Showing results by narrator "Anna Bentinck" in All Categories

She was a daughter, a wife, a mother. She was my friend. But what secrets did Eloise take to her grave? After her best friend Eloise dies from breast cancer, Cathy is devastated. But then Cathy begins to have disturbing dreams that imply Eloise's death was not all it seems. With a history of depression, Cathy is only just recovering from a nervous breakdown and her husband Chris, a psychiatrist, is acutely aware of his wife's mental frailty.

Perhaps England's greatest literary family. To find one brilliant novelist in a family is extremely rare. But two? Three?

The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily Jane and Anne, together with their brother Patrick, are famed throughout the world. And amongst their many talents was poetry. Of course, being Brontë's, they were rather good at that too.

Stella Darnell is a cleaner. But when she isn't tackling dust and dirt and restoring order to chaos, Stella solves murders. Her latest case concerns a man convicted of killing his mistress. His daughter thinks he's innocent, and needs Stella to prove it. As Stella sifts through piles of evidence and interview suspects, she discovers a link between the recent murder and a famous case from forty years ago: the shocking death of six-year-old Sarah Ferris, killed in the shadows of an empty playground. Stella knows that dredging up the past can be dangerous. 

It's April 1939, and, with their lives in Berlin and Vienna under threat, Esther and Kitty - two very different women - are forced to make the same brutal choice. Flee Europe, or face the ghetto, incarceration, death. Shanghai is a haven - and so they secure passage to the other side of the world. What they find is a city of extremes - wealth, poverty, decadence and disease - and of deep political instability. 

Three very different people, connected by a thread of violence...and hope. Kay, recently widowed and coming to terms with life on her own, feels she has hit rock bottom. For years she and her husband fostered difficult children - including Becca, whom trouble follows like a stray puppy. And now Becca seems to be in the worst trouble of her life. A girl has been attacked so savagely she can’t be identified. She’s alive, but only just. Becca, tossed out of university and just let go from her dead-end job, is certain she knows who the victim is. But no one will believe her.

When Sam falls in love with Deptford thug Derek, and Anne’s best friend Kathleen takes her own life, they discover they are linked not just by a world of drugs and revenge - they also share the friendship of the uncanny and enigmatic Deborah. Seamstress, sailor, storyteller and self-proclaimed centenarian immortal, Deborah slowly reveals to Anne and Sam her improbable, fantastical life, a history of hidden Deptford and ultimately the solution to their crises.

When Lily Bell is sold by her father to a Professor of Ghosts to settle a bad debt, she thinks she is about to hit the London stage as an actress. But little does she know that the professor intends her to be his very own ghost, part of an elaborate illusion for a fascinated audience. Obsessed with perfection, the professor covers all bases to ensure his illusion is realistic and when Lily comes across her own obituary in the paper and then her own headstone in the cemetery, she soon realises that she is trapped, her parents think she is dead and soon her fate is to become even darker.

There are some things you can never leave behind… Kate Forrest is invisible…her husband doesn’t seem to know she’s alive and her two children have become stroppy adolescents. With her fortieth birthday approaching, Kate walks out of her life, and gets on a plane to Italy. With no responsibilities, she soon finds herself caught up in the arms of a man half her age. But eventually Kate will be forced to choose between her past and the future.

One abandoned, one unfinished, these short works show Austen equally at home with romance (a widowed clergyman with four daughters must needs be in search of a husband or two in The Watsons) and with social change (a new, commercial seaside resort in Sanditon). Typically touching, funny, charming and sharp.

Forgive me, Dorothea, for I cannot forgive you. What you do, to this child, to this child's mother, it is wrong... Roberta likes to collect the letters and postcards she finds in second-hand books. When her father gives her some of her grandmother's belongings, she finds a baffling letter from the grandfather she never knew - dated after he supposedly died in the war. Dorothy is unhappily married to Albert, who is away at war.

In this eloquent meditation on ageing, Marie de Hennezel guides us through a true ‘art of growing old’. She recalls her encounters as a clinical psychologist with extraordinary people who 'grow old gracefully’ – and through her experience shows us how to make the most of this time in our...