Showing results by narrator "Anna Burnett" in All Categories

Sophia, Tirzah, and Polly are best friends from boarding school who are living very different lives since leaving. The year is 1896, and Polly is teaching in an orphanage in northern England, Sophia is looking for a rich husband at the dances and parties of the London Season, and Tirzah is stuck acting as an unpaid companion to her forbidding grandmother in a remote part of Scotland. In a series of letters buzzing with the drama of being out in the world, the young women air their hopes, frustrations, and romances.

Falling in love wasn't on Emma's agenda for her year abroad at Dunbridge Academy, the boarding school where her parents once met. Here she wants to find out where her father disappeared to when he left their family all those years ago. She has no time for distractions. But when she meets fellow student Henry, Emma knows she's in trouble. During secret midnight parties and moonlit walks through the old school buildings, feelings grow between them, and Emma feels powerless to resist. But Henry has a girlfriend and Emma doesn't want her heart broken....

In the land of Tsaretsvo, civil war has divided the human Tsardom from the Republic of Birds. Magic is outlawed, and young witches are sent to a mysterious boarding school from which no one returns. Olga and her family live a life of dull privilege in the capital until her father displeases the tyrannical tsarina. The family is sent off into exile at the Imperial Center for Avian Observation, an isolated shack near the Republic of Birds.

A young woman wakes after a house party with scratches and bruises - and a gap in her memory. As the violent truth comes back to her - a series of events she struggles to name - her anger grows. Solace comes in the form of enigmatic, captivating Helene, who knows what the man at the party did, has suffered at his hands too. An act of violence demands one in return and Helene is planning revenge. But who can afford to ask for justice, when the cost is murderously high?

In a world where violence—of the market, of climate change, of capitalism—is part of our everyday lives, Which as You Know Means Violence focuses on those who enact violence on themselves, or for art and entertainment, and analyzes the role that violence plays in 21st century culture.

Spring 1937: Teresa, a young Basque girl, is evacuated to London in the wake of the Guernica bombing. She thinks she has reached safety in the lofty halls of Rochester Place and the soothing arms of Mary Davidson, but trouble seeks her out wherever she goes. Autumn 2020: Corrine, an emergency services operator, receives a call from a distressed woman called Mary. But when the ambulance arrives at Rochester Place—the address the woman gave them—she is nowhere to be found.

1816. Mary, 18 years old, is staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with her lover Percy Shelley. She is tormented by his infidelities, haunted by the loss of her baby daughter. Then one evening with friends, as storms rage outside and laudanum stirs their imaginations, Lord Byron challenges everyone to write a ghost story, and something fierce and wild awakens in Mary. Memories surface of the long, strange summer she once spent with a family in Scotland, where she found herself falling in love with the enigmatic Isabella Baxter. She learned tales of mythical beasts, witches and spirits.

Marine biologist Hana Ishikawa is racing against time to save the coral of the Great Barrier Reef, but struggles to fight for a future in a world where so much has already been lost. Seventeen-year-old Judith Holliman escapes the monotony of Sydney Town during the nineteenth century, when her naval captain father lets her accompany him on a voyage. Telma Velasco is hunting for a miracle in a world ravaged by global heating: a leafy seadragon, long believed extinct, has been sighted. But as Telma investigates, she finds hope in unexpected places.

Bristol, 1896. Used to scraping a living as the young assistant to an ageing con artist, Cecily Marsden's life is turned upside down when her master suddenly dies. Believing herself to blame, could young Cec somehow have powers she little understands? Meanwhile Eadie Carleton, a pioneering early film-maker, struggles for her talent to be taken seriously in a male-dominated world, and a brilliant young magician, George Perris, begins to see the potential in moving pictures.

On the tiny island of Rokesby, Addie helps her mother run a women's retreat. On the neighbouring island, joined to Rokesby by a bridge at low tide, Sol has sought refuge at a wind-swept prayer house, grieving both his mother’s death and his father’s devastating betrayal. Alone and anxious, he takes comfort in birdwatching, books and the sounds of the sea. Introverts with turbulent pasts and wary hearts, Sol and Addie are both drawn to nature far more than to people – until they catch sight of one another in the wild.

Beautiful young Janie White, leaving her past behind and taking the first steps into adulthood. World-famous rockstar, Robbie Manning, who harbours a shocking secret. Witness support officer Vanessa, recently widowed and desperate to right the wrongs of her past. Three people brought together by a terrible tragedy that leaves a town shaken and lives changed forever.