the city and make a new life for themselves away from harm. But soon Elenor discovers that Hitler’s firestorm is not the only thing she must fear when she learns a devastating secret about Rose....

Stella’s life hasn’t quite gone to plan. She imagined that, at forty, she’d be settled with a supportive husband, two kids and a dog. Instead, she’s single and living at home with her mum, Bonnie, and grandmother, Florence. She passes the evenings in her childhood bedroom, obsessively searching for the perfect sperm donor. Unbeknownst to Stella is that Bonnie and Florence both also had difficult journeys to motherhood. And now that they’re writing down their stories for Stella’s unborn child, the truth about their family is becoming harder to conceal.

A biography of the remarkable, and in her time scandalous, seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.

All the neighbours were laughing, drinking out of plastic glasses and getting along. I almost felt happy. Almost forgot about the terrible argument earlier and the sinister messages I’d been receiving from a strange address all week, threatening to expose the lies behind my perfect life. As we finished with the red and gold fireworks and welcomed everyone back to our house, I believed that everything would be okay. But I didn’t know who I was inviting in.