Showing results by narrator "Maggie Mash" in All Categories

Fifteen years ago, a teenage girl was assaulted and raped as she picked flowers for a Midsummer's Eve ritual. Cut to the present, and a man is killed in a hit-and-run. He has no identification on him; he is not reported missing or wanted by the police. At the same time, a priest and his wife are found dead in an apparent suicide.

Beth thought she had been rescued from a life of servitude by an offer of marriage from gentleman farmer Edgar Collins, but her future would be bleaker than she could ever imagine. When the legitimacy of her twin babies with Edgar is called into question, the tiny infants are taken from Beth and sent far away. James is adopted by Edgar's uncle, the very wealthy Lord Redfern, master of Redfern Abbey. But little Daisy is sent to a cold-hearted childless couple who raise her to be a maid rather than a daughter.

Resurrecting buried scandals, audacious hoaxes and private tragedies, Emma Donoghue has written a sequence of short stories about peculiar moments in the history of the British Isles. Here artists mix with poisoners and countesses rub shoulders with cross-dressers, vicars and revolutionaries; the Second Coming is proclaimed in Scotland; and a miniature girl becomes a tiny skeleton in a London museum.

Zannah and Adrian are planning a May wedding. But before that they must endure the one thing that happens before all weddings—the meeting of the families. Will the gathering go smoothly? Will they like each other—the slightly bohemian Gratrixes from Cheshire and the wealthy Ashtons from the Home Counties? The meeting will take place on neutral territory, at a lunch party in the home of Zannah's great-aunt Charlotte in London. A mood of festivity and celebration prevails. Then Adrian's stepfather arrives and Zannah's mother turns frighteningly pale and hurries away from the party.

Bryony and Hannah are sisters, but they couldn't be more different, and war has brought even more of a rift between them. Bryony is happiest at Combe Lodge, the family home, while young, headstrong Hannah has fled to Jersey. At Combe Lodge, everyone else is pitching in with the war effort. The family home fills with evacuees, and Bryony is doing her bit, flying planes at the nearby Combe Lodge Airlines. But Bryony knows that she needs to reach out to Hannah. Only she will be able to keep her flighty younger sister's feet on the ground. But is Bryony too late to help her? Will Hannah ever come home?

Eighty-two-year-old Nettie still hears the occasional gossiping, but most have forgotten what she did. Now, living alone in a run-down farmhouse, she surrounds herself with memories of her late husband and estranged daughter, Catherine. When Catherine's friend James appears out of the blue, Nettie is grateful for the company and keen to learn more about her daughter. But soon James starts asking Nettie questions she doesn't want to answer, about some things she can't remember and others she's tried to forget.

Born into hardship in a Northumbrian mining village, Annie Manon needs all her strength to survive the bleak years following the First World War. As her family fractures around her, she longs to make something of her life. Through hard work and determination Annie eventually leaves the poverty and despair of her childhood behind her. But then war breaks out once more, taking her further away from her dreams and those she loves most. And it is all Annie can do to keep hope alive....

June 1940, and newly qualified teacher Phyllis Saunders is evacuated with her school to Dorset. Here she encounters prejudice and suspicion, but she is determined to make the best of life for herself and the children in her care. All the while her fiancé, submariner Sammy, is facing danger out at sea. On a visit to London, Phyllis gets caught up in the Blitz but manages to escape. Shaken but alive, she returns to the relative peace of the countryside - but soon she is nursing a secret she can tell no-one about.

In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B. S. Johnson was one of the best-known novelists in Britain. House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy is Johnson's most richly characterised, humane and sympathetic work. Eight residents in a home for the elderly sit down to dinner, along with the House Mother herself, and each takes it in turn to relay the proceedings of the evening from their own, individual perspective.

In June 2014, Julia White - a beautiful and intelligent young woman - blows up a coffee shop in central London, killing 24 people before turning herself in to the police. Apart from publishing a potentially ironic manifesto, she refuses to explain the reasons for her actions.... Clare Hardenberg, an investigative journalist, has been commissioned to write a biography of Julia, but at the start of the novel she is on her way to prison herself. What has brought her to this point?

Shortly after a crowded New York-bound flight takes off from Stockholm, a bomb threat is found onboard. Anonymous hijackers demand that the Swedish government revoke its decision to deport a Moroccan man. If their demands are not met, the plane will explode if it attempts to land. The US and Swedish governments must choose between negotiating with terrorists in order to save the 400 passengers held hostage at 30,000 feet or to stand their ground and pursue the deportation of a possibly innocent man.

God was everywhere once. Prayer was part of public life; places of worship marked our landscape. Equality is the new deity now, and much of Europe is already becoming a no-God area. In this short essay, Christina Odone explores whether God is no longer welcome in the West and whether religious followers have been silenced in our newly secular society.

A joyful and hilarious tale of some very spirited septuagenarians as they overcome innumerable obstacles to save their beloved mutt from a heartless exterminator in a land where bureaucracy reigns above all else. Picaresque at its very best. Perhaps you're not a member of the Azov House of Culture Elderly Club. Perhaps you missed the talk on the Cabbage Root Fly last week. Galina Petrovna hasn't missed one since she joined the club, when she officially became old.

Set on the island of Mallorca, The Rocks is a double love story told in reverse. Opening in 2005 with a dramatic event that seems to seal the mystery of two lives, the story moves backwards in time, unravelling over 60 years amid the olive groves and bars, the boats and poolside parties, the lives and relationships of two intertwined families within an expat community of endearing and flawed characters.

The spy novel that anticipated the Snowden revelations. Carina Dymek is on a fast track for promotion at the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when she is approached by a stranger and given a USB stick containing a report to circulate in her department. Unwittingly, she delivers a time bomb of classified information that sends her career up in flames and puts her on the radar of the security service,

When 17-year-old Mary O'Connor collapses one Sunday in church she is taken to live with Dr Roberts and his wife in a beautiful Yorkshire village for her health. Though initially employed as a maid, Mary soon becomes the daughter the couple were never able to have. With Britain at war, unable to remain idle, Mary finds employment in the local steel works but when her fiancé Tom Downing is killed in action Mary is convinced it is retribution for their night of sin during Tom's Christmas leave.

In the early days of the 19th-century, Whitby is a thriving port. Both the Coulson and the Campion families make a living by the sea. Sam Coulson has three sons: Martin, Ben, and Eric. He has grand plans for expanding his whaling business; and as Seaton Campion has no sons, a marriage between Martin and Campion's eldest daughter, Alicia, will aid the fortunes of both families. Ben Coulson, Sam's middle son, has turned his back on whaling to follow other pursuits.

Sophie and Lydia Westlake have always been close, and think of each other as sisters, despite the fact that they are really cousins. Sophie has always been the prettier, more light-hearted younger sister, whilst Lydia has grown up in her shadow, and is more serious and reserved. But until dashing young architect Christian Mellor arrives in town on the day of the annual summer fete, their differences had never mattered.

New Year's Day, 2000. Hunters stumble upon a half-circle of dead bodies lying in the snow near a holiday chalet. The judge and commissaire in charge of the investigation have encountered this suicide sect before. In the chalet they find a leather-bound book. The book of The Faith leads them to the composer, Friedrich Grosz, who is connected to every one of the dead. Surely he must be implicated?

They loved. They lost. They lived. In the small Yorkshire town of Cottenly - dominated by the steel works and surrounded by beautiful countryside - Isaac Stanford lives with his wife Emily and their three lovely daughters, known locally as the Stanford lasses. Alice, the eldest, lives only for her work as a secretary and chapel on Sunday.