Showing results by narrator "Alix Dunmore" in All Categories

In a bold and magisterial work of immense scope, Josephine Quinn argues that the real story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm leads us to believe. So much of our shared history has been lost, drowned out by the concept – developed in the Victorian era – of separate ‘civilisations’. Moving from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration, How the World Made the West reveals a new narrative: one that traces the millennia of global encounters and exchange that built what is now called the West, as societies met, tangled and sometimes grew apart.

Our brains stay active for 10 minutes after our heart stops beating. For Leila, each minute brings with it a new memory: growing up with her father and his wives in a grand old house in a quiet Turkish town; watching the women gossip and wax their legs while the men went to mosque; sneaking cigarettes and Western magazines on her way home from school; running away to Istanbul to escape an unwelcome marriage; falling in love with a student who seeks shelter from a riot in the brothel where she works. 

When Hannah's family flee from the Nazis to Amsterdam, she soon strikes up a friendship with a girl just like her freshly arrived from Germany. Precocious and outspoken, the girl's name is Anne Frank and for seven blissful years the inseparable pair navigate school, boys and coming of age.

Peri, a wealthy Turkish housewife, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground. A relic from a past - and a love - Peri had tried desperately to forget. The photograph takes Peri back to Oxford University, as an 18-year-old sent abroad for the first time. It also takes her to her home with her two best friends, Shirin and Mona, and their arguments about Islam and femininity and to the scandal that tore them all apart.

Kim is becoming a writer, and is determined to write a bestseller. She's been convinced of this idea by Matthew, an American literary agent who is as emotionally unavailable as he is handsome (very). Kim lives in her own carefully constructed reality, which her imagination is constantly pumping full of hot air. As she attempts to buoy herself using other people for external motivation, they poke holes in her fantasies, leading her to wonder if she's going to come crashing down or somehow stay afloat.

One rainy afternoon in Istanbul, a woman walks into a doctor's surgery. 'I need to have an abortion', she announces. She is 19 years old and unmarried. What happens that afternoon will change her life. Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse, all the Kaznci men die in their early 40s, so it is a house of women, among them Asya's beautiful, rebellious mother Zeliha, who runs a tattoo parlour; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as clairvoyant; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. 

Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live? Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their preconceived conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.

A family from two nations, England and Greece, live a simple life on a tiny Greek island: Irini, Tasso and their daughter, sweet Chara, whose name means joy. Their life goes up in flames in a single day when one man starts a fire out of greed and indifference. Many are killed, homes are destroyed, and the island's natural beauty wiped out. In the wake of the fire, Chara bears deep scars across her back and arms. Tasso is frozen in trauma, devastated that he wasn't there when his family most needed him. And Irini is crippled by guilt at her part in the fate of the man who started the fire.

It was easy for Elizabeth. She married the man she loved, bore him two children and made a home for him which was the envy of their friends. It was harder for Ruth. She married Elizabeth’s son and then found that, somehow, she could never quite measure up. Isolation, deceit and betrayal fill the gaps between the two individual women and between their different worlds. In this complex thriller, Philippa Gregory deploys all her insight into what women want and what women fear, as Ruth confronts the shifting borders of her own sanity.

Debutante of the year. Able politician. Femme fatale. Just some of the many labels attached to the irrepressible, controversial Raine Spencer: Countess, socialite and stepmother to Diana, Princess of Wales. But who was the real Raine? What was hidden behind the immaculately manicured public façade and her overwhelmingly negative tabloid image? From her childhood days as daughter of romantic novelist powerhouse, Barbara Cartland, to Westminster councillor and wife of Earl Spencer, Three Times a Countess recounts Raine's compelling and glamorous life.

A short feminist polemic that argues that the afterlife of the witch hunts continues today: the same reasons for which women were demonized in the past—being single, ageing, deciding to not have children—lead to them be persecuted now. 

Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe were philosophy students at Oxford during the Second World War when most male undergraduates (and many tutors) were conscripted. Taught by refugee scholars, women and conscientious objectors, the four friends developed a philosophy that could respond to the war's darkest revelations.

Wry, compassionate and glittering with wit, Penelope Lively's stories gets beneath the everyday to the beating heart of human experience. In intimate stories of growing up and growing old, chance encounters and life-long relationships, Lively explores with keen insight the ways that individuals can become tangled in history, and small acts ripple through the generations. From new and never-before-published stories to forgotten treasures, Metamorphosis showcases the very best from a literary master. 

Millie loves her city life, her city friends and writing her true(ish) confessions column—but she’s starting to wonder if the grass really is greener on the other side, or if her heart really belongs back in Northumberland, with her mum who is struggling after the death of Millie’s dad.

Steven is one unlucky closeted sixth former. Whenever he has a strong emotion, be that happiness or sadness, weird things happen. Like, potentially dangerous things. Recently, he kissed another boy for the first time and...the boy's head literally exploded. Steven flees to the miserable town of Grunsby-on-Sea, determined not to hurt anyone else with his "Emomancy". With a best friend as determined as Freya, it is impossible to stay hidden for long though, especially when she realises Steven might be in danger after a mysterious organisation called DEMA start asking questions about him.

Jessie wakes to darkness, cold, and the rain beating down on her. She reaches out, and her hands meet hard stone. Suddenly she knows where she is. Deep in the woods, far underground, at the bottom of the well where her best friend's lifeless body was found fifteen years ago. After returning to her hometown to investigate a new murder, she now finds herself poised to become the killer's next victim. Jessie gazes up to the circle of night sky above her, the relentless raindrops landing on her face.

Jenna is a wife, a mother, a doctor. She’s also the victim of a stalker. Every time she leaves her house, she sees him. Disturbing gifts are left at her door. Cruel emails are sent to her colleagues. She has no idea who this man is, but she feels powerless against him. Until the day he is brought into her hospital after a serious accident, and Jenna is given the chance to find out once and for all why this man is tormenting her. Now, the power is all hers.

Hotshot lawyer Rebecca Madison is dreading the annual family Thanksgiving break where the question on everyone’s lips will be ‘why are you still single?’. When it comes to her career, she’s the best of the best, hired for her take-no-prisoners approach and sharp instincts. But when it comes to her love life…well, she hasn’t found the loophole for happy ever after yet. So when she has a one night stand with a gorgeous stranger she meets in a bar, Becca decides to do what she does best: make a deal with Mr One Night to be her Mr Right (just for the holidays).

In the summer of 1973, teenage Ruth and her four friends are obsessed with pre-Raphaelite paintings and a little bit obsessed with each other. They spend the scorching summer days in the river by Ruth's grand family home, pretending to be the drowning Ophelia and recreating tableaus of other tragic mythical heroines. But by the end of the summer, real tragedy has found them. Twenty-four years later, Ruth is a wife and mother of three children and moves her family into her still-grand, but now somewhat dilapidated, childhood home following the death of her father.

Since his adventure in Grunsby-on-Sea, Steven Percival has been thriving. He's kept his powers under control, come out of the closet, and been with his handsome American boyfriend, Troy, almost every day this summer. He can't wait to start uni in London with his best friend, Freya, especially as Troy is going to a different university just a quick train ride away. But Grunsby won't let him go. Around every corner, he's convinced that he's seeing Zachary, the evil emomancer who tried to leech his powers away.