Showing results by narrator "Karen Cass" in All Categories

Lucy has her rigid middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George. Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse.

This Is Not a Diet Book is a collection of calm, practical tips and ideas on healthier, happier eating from award-winning food writer Bee Wilson. From unsweetening your palate to rethinking the lunchtime sandwich, This Is Not A Diet Book gathers together some of the wisest, most constructive advice for feeding you and your family.

It was clearly no accidental drowning. When a young immigrant girl is found in the watery depths of Holbaek Fjord, a piece of concrete tied around her waist and two mysterious circular patches on the back of her neck, Detective Louise Rick is called to investigate. The girl's name was Samra, and Louise soon learns that her short life was a sad story. Abused by her father, it becomes clear that he would be capable of killing Samra if she brought dishonour to the family. But according to her family, she has done nothing to inspire this sort of violence.

The lie was just the beginning... Marion Anderton lives the perfect life. She has a beautiful home, a handsome and loving husband, and an intelligent and caring son. But as easily as perfect lives are built, they can also be demolished. When tragedy strikes at the heart of her family, Marion finds herself in the middle of a nightmare, with no sign of waking-up. The life she treasured is disintegrating before her very eyes, but it's just the beginning of something much worse and altogether more deadly…

Last night my sister was murdered. The police think I killed her. I was there. I watched the knife go in. I saw the man who did it. And heard him laugh when he said he'd never be caught. Because he knows I have prosopagnosia - I can't recognise faces. And if I don't find the man who killed my sister, I'll be found guilty of murder.

December 1838. A storm is raging outside Kenilworth Hall. Inside, Lord Kenilworth's wife is in agony in the middle of a difficult labour. Lady Kenilworth doesn't survive the birth, but, against all odds, her baby daughter does. Baby Storm grows into a headstrong and adventurous child, close to her sister, Eloise, and their neighbours at Chislestone Manor - her best friend, Cissy, and Cissy's handsome older brother, Hunter, who has promised to marry Storm when she's older.

Celeste is mourning the tragic death of her young son, Jack, who died from leukaemia. So when she learns that her nephew is coming to stay, she doesn't think she can bear to have another child in the house. But when Bruno arrives, she has no choice but to make him feel welcome and loved, even though her heart is breaking. And when he starts to show some insight into what Jack was like, Celeste dares to dream there might be something more than meets the eye....

When Noel Bostock - aged 10, no family - is evacuated from London to escape the Nazi bombardment, he lands in a suburb northwest of the city with Vera Sedge - a 36-year-old widow drowning in debts and dependents. Always desperate for money, she's unscrupulous about how she gets it. Noel's mourning his godmother, Mattie, a former suffragette. Wise beyond his years, raised with a disdain for authority and an eclectic attitude toward education, he has little in common with other children and even less with the impulsive Vee.

Annie Carter should have demanded to see their bodies lying on a slab in the morgue, but she really believed the Delaney twins were gone from her life for good.Now sinister things are happening around her and Annie Carter is led to one terrifying conclusion: her bitter enemies, the Delaney twins, didn't die all those years ago. They're back and they want her, and her family, dead.This isn't the first time someone has made an attempt on her life,yet she's determined to make it the last. Nobody threatens Annie Carter and lives to tell the tale . . .

Flora Thompson was born in 1876 at Juniper Hill on the Oxfordshire/Northamptonshire border. She is best known as the author of Lark Rise to Candleford, that classic and evocative observation of her rural childhood which has been a best-seller since its publication in 1945. That story ends with her leaving her native Oxfordshire in 1897 for pastures new. In Heatherley she picks up the story again when she takes her first permanent post in Grayshott, a village on the Hampshire/Surrey border.

In the quaint seaside town of Newbay, a beginner's cookery course is starting. And three very different students have signed up.... Liz, determined to find love, has heard the old adage that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. John is newly widowed after 57 years of marriage, facing a lifetime of cheese on toast. Twenty-two-year-old DeeDee has been drifting from one dead-end job to another. The only thing they have in common: between them, they can barely boil an egg!

It deeply irritated Leonora that she was always being caught in awkward situations with the village's new doctor, James Galbraith - especially since she was engaged to Tony. But James proved a sturdy support as she did her best to keep her parents' decrepit but much loved manor house running smoothly. There was little point in admitting her growing feelings for James, since he showed so little sign of caring for her....

Fifteen seventy-four, Devon. With Hugo and Maria finally wed and a strong line of Kendal heirs on their way, the Heron family have reached a prosperous point in their history. But when a deadly plague breaks out, their happy existence is threatened, and disaster creeps into the household when Alan Kendal’s wife, Harriet, is taken ill. With the Kendal heir now both wifeless and childless, Hugo and Maria insist upon arranging a new match. The beautiful Eloise sweeps into the family as the bride-to-be and immediately causes a stir.

Moments after she is born, tiny kitten Tallulah, with her bright eyes and silver and white fur edged with gold, is whisked away from her father Solomon and dumped in the hedge like rubbish. After a tough start to life, neglected and abandoned, Tallulah eventually finds a new home with the Lee family and forms a special bond with their daughter Tammy. But Tammy has a terrible secret and Tallulah must do all in her power to keep the family safe.

Genevieve has finally escaped the stressful demands of her sales job and achieved her dream: to leave London behind and start a new life aboard a houseboat in Kent. But on the night of her boat-warming party the dream is shattered when a body washes up beside the boat, and she recognises the victim. As the sanctuary of the boatyard is threatened, and her life is increasingly at risk, the story of how Genevieve came to be so out of her depth unfolds, and she learns the real cost of mixing business with pleasure.

Sophie is a girl about town - living the party lifestyle with Daddy footing the bill. But when she gets embroiled in a scandalous affair, she is thrown out of home and left to fend for herself on the mean streets of London. Scraping a living as a cleaner in a photographic studio, living in a bedsit on the Old Kent Road, eating baked beans from the can - this is one spectacular fall from grace. On top of that, she is papped by photographers every time she leaves the flat, with her so-called friends laughing at her downfall.

Danish journalist Heloise Kaldan is in the middle of a nightmare when she receives the first in a series of cryptic letters from a woman named Anna Kiel. Wanted in connection with the fatal stabbing of a young lawyer three years earlier, Anna hasn't been seen since. The police think she's fled the country, until the reporter who originally wrote about the case is found murdered. Has Anna Kiel struck again, or is there more than one killer at large? And why does every clue point directly to Heloise Kaldan?

Amory Ames is travelling to New York, excited to be a bridesmaid at her childhood friend Tabitha’s wedding, but with Prohibition in full swing, her husband, Milo, is less than enthused. When a member of the wedding party is found murdered on the front steps of the bride’s home, the happy plans take a darker twist.

The story of Emma and Carl Jung's highly unconventional marriage, their relationship with Freud and their part in the early years of psychoanalysis. Emma Jung was clever, ambitious and immensely wealthy, one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland when, aged 17, she met and fell in love with Carl Jung, a handsome, penniless medical student. Determined to share his adventurous life and to continue her own studies, she was too young to understand Carl's complex personality or conceive the dramas that lay ahead.

Are we living in an age where we are more boredom-prone? Or are other people boring us? Or could we be those boring people? In our current information age, we are constantly connected to technology and have so many varied ways to spend our leisure time that we should all surely never know what boredom feels like. Yet boredom appears to be on the rise; it seems that the more we have to stimulate us, the more stimulation we crave.