Showing results by narrator "Penelope Freeman" in All Categories

Staying at Daisy's from Sunday Times best-selling author Jill Mansell is essential reading if you love the novels of Cathy Kelly and Milly Johnson. Daisy MacLean runs the country house hotel owned by her flamboyant father, Hector. When she hears who's about to get married there, she isn't worried at all - her friend, Tara, absolutely promises there won't be any trouble between her and ex-boyfriend Dominic, whom she hasn't seen for years. But Dominic has other ideas....

Tess Simpson needs a break. No one appreciates her at home. No one appreciates her at work. And now her dog has died. She’s had enough! Maybe what she really needs is a break from hopeless husband, Dave, the ungrateful ‘kidults’ and the lacklustre job.

Three very different girls sign up as trainee nurses at a big London teaching hospital in 1934. Dora leaves her overcrowded, squalid working-class home for a better life. But has she got what it takes to keep up with other, better-educated girls? And will her hated stepfather ever let her go? Helen is born for the job; her brother is a doctor, her all-powerful mother a hospital trustee. But will Helen’s secret misery be her downfall? An aristocratic rebel, Millie’s carefree attitude will find her up in front of Matron again and again. Will she ever care enough to make a nurse? Or will she go back to the glamorous life she was born to?

Mabel Beaumont’s husband Arthur loved lists. He’d leave them for her everywhere. ‘Remember: eggs, butter, sugar’. ‘I love you: today, tomorrow, always’. But now Arthur is gone. He died: softly, gently, not making a fuss. But he’s still left her a list. This one has just one item on it though: ‘Find D’. Mabel feels sure she knows what it means. She must track down her best friend Dot, who she hasn’t seen since the fateful day she left more than sixty years ago.

Joanna Ryan’s father has gone off to war, leaving her in the care of her step-mother, a woman more concerned with having a good time than being any sort of parent to her. But then she finds a puppy, left for dead, and Joanna becomes determined to save him, sharing her meagre rations with him. But, in a time of war, pets are only seen as an unnecessary burden and she is forced to hide her new friend, Harry, from her step-mother and the authorities. With bombs falling over Bristol and with the prospect of evacuation on the horizon, can they stay together and keep each other safe?

Bristol 194. As the clouds of war grow bleaker both at home and abroad, the Tobacco Girls are determined to do their bit for king and country. To that end Maisie Miles and Bridget Milligan become voluntary ambulance drivers. As well as coping with the frequent air raids, Maisie is kept on her toes with three new junior employees, one of whom is particularly testing. Bridget’s heart becomes torn between family loyalty and Lyndon O’Neill III, the man she loves. Meanwhile Phyllis Harvey has joined the WAAF, opting to serve overseas whilst trying to escape her past.

Janey is 18 and living in a small flat with her baby daughter. Just as her new life starts to show promise, her past catches up with her. Nicole is renting one of the new luxury flats. She’s just walked away from her husband and teenage sons, tired of being treated as a servant, suspecting her husband of having an affair. Winifred has lived in her large family home for over 80 years but it’s all getting too much, though she doesn’t want to leave. Things are not what they seem, and danger can strike both rich and poor.

Fearless Felicity Penrose thrives on adventure: she's one of the most experienced female sailors in the world. But one day, in the middle of the 1950s, her boat is found abandoned. Fliss has mysteriously vanished, tragically leaving behind her husband and baby girl. Nearly 30 years later, Emma's world is rocked when she is approached by journalist Mike Bond with an extraordinary revelation: that Fliss was seen in America after she was presumed drowned.

Emma Brown is a happy-go-lucky child, content to work hard at school, and to play hopscotch with her friends on the pavement outside her house in the run-down Nechells area of Birmingham. As long as everything is all right at home with her Ma and Pa, her little sister Joyce and brother Sid, then life is good. But after Em's mother, Cynthia, has her baby she just doesn't seem to be able to cope.

After escaping a train bound for a death camp with a trusty German Shepherd dog, a girl wakes to find that she has no memory of her former life. Lily is fostered by the kind RAF pilot who found her and his wife, Meg. It is not long before their lives are disrupted once again by the war and, with their home in ruins, they are forced to flee to the country. In the Somerset countryside, Lily is reunited with Rudy, the heroic German Shepherd.

No turkey. No fruit to make a decent pudding. No money for presents. Your children away from home; your husband, father and brothers off fighting. How in the world does one celebrate Christmas? That was the situation facing the people of Britain for six years during the Second World War. From the family whose dog ate the Christmas roast, leaving them to enjoy “Spam with all the trimmings”, to the exhibition of handmade toys for children in a Singapore prison camp, these firsthand stories are by turns tragic, poignant and funny.

A sequel to The Hopscotch Summer. Molly Fox has grown up in the back streets of Birmingham at the mercy of her cruel grandfather and her drunken mother. Though she has grown into a tall, beautiful woman, Molly is haunted by terrible family secrets. When she is found lying drunk in a gutter, Molly reaches a turning point. She decides to escape by joining the army as an ATS girl.

Haughty, social climber Juno, her ditzy, style-free sister Athena and their cousins, "It" girl Diana and wannabe actress Venus, are accustomed to living the high life, thanks to a trust fund set up by their super-rich, reclusive Uncle Clem.

She longed to be reunited with her family. The compelling new novel from the Sunday Times top ten bestselling author of The Workhouse Girl. Eleven-year-old Stella Barry is forced into service when her family find themselves living hand-to-mouth.Leaving her mother and younger brother and sister behind, Stella goes to a big country house outside London. When she returns home one Sunday, she discovers they have disappeared.

In 1984, two young mothers meet at a toddler group in Birmingham. As their friendship grows, they share with each other the difficulties and secrets in their lives: Joanne, a sweet, shy girl, is increasingly afraid of her husband. The lively, promising man she married has become hostile and violent and she is too ashamed to tell anyone. When her mother, Margaret is suddenly rushed into hospital, the bewildered family find that there are things about their mother of which they had no idea.

A moving story of two women struggling with their past: one cannot remember hers, the other cannot forget.... When Hebe receives a life-changing diagnosis at only 40, she struggles to make sense of what it will mean for her, her job and the man she loves. With memories slipping away by the day, she flees to the one place she has always felt safe and peaceful - Cornwall, and the house her family spent so many summers in.

It's 1945 and, as the troops begin to return home, the inhabitants of London attempt to put their lives back together. For 25-year-old Millie, a qualified nurse and midwife, the jubilation at the end of the war is short-lived as she tends to the needs of the East End community around her. But while Millie witnesses tragedy and brutality in her job, she also finds strength and kindness. And when misfortune befalls her own family, it is the enduring spirit of the community that shows Millie that even the toughest of circumstances can be overcome.

Divorced and on a deadline, bestselling novelist Bea Pinkerton has a serious case of writer's block. With her agent breathing down her neck, Bea will do ANYTHING to avoid writing another word. So an invite to a reunion with her old school friends at a beautiful chateau in France is Bea’s perfect chance to escape. Surely here, relaxing with old friends and drinking cold fizz, Bea will find inspiration? But as soon as Bea arrives, she realises this is not going to be the peaceful getaway she anticipated.

December, 1940. As German bombs fall on Southampton, the city’s residents flee to the surrounding villages. In Upton village, amid the chaos, newly married Ellen Parr finds a girl sleeping, unclaimed at the back of an empty bus. Little Pamela, it seems, is entirely alone. Ellen has always believed she does not want children, but when she takes Pamela into her home the child cracks open the past Ellen thought she had escaped and the future she and her husband, Selwyn, had dreamed for themselves. As the war rages on, love grows where it was least expected, surprising them all.

The eldest of seven daughters, Grace must act as a buffer between her violent, ambitious father and the sisters who depend on her, while her disenchanted mother withdraws to her rooms. Rejected by her first love and facing a spinster's future, she struggles to hold the broken family together through her father's infidelity, one sister's alcoholism, and another's out-of-wedlock pregnancy by an unsuitable match.