Showing results by narrator "Patience Tomlinson" in All Categories

Seven-year-old Jocelyn Holt loves her nanny Hannah more than her own mother. When Hannah disappears one summer night, Jo never gets over the loss. Thirty years on, now a young widow with a daughter of her own, Jo is forced to return to her family home, and the mother she’s always despised, just as a skull is pulled out of the lake in the grounds. Could this explain her beloved nanny’s disappearance? What other secrets will that lake give up to the police?

Bel, an orphan daughter of an Army colonel, is brought up in an English village and flung into the whirl of London life to earn a hard living as a secretary while attempting to navigate romance, unexpected friendships and urban life. Shy and sensitive, she is unaware of the pitfalls that surround her. When Bel is offered a chance to leave London and venture to a fishing hotel in Scotland for a much needed holiday with an old school friend, things begin to change. There she learns that you cannot escape from your troubles by running away from them....

Faye is 39 and single. She's terrified she may never have the one thing she always wanted: a child of her own. Then she discovers a co-parenting app: Acorns. For men and women who want to have a baby, but don't want to do it alone. When she meets Louis through it, it feels as though the fates have aligned.

Shortly before Bel's marriage to Ellis Brownlee, her friend, Louise Armstrong, goes house hunting for them and discovers a charming but neglected old stone cottage in the Cotswolds. Bel adores the house, called Fletchers End. Ellis buys the place from the absentee-owner, Lieutenant Commander Lestrange, and, after a picture-book wedding, the happy couple move in. As she embarks on her new life as a devoted wife, Bel loyally guides Louise through her own romantic tribulations.

An investigation into the sale of a plot of land takes a darker turn when a body is found on a cliffside. Libby Sarjeant and her friend Fran reluctantly agree to investigate the case. It's clear that there's more than a dodgy development deal at play—but can Libby and Fran unravel the puzzling case before it's too late?

It was odd that Harriet should always have been so fond of curates. They were so immature and always made the same kind of conversation. Now the Archdeacon was altogether different...'Together yet alone, the Misses Bede occupy the central crossroads of parish life. Harriet, plump, elegant and jolly, likes nothing better than to make a fuss of new curates, secure in the knowledge that elderly Italian Count Ricardo Bianco will propose to her yet again this year.

From Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg, the author of the smash hit The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules, comes the third hilarious title in this much-loved series: The Little Old Lady Behaving Badly. Nothing can stop The League of Pensioners, a wily gang of blue-rinsed rebels. They have a plan, and to realize it they are going to need money - lots of money.

For Eveleen Hardcastle life gets no better than growing up on Pear Tree Farm in the Lincolnshire countryside. Her family works hard for the Dunsmore estate and Eveleen finds it impossible to resist the charms of their employer's son, Stephen Dunsmore. But Jimmy, ever quick to antagonize, ensures that his sister's clandestine trysts do not remain so for long. Mary Hardcastle reacts to the news of her daughter's affair with a shocking ferocity, which seems to be borm more of bitterness than maternal protectiveness.

Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine - in touch only with his daughter and still trying to reconcile him to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset - he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The return address on the box - Dussmann - unsettles him completely.

Spring, 1943. After a visit to see her mother in Sussex with Ned, it's time for VAD nurse Evie Jones to say a fond farewell to Rookery House and seek a new home in Great Plumstead. When an unusual opportunity arises, will it be all she hopes for? Marianne is visited by her husband's sister, stirring up bad memories from the past. Scared that Alex's family will once again try to take her young daughters away, Marianne vows to do all she can to keep them safe and living with her at Rookery House.

In Paris, January 1943, 230 French women resisters were rounded up and sent on a train to Auschwitz - the only train, in the four years of the German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. The youngest was a schoolgirl of 15, the eldest a farmer’s wife of 68; there were among them teachers, biochemists, sales girls, secretaries, housewives and university lecturers. The women turned to one another, finding solace and strength in friendship and shared experience.

October 1940. When VAD nurse Evie narrowly escapes being killed in an air raid during the London Blitz, it propels her to make a life-changing decision to break free of her troubled and unhappy life. She escapes to the Norfolk countryside to start afresh, with a job at the newly opened Great Plumstead Hall hospital, and a wonderful new home at Rookery House. The community of Great Plumstead welcomes evacuees to the village—mothers and children bombed out of their London homes. Sisters Prue and Thea, along with members of The Mother's Day Club, help the new arrivals settle in.

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Virginia Nicholson's Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in the Second World War. A special multi-voice recording featuring five actresses that bring to life the hundreds of personal testimonies, diary entries and books that make up this superb study. Read by Patience Tomlinson, Annie Aldington, Rachel Bavidge, Julie Maisey and Georgina Sutton.

The little old lady is back! This time, Martha Andersson and her friends - the League of Pensioners - have left behind their dreary care home in Stockholm and are enjoying the bright lights of Las Vegas. This is their opportunity for a new lease of life and they plan to make the most of it. But before long, they are up to their old tricks and with ingenious tactics, a pair of false teeth and a wheelchair each, they plot to outwit the security system at one of the casinos.

Mrs Bradley, sharp-eyed detective and celebrated psychiatrist, has decided to spend Christmas with her nephew at his beautiful house in the Cotswolds. It isn’t long before a mystery unfolds. There are strange events occurring in the nearby wood, and local villagers are receiving anonymous threatening letters. Then the snow begins to fall - and a body is discovered. Mrs Bradley is on the case, but she’ll have to hatch an ingenious plan to reveal the truth and find the culprit....

Norfolk, 1940. As war rages on, sisters Prue and Thea, along with the wider community of Great Plumstead, are doing all they can to help the war effort, from running the mobile canteen for the Women's Voluntary Service to organising clothing drives and collecting salvage. When, Anna, a young German girl who fled her country, seeks refuge at the local hall, Thea opens up her home, Rookery House, and invites Anna into their growing family. But while many in the village welcome Anna with open arms, others are suspicious of the new arrival.

Born on a Somerset pea-field in 1941, the second of eight children in a Romani family, Maggie Smith-Bendell has lived through the years of greatest change in the travelling community's long history. As a child, Maggie rode and slept in a horse-drawn wagon, picked hops and flowers, and sat beside her father's campfire on ancient verges, poor but free to roam. As the twentieth century progressed, common land was fenced off and the traditional ways disappeared.

Norfolk, 1939. When the residents of Great Plumstead, a small and charming community in Norfolk, offer to open their homes to evacuees from London, they're expecting to care for children. So when a train carrying expectant mothers pulls into the station, the town must come together to accommodate their unexpected new arrivals....

It's 1934. When Miss Pongleton is found murdered on the stairs of Belsize Park station, her fellow boarders in the Frampton Hotel are not overwhelmed with grief at the death of a tiresome old woman. But they all have their theories about the identity of the murderer and help to unravel the mystery of who killed the wealthy 'Pongle'. Several of her fellow residents - even Tuppy the terrier - have parts to play in the events that lead to a dramatic arrest.

When Barbara realizes time is running out, she writes letters to her four daughters, aware they'll be facing the trials and triumphs of life without her at their side. But how can she leave them when they still have so much growing up to do?