Showing results by narrator "Lucy Paterson" in All Categories

This sweeping account confronts and upends old fantasies, revealing the far more startling reality of our world's largest hot desert. Drawing on decades of research, and years spent living in the region, anthropologist Judith Scheele takes us from Libya to Mali, Algeria to Chad, from the ancient Roman Empire to the bloody colonial era to contemporary regional battles and fraught international diplomacy, questioning every easy cliché and exposing fascinating truths along the way.

It is 1958. Elizabeth has been sent away from her London home to the beautiful Hartland House in Sussex. Over an idyllic summer by the coast, she grows close to the confident young Shaws, who treat her like one of their own. A lovely but innocent girl, Elizabeth is ready to fall in love - but her dreams are dangerously naïve. Decades later Elizabeth's daughter, Addie, is stunned when a stranger appears on her doorstep, claiming that they are sisters. Addie doesn't believe it until her beloved father admits that everything she's been told about her early life is a lie.

"I don’t exactly know how to tell you this, but you're not the only one who is single again." Single together for the first time, 34-year-old Meg and her warm-hearted mother Sally decide to cancel Christmas, and run away to a tiny cottage on the Cornish coast. For Meg, it is the perfect place to heal, while for her mother it has a special, and secret, place in her heart. Meg and Sally find that they’re not only getting to know themselves, but also each other. However, unable to resist getting involved in the village Christmas celebrations.

Words can be a way to unlock our feelings. Poetry allows us to be in touch with our emotions and helps us unlock and explore our vulnerability. You'll Never Walk Alone is a collection of the kind of inspirational texts—mainly poems—that can accompany us, whatever we are feeling, from sorrow to delight. The texts are not just about words which can console us or comfort us—though they often do this too. Rather these are poems that allow us to enjoy a full range of emotions.

Sisters Alice and Jenny are in their early 20s when the Germans occupy their home of Jersey. Alice, a nurse, is called to work in the German hospital, unaware that she will find a great love but that she will make an even greater sacrifice and be sent to a place across the seas where she will witness unbearable suffering. Meanwhile her sister, Jenny, is drawn into a circle of islanders who decide to rise up and resist the occupiers. For both sisters, the war will cause them to make extraordinary choices, experience unimaginable heartbreak and emerge forever changed....

Thelma is the busy single mum of 12-year-old Louis. When he is hit by a lorry one morning, their lives are changed for ever. Louis falls into a coma, and if he doesn't regain consciousness in the next four weeks, he may never wake up again. At home in Louis' bedroom, a devastated Thelma finds a list of all the things he wants to accomplish in his life and suddenly sees a way to survive: she will fulfil her son's dreams, in the hope that it will bring him back.

It was a victimless crime.... Estate Agent Clara is struggling to make a sale. With her abusive ex-husband on the brink of finding where she's hiding, she needs to make a commission soon or lose her chance to escape. Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness has remained unsold for years, and Clara is sure that an 'innocent' fire will force the price down. But the perfect crime soon turns into the perfect nightmare: there was a witness, a stranger in the village, and he's not going to let Clara get away with it that easily....

Nina, in the final days of her illness, asks her best friend Marie to look after her family when she's gone. And Marie does everything she can to step into Nina's shoes after her friend's tragic death. She tries to do the best by Nina, tries to be there for Nina's young children, tries to support Nina's grieving husband, tries to keep their lives on track despite their terrible loss.

Out for a bicycle ride in the hills beyond Inversgail, Janet Marsh discovers the body of Dr. Malcolm Murray. The elderly Murray and his own bicycle went off the road and down a steep slope - he’s sprawled in the burn at the bottom, his damaged bike in a patch of thistles on the bank. Tire tracks at the side of the narrow road suggest a vehicle might have been involved. But who would want the well-loved retired doctor dead?

In this comforting and supportive little book, best-selling authors Sarah Rayner and Kate Harrison, with Dr. Patrick Fitzgerald, draw on their own experiences of living with depression and share their life-changing coping techniques that have helped them manage low mood and depressive episodes. They explain that actively trying to fight your depression can actually prolong your suffering–instead, making peace with difficult emotions and compassionately accepting them can restore mental health and happiness.

After ninety-three well-lived years, Violet MacAskill is ready to simplify her life. Her eccentric solution? She’ll throw a decanting and decluttering party at her family home—a Scottish Baronial manor near the seaside town of Inversgail. She sets aside everything she wants or needs, then she invites her many friends in to sip sherry and help themselves to whatever they want from all that’s left. Janet Marsh and Christine Robertson, two of the women who own Yon Bonnie Books in Inversgail, enjoy themselves at the party. Not everyone who attends has a good time, though.

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.

You can find anything in Scalentine, the city of portals, but you won't find a better brothel than the Red Lantern. And its proprietor, Babylon Steel (ex-mercenary, ex-priestess, ex...lots of things), means to keep it that way. But a prurient cult are protesting in the streets, sex workers are disappearing and Babylon has bills to pay. When the powerful Diplomatic Section hires her - off the books - to find a missing heiress, she has to take the job. And then her past starts to catch up with her.

Evie has just started her second year at University. She is young, beautiful and popular. She should be having the time of her life, except she has something to hide - a one-night-stand with her English professor, Simon. Not wanting any of his other students to be used in the same way, Evie reports their relationship to University HR. But hours later, Village Vixen, the student gossip blogger, is baying for blood. She's found out about the accusation and is firmly on Simon's side.

A mother walks into the sea...and never comes back. Why? One perfect summer day, mother of two Alice walks into the sea...and never comes back. Her daughters - loyal but fragile Lily and headstrong, long-absent Marietta - are forcibly reunited by her disappearance. Meanwhile, with retirement looming, DI Fox investigates cold cases long since forgotten. And there's one obsession he won't let go: the tragic death of an infant 20 years before. Can Lily and Marietta uncover what happened to their mother? Will Fox solve a mystery that has haunted him for decades?

All In My Head is a memoir by a woman who in her early 50s received a life-shattering diagnosis. It is about her determined search for effective treatment, the birth of a campaign to get proper data and funding for research into glioblastoma (GBM), and finally her coming to terms with the knowledge that she has reached the end of the road.

Heiða is a solitary farmer with a flock of 500 sheep in a remorseless area bordering Iceland's highlands. It's known as the End of the World. One of her nearest neighbours is Iceland's most notorious volcano, Katla, which has periodically driven away the inhabitants of Ljótarstaðir ever since people first started farming there in the 12th century.

Lizzie Bradshaw. A student from the Lake District, forced to work away from home, who witnesses a terrible crime. But who will ultimately pay the price? Emma Taylor. A mother, a wife, and a woman with a dangerous secret. Can she keep her beloved family safely together? Stella Taylor. A disaffected teenager, determined to discover what her mother is hiding. But how far will she go to uncover the truth? And one man, powerful, manipulative and cunning, who controls all their destinies.

After an acclaimed career in ceramics making things and breaking things, it is now Jay herself who has cracked. Recovering from a breakdown, she and her husband, Simon, move to the desolate edges of the Yorkshire moors, where they find and fall in love with the Two Houses: a crumbling Victorian property whose central rooms were supposedly so haunted that a previous owner had them cut out from the building entirely.

Bodies surface and disappear, seduce and corrupt in these original stories by best-selling, award-winning female crime writers. Keep your eyes peeled, your ears cocked and your wits about you as 20 deliciously twisted tales take you to surprising places....