Showing results by narrator "Jilly Bond" in All Categories

A World of Beauty: Tales from Pavlysh contains 19 charming little tales about the beauty of the natural world, and how nature supports all living creatures. A chicken hatches some duck eggs. A rowan tree welcomes some beautiful crested birds to feed on its berries. A blade of grass slumbers through the winter and awakens to joyfully greet the spring. In some of the stories, people engage with this beauty. A child admires the magic beauty of a snowflake, “a six-pointed star, so beautiful and shiny, that a fairy-tale master might have cut it from a plate of silver”.

Emily Soldene's life spanned the entire Victorian era. As both leading lady and a formidable impresario with her own opera company, she was a darling of London’s music halls and theatre land, later reinventing herself as a journalist and writer. From humble working-class beginnings, Emily's fiery ambition would see her counting the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Charles Dickens as friends and mingling with the Rothschilds, Oscar Wilde and aristocrats. She even alleged that she had a close encounter with Jack the Ripper.

As children, Gareth and Helen went ignored and utterly unsupervised in their isolated English farmhouse while their mother obsessively tended to her beloved, exquisite garden. When they were little, Gareth would occupy himself by trapping insects under glass and Helen would find ways to entertain herself - but the older they grew, the more sinister their lives became, with no attentive parent to shield them from the predators of the world. Decades later, Helen is in the same crumbling house, unhappily married and looking after their bedridden mother, and Gareth finally returns home.

In this beautifully nostalgic memoir, eminent author Angela Thirkell recalls in rich detail the three houses in which she grew up. Focusing first on 'The Grange', where her grandfather, the celebrated painted Sir Edward Burne-Jones, set the cultivated tone, Thirkell also reminisces about her parents' home in Kensington Square and the Burne-Jones' seaside retreat, where Angela's cousin, Rudyard Kipling, lived across the green.

Based on a true story, Even in Darkness highlights the intimate experience of Klare’s reinvention as she faces the destruction of life as she knew it, and traces her path not only to survival, but to wisdom, meaning, and most unexpectedly, love.

Penelope was to spend the first Christmas after her marriage at the country home of her great aunt Hermione, where she had lived as a child after the death of her parents. She looked forward to the traditionally peaceful holiday that she had known all her life. Before they left London, Vincent, her husband, gave her a present which was to prove a dominant factor in the events, tragic and terrifying, that followed. It was a small china doll.

Voices from the Blue tells the story of the hundred years of service of female police officers within the Metropolitan Police through the voices of the women who fought their way towards equality and won the respect of both their colleagues and the public. The authors have interviewed hundreds of former and serving policewomen and with the co-operation of the Metropolitan Police and the Women's Police Association now have access to the files and stories of thousands of former officers who served over the past hundred years.

Discover these horror stories of the Victorian era, with Gothic tales from J. S. Lee Fanu. This definitive audio version is narrated by Jilly Bond and brings the classic horrors of old to a new audience. Ghostly Tales by J. S. Le Fanu is brought to audio for the first time. Dim the lights and listen to these unsettling tales of Victorian horror. Fanu is described as a "master of the genre" by subsequent distinguished authors such as E. F. Bleiler. Fanu's unique approach helped to usher in a new, more psychological era of dread.

A person or persons unknown bludgeon Stafford Mills to death with his own silver candlestick. Suspects abound and suddenly sleepy Osborne-Tye seems a sinister place. The clues pile up. So to the suspects, and the search for the killer becomes quite a challenge. Then a second body is discovered, turning everything on its head. Can DI Guido Black and D Sgt Eden Hudson unravel the clues and unpick the alibis to crack their first murder?

In 1421, Henry V and his young bride, Catherine de Valois, are blessed with the birth of a son - but their happiness is short-lived. Catherine is widowed, and when her father, the French king, also dies, her son inherits the crowns of France and England.

Meet Sally Stick and her dog (and best friend), Fetch. Together, they're Stick and Fetch: Detectives. A girl. A dog. A detective agency. Sally loves nothing more than investigating a good mystery - and her shaggy canine companion, Fetch, loves nothing more than to be at her side when she does. There's just one small problem: they always gets the wrong end of the stick! The hapless pair remain undeterred, however, dashing from one crime scene to another on their bicycle, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake...yet always emerging blissfully unaware. A fun, madcap trio of stories featuring two lovable heroes with a lot of hair.

When Judith Summers' husband and father both died within the space of two weeks, she found herself floundering. Life for her and her eight-year-old son, Joshua, seemed relentlessly bleak. Then George bounced into their lives. A loving Cavalier King Charles Spaniel with film-star looks, George reawoke their joie de vivre.

Nattie is now happily married to Hugo, and they have two beautiful children, but her heart has never truly been hers to give.... The love of her life was lost to her years ago, but now Ahmed is back, and although he knows Nattie is married, he just can't stop himself from making contact. Desperate to find out what happened but torn between Ahmed and her family, Nattie ends up meeting him in secret. But will her lies cause more trouble than the truth?

A novel of five lifelong friends who, in their sixties, decide to live together on a cocoa farm in Fiji, where they not only start a chocolate business but strengthen their friendships and rediscover themselves. "I've planted my feet on Fijian earth and I intend to stay here until the last...

'I've come about the bodies. I know who they are.' 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...

The day after her wedding, Donella Ferguson Watson wakes up shackled to a man haunted by the past. The lonely days become weeks, months. Her husband, Hugh, a prison doctor, will offer no explanation for their sexless marriage. She comes to suspect the answer lies with a hunger-striking suffragette who was force fed and held in solitary confinement. But what really happened between Hugh and his prisoner patient?

A story about love, loss and starting again. Widower Henry Drummond is marking time, drifting towards retirement, until he accidentally saves a life. His daughter, Maddie, is at a wedding with the love of her life. But he is the groom, and she is not the bride. They both decide they need to change their lives, preferably with soulmates by their sides. But, as Henry's mother tells him, 'Love is a complicated business, and it is not for the easily discouraged'.

With her awful secondhand uniform and stuck-up classmates, Binny's new school is horrible. And life gets even worse when a storm damages the roof of her house, forcing Binny and her family to move to the countryside whilst it's being fixed. Binny; her sensible older sister, Clem; and her rambunctious brother, James (and his chickens) begin adjusting to life in the country. Then one of James' beloved chickens vanishes, and Binny finds strange footprints in the mud. What kind of creature is lurking in the undergrowth?

It's 1782. The 13-year-old daughter of a Venetian merchant family is lured naked from her bath by a stray cat and finds herself in the arms of Casanova - the legendary seducer of women. Twenty-five years later Cecilia is in Albania, now a portrait painter of some renown. Enter a young man from England, a troubled poet, looking for adventure at any price - a man who begins his affair with Cecilia.

A grey dawn in 1943: On a street in Rome, two young women, complete strangers to each other, lock eyes for a single moment. One of the women, Chiara Ravello, is about to flee the occupied city for the safety of her grandparents' house in the hills. The other has been herded onto a truck with her husband and their young children and will shortly be driven off into the darkness. In that endless-seeming moment, before she has time to think about what she is doing, Chiara makes a decision that changes her life for ever.