Showing titles in Friendship

Living hand to mouth ever since her mother’s tragic death, Amelia sells the last of her treasured possessions to avoid being cast out of her home onto London’s streets. Her estranged grandfather unexpectedly bequeaths a small struggling factory making mourning dresses and Amelia dares to dream… Drawing sketches by candlelight, she longs to sew elegant gowns from fine silks and beautiful ribbons for the rich. As the cold winter wind begins to bite, Amelia’s future hangs by a thread – can she keep her hopes alive?

Esther Hamilton, is finally finding her feet after her split with her horrible ex, and is looking forward to her new single life. She has a job she loves in the busy Accident and Emergency department, a new home and for the first time ever, a chance to just have fun with her good friends. Love is very much off the cards…Until the arrival of Joe Carter – the brother of Esther’s best friend, Danni.

For twenty years, Sciona has devoted every waking moment to the study of magic, fuelled by a mad desire to achieve the impossible: to be the first woman ever admitted to the High Magistry at the University of Magics and Industry. When Sciona finally achieves her ambition and becomes a Highmage, she finds her challenges have just begun. Her new colleagues are determined to make her feel unwelcome – and instead of a qualified lab assistant they give her a janitor. What neither Sciona nor her peers realize is that her taciturn assistant was not always a janitor.

When Lewis Harley has a health scare in his early 40s, he takes it as a wake-up call. So he and his wife, Charlotte, leave behind life in the fast lane, and Lewis opens the antiques shop he has dreamed of. Bonnie Brookland was brought up in the antiques trade and now works for the man who bought out her father's business, but she isn't happy there. So when she walks into Lew's shop, she knows this is the place for her.

Jerra and his best mate Sean set off in a beaten-up old VW to go camping on the coast. Jerra's friends and family want to know when he will finish university, when he will find a girl. But they don't understand about Sean's mother, Jewel, or the bush or the fish with the pearl. They think he needs a job, but what Jerra is searching for is more elusive. Only the sea, and perhaps the old man who lives in a shack beside it, can help.

South London, 2008. Two couples find themselves at a moment of reckoning, on the brink of acceptance or revolution. Melissa has a new baby and doesn’t want to let it change her, but in the crooked walls of a narrow Victorian terrace, she begins to disappear. Michael, growing daily more accustomed to his commute, still loves Melissa but can’t quite get close enough to her to stay faithful. Meanwhile, out in the suburbs, Stephanie is happy with Damian and their three children, but the death of Damian’s father has thrown him into crisis - or is it something, or someone, else?

When Lou Taylor inherits a quaint country cottage and a mobile library full of books from her birth mother, she heads to the small town of Wagtail Ridge to learn more about the woman she never knew. Curiously, the last piece of the bequest is a handwritten letter, the first of many Luca left scattered along the library's route in hopes of finally sharing her secrets with the daughter she had to give up.

East House is the oldest and least desirable dorm on campus, but it has a draw for lonely university freshman Aleeza Kassam: Jay Hoque, the hot and broody student who vanished from East House five months ago without a trace. It’s irresistible to an aspiring investigative journalist like Aleeza. But when she starts receiving texts from Jay, the mystery takes an unexpected turn. To put it mildly.

Gina Knight is looking forward to the prospect of retirement with her husband of forty-three years. Until, to her surprise, said husband decides he needs to 'find himself' – alone – and disappears to Santa Fe, leaving a Dear John letter in his wake. Now Gina needs a new role in life, not to mention somewhere to live, so she applies for the position of Companion to elderly Dorothy Reed. At eighty-nine, ‘Dot’ needs someone to help her around the house – or at least, her family seems to think so. Her companion’s first role would be to accompany Dot for a week-long extravagant wedding party.

The complete BBC radio adaptations of Alexander McCall's bestselling series. Inspired by Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, 44 Scotland Street started life as a serial in The Scotsman. It was a huge hit, and was soon novelised, adapted on stage and dramatised for BBC Radio 4. Collected here are all five radio series, in which we follow the interconnected lives of the residents of adjoining flats in a tenement in Edinburgh's Georgian New Town.

In Tokyo, there is a neighbourhood with the highest number of bookstores in the world. It is called Jinbocho where book lovers can browse to their heart's delight and where hunters of first editions or autographed copies prowl the bookcases. The Morisaki bookshop, a small family-run shop, is so packed with books that barely five people can fit inside. Books crowd the shelves and invade every corner of the floor; when a customer arrives, the owner, Satoru, immediately pops out from behind the counter.

Addy joined the Tuis for the adventure. Vivacious and outgoing, she is the life of the party, with an unforgettable voice. Margot is quiet and withdrawn, grieving the young husband she lost to the war. Despite their differences, the girls become fast friends. When the Tuis are relocated to Italy to set up clubs in grand venues, Addy and Margot are enchanted by the culture. But dark shadows loom, and when their illusion of peace is shattered by news of a devastating attack, the friends will find their endurance pushed to the limit.

On a cold February afternoon, Stella catches sight of a man she hasn't seen for many years, but instantly recognises. Or thinks she does. At the same moment on the other side of the globe, in the middle of a crowd of Chinese New Year revellers, Jake realises that things are becoming dangerous. They know nothing of one another's existence, but both Stella and Jake flee their lives: Jake in search of a place so remote it doesn't appear on any map, and Stella for a destination in Scotland, the significance of which only her sister, Nina, will understand.

After three years away, Brodie McKellon has returned to Warwick to live with her eccentric grandmother above a Dead Letter Office - the place letters go when no one is left to claim them. But with her reputation as a troublemaker, things don't stay quiet for long, and Brodie soon reunites with her childhood best friend, Elliot, and sidekick-turned-nemesis, Levi, to investigate an unsolved mystery: unclaimed letters from a group of friends who seemed to vanish without a trace nearly twenty years ago.

France, 1942. At the end of the day, the schoolteacher releases her pupils. She checks they have their identity passes and warns them not to stop until the German guards have let them through the barrier that separates occupied France from Free France. As the little ones fly across the border and into their mothers' arms, she breathes a sigh of relief. No one is safe now. Not even the children.

On a brisk fall night in a New York apartment, 35-year-old Billie West hears terrified screams. It's her lifelong best friend Cassie Barnwell, one floor above, and she's just realized her infant daughter has gone missing. Billie is shaken as she looks down into her own arms to see the baby, remembering—with a jolt of fear—that she is responsible for the kidnapping that has instantly shattered Cassie’s world.

In the latest book in the widely beloved No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, Precious Ramotswe takes on a case for a childhood acquaintance, but her inquiries will require an even more delicate touch than usual. Mma Ramotswe reconnects with an old friend who has been having problems with her daughter. Though Precious feels compelled to lend a hand, she discovers that getting involved in family affairs is always a delicate proposition.

From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the 20th century to the teens of the 21st, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of 12 characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope....

Mari and Elisabeth have been at the center of each other's lives for years. Close friends since university, they're now drifting through their mid-twenties, working casual jobs and living in run-down share houses. When they meet Jack, a charming academic historian twenty years their senior, they're attracted to the sophisticated, intellectual world in which he seems to move. As the summer gathers heat, Jack is drawn into their lives, and an unconventional relationship—halfway between friendship and love triangle—develops.

At 57, Ruth made a successful sea change: she relocated from the city to the country and opened Rosie's Cafe in the seaside town of Cutlers Bay. Business boomed, but five years on the shine has worn off. Where has that other Ruth gone, the independent, feisty woman who'd had the courage to sell up in the city and move to the country? Even the bathroom mirror is reflecting back someone she doesn't quite recognise: greying hair, wrinkles, the sparkle all but gone from her blue eyes. Ruth is convinced she has to make a change—if only she could decide what.