Showing results by narrator "Gemma Lawrence" in All Categories

When a large diamond goes missing from Silvershell Manor, who better to get to the bottom of the mystery than detective Violet Veil and her dog Bones. But nothing is quite as it seems when it comes to the missing heirloom and when a trail of origami birds leads them to Elizabelle Crane, a young casino owner and debt collector, Violet realises that it’s all just turned into a game of high stakes . . .

The Children's Book of the Future is a narrative non-fiction audiobook offering an inclusive and hopeful vision of the future, with a diverse, multicultural approach that will appeal to children of all backgrounds. Some of the diverse visions explored include: underwater cities; the solar system and space travel; green technologies and sustainability; robots and AI; the future of cities; and much more! In short, the audiobook sets out to reclaim the future for current and future generations of children.

Lily Baker wants more from life. Working at the local cinema, she saves her pennies so she can have a chance to get ahead. After she’s attacked one night while locking up the cinema, she loses her heart to her dashing rescuer…But this lovely man is as different from her as can be. When the town is divided, pitting the wealthy elite against the poor working class folk like Lily, she finds her allegiance is torn.

Sisters Bel and Marie are poles apart. Whilst Marie is a free spirit who spurns alcohol, casual sex and material possessions, Bel needs all of those things just to make it through to lunchtime. When their mother dies suddenly, leaving them a rundown house on the Norfolk coast, they are unexpectedly thrown together. Because there's a condition: before they can inherit it, they have to live in it for one year - together.

One Girl Began entwines the stories of three women, separated by history but connected by the same building. For Ellen in 1909, it is a box factory where she finds work and a transformative circle of friendship when her family fall on hard times. For Frances in 1984, it is a derelict ruin, where she joins a group of squatters and is drawn into a coercive relationship. And for Amanda in 2020, it is a gentrified conversion, where she finds herself trapped in a tiny flat and grappling with new motherhood as the pandemic looms into view.

As the Great War rages across Europe, twenty-one-year-old Ruby Archer decides to ‘do her bit’ at an East End munitions factory. The work is relentless and deafening, but the camaraderie of the other girls carries her through. As the threat of another Zeppelin attack grows by the day, Ruby cannot ignore the abandoned animals scavenging the local streets. She rescues a stray kitten, Tess, and takes in an injured terrier Mac, but when all the local cats mysteriously disappear, she knows she needs to do more, and with the help of her friends plans to open a weekly animal clinic.

12-year-old Nancy Crumpet lives above a bakery and her life is a delightful mix of flour, salt and love. Yet her mind is brimming with questions nobody can answer. Why did her birth parents disappear? Why can she speak with the sky? And why must she keep her mysterious birthmark hidden? Everything is about to change when the Scareground returns to Greenwich. Nancy is convinced it holds the answers to her parents' disappearance. She and her best friend Arthur Green meet Skelter, the fair's spooky owner, and discover a world full of dark magic and mystery.

For Lil, life at the Squawking Mackerel inn couldn't be more miserable. She's tasked with the sloppiest, grottiest jobs and picked on at every turn. Her only friend is Augustus Scratchy, a cantankerous crow with a habit of stealing. When the dread villain Rotten Bob Hatchet and his gang of cut-throat highwaymen begin attacking travellers on the road, things get really dire. Joining forces with a new servant boy, Ned - and armed with the contents of the inn's lost property cupboard, a pocketful of dumplings and some knicker elastic - Lil comes up with a plot to scare off Rotten Bob.

Thirteen years ago, magic was banished and the witches were hunted. Sisters Spel and Egg are the daughters of witches, but they grow up in Miss Mouldheel’s School for Wicked Girls with no idea who they really are. Until the day the message arrives telling them to run. The message sends them to a funeral parlour in a far away village—and their new guardian, the Undertaker, has a secret. Beneath the funeral parlour is a portal to the Other Ways—four worlds that lie parallel to ours. When Egg vanishes through the portal, Spel knows she must try to save her sister.

Sisters Spel and Egg grew up in Mistress Mouldheels’ School for Wicked Girls believing they were the daughters of criminals, until they discovered the truth: They are witches. And after always being in the shadow of her big sister, Spel discovered that she was a Shadowborn Witch—the only one who can step between portals to other worlds. Now in a coven with their schoolmates and part of the alliance against the Hunt, the sisters try to master their new powers. But the Hunt is rising, the witches are in danger and when a new portal opens the whole world is under threat.

Isabelle, a young university researcher, is sent to a country manor house deep in the heart of rural England to verify an ancient object that the family has discovered during the renovation of their home. While Isabelle sets to work verifying its authenticity, she becomes the obsession of the owner’s strange but beautiful daughter, and they develop a dangerous attraction.