Showing results by narrator "Lizzie Hopley" in All Categories

Looking back on his life, eight-four year-old Manuel Echaniz will never forget his youth growing up poverty-stricken and in hardship on the streets of Liverpool. Now far away from the place that formed him, Manuel has a family who know nothing about the place he grew up. Concerned by their lack of interest in their heritage, he sets out to teach his granddaughter about his formative years and the matriarchal community that raised him through the toughest of times. Will she ever understand that other world he left behind in the teeming streets of the Mersey docklands?

Liverpool, May 1941. An extraordinary story of three brave women, each trying in her own way to deal with the brutal tide of destruction brought on by the air raids of the Second World War. There is Ellen—whose home is destroyed by bombs; Gwen, whose family absorbs all her time and energy and Emmie, whose only fears are for the safety of her merchant seaman fiancé, far away in the South Atlantic. None of them were prepared for what would follow, when the air raid siren sounded for the first time on 1 May, 1941.

When Ali inherits her great-aunt’s house, she immediately moves her whole family in, despite the warnings that there is something strange about the place. Unfazed, Ali begins redecorating, going through the rooms, making each one her own with the help of her daughter, Kelly. But when under the wallpaper in Kelly’s new room they discover a scrawled message from 1944, Ali begins to question the history of the house as she knows it.

Harriet and Mark have it all: successful careers, a lovely house in a leafy London suburb, twin boys on the cusp of leaving home. Yvette and Gary share a smaller place with their two daughters in a shabbier part of the same borough. But when the stars align for a collective move north, it means a fresh start for them all. For Mark, it’s a chance to escape the rat race; for Harriet, a distraction from her unfulfilled dream of a late third child. Gary has decided to reboot the Madchester band that made him famous, while Yvette hopes it will give her daughters what she never had.

Liverpool 1931. In a Liverpool torn by the Depression, Daisy Gallagher grows to womanhood the hard way. She is the mainstay of her poverty-stricken family and the devoted friend of Nellie O’Brian, who is dying for lack of medical attention. Daisy’s desperation for money leads her into the darkened streets and into the arms of drunken sailors willing to pay for their relief. Through her own strength and suffering, Daisy earns enough to pay for her friend’s much needed medical attention.

Driven by poverty, Spin and her makeshift family move to the Songwynds in search of work. There they share a tiny, rat-infested tenement room with their adoptive Ma: a ferocious wishhobbler. A monster of a mother, and the mother of all monsters, the wishhobbler’s viciousness has caused fear and mayhem among the slum dwellers. Unable to hit back at the wishhobbler, her victims turn their attention to Spin.

Liverpool, 1940. Journalist Ruth Holt is struggling in the terror of the Blitz when her young son is suddenly snatched away in broad daylight. Soon after, the kidnappers’ demands arrive. They are working with the Nazis, and she has no choice but to co-operate, or the authorities will learn that she is harbouring secrets of her own. Ruth’s job gives her access to critical information, and if she does not share it with Britain’s enemies, her child will face the consequences. Desperate, she falsifies information, lying to everyone: her employers, her family and her lover.

'My curse...to be the greatest painter who ever lived! And yet to never be able to see them for myself!' The year is 1893, and struggling artist Charles Delaware Tate works alone in a garret in New York City. Frustrated by his lack of artistic genius, he seems doomed to a life of misery and failure. And then he meets Eloise Verinder...and his whole world changes.

This is Moss Side, Manchester, during the 1960s and '70s as seen through the eyes of an Irish Traveller child. It depicts a community rich with diversity, humour and warmth. It's a story of lives behind pristine net curtains, in which a black eye marked a woman not as a victim but as a man's property. Amidst this stark tale of a bygone era is an affectionate account of love.

Jamison Collins is a lost and broken man. His wife has died, leaving him to bring up his children, Roger and Elizabeth, alone. Ivanka Romano lives in the Old House on the Collinwood estate. Abandoned by her gypsy tribe, she is also alone. But on this dark and stormy night, ghosts from the past are returning. Ghosts from the past are threatening to end the lives of these lost and broken people. It's Christmas Eve, but the only present that the children of Collinwood will receive is death....

Exiled to Earth by her mysterious superiors, Iris has been amusing herself and Panda by working for MIAOW, the Ministry for Incursions and Other Wonders. When a certain Professor Ramsbottom and his lovely assistant Audrey unearth a weird vehicle under a London railway station, Ms Wildthyme and her art critic chum are on the scene pretty sharpish. Among anachronistic skulls and crockery they discover the still-living forms of utterly perplexing, alien creatures.

Abandoned by her mother at an early age, 10-year-old Spin has been adopted by Sir Fistache mal Arthreign. The knight's habit of collecting waifs and strays has thrown together a family of rowdy headbangers. Expelled from countless towns and villages, they hope to make a fresh start in the Songwynd slums - but the decision to bring along their pet wishhobbler wrecks any chance of this.

From Liverpool’s best-loved author comes a superb novel of loss and grief, love and hope, set on Merseyside in 1920.

Life in a Liverpool tenement block is a grim struggle for Martha Connelly and her poverty-stricken family, as every day renews the threat of homelessness, hunger and disease. Family warmth remains constant however, despite the misery and disquiet of the slum surroundings, and the indomitable neighbourhood puts up a relentless fight for survival. Helen Forrester’s poignant novel relays bleakness and hardships, but celebrates also the spirit of unified hope and the restorative values of the close-knit community.