Pretty seventeen-year-old Greta has never known a stable family life. With no father & loathing her mother Ruby's latest boyfriend Greta finds life hard at home & is happiest at work with her friends at the Cadbury factory in Birmingham where she is popular with the boys. Life takes a turn for the worse when her missing vixen of a sister Marleen turns up during the freezing winter of 1962. Greta soon decides that her only way out is marriage but all too soon she discovers that life with her old class mate Trevor is not a ticket to freedom & happiness. She finds herself on the streets pregnant & homeless... She is taken in by her mother's old friends Edie & Anatoli Gruschov. In Anatoli Greta finds the father she has never had. Kindly Edie loves to mother people & is desperately missing her son David & his family who have settled in Israel. But the love & security of this haven is soon shattered by appalling tragedy which affects all the chocolate girls & their children & changes life forever... Continuing the saga begun in Chocolate Girls & set in 1960s Birmingham this is a story of families whose lives are entwined of belonging & loss...and of a young woman's search for transforming love. ...

When Stella Simmons comes to the Devonshire village of Burracombe to start her teaching career she is alone in the world. Orphaned as child & brought up in a childrens home she was separated from her sister Muriel & has never been able to trace her. Stella is soon caught up in the life of the village & especially in the plans for celebrating the Festival of Britain. As headmistress Miss Kemp & vicar Basil Harvey try to keep the peace between villagers who all have their own ideas for the proposed pageant & fair Stella tries with the help of artist Luke Ferris to find her sister. But Luke has his own troubles...THE BELLS OF BURRACOMBE begins the story of life in a Devonshire village in the 1950s & shows us a picture of Britain coming to terms with the aftermath of the Second World War & entering a new decade. ...

In 1930 Bridget O' Brien a young widow with two children fled her brutal & bigoted father & headed for Liverpool & an arranged marriage with a man she had never met. Her destination the famous Scotland Road was noisome & terrifying & a far cry from the clean air & flowing rivers of the only country she had known Irel&. When she met her middle-aged bridegroom Sam Bell whose twin sons were older than she was her sense of isolation only increased. Anthony one of her so-called stepsons also held out the strong hand of friendship but Liam the favourite of his father had the power to terrify her. Liam was cold compelling mysterious & antagonistic. He was also a priest. ...

Bright bookish Oscar Lowe has escaped the urban estate where he was raised & made a new life for himself amid the colleges & spires of Cambridge. He has grown to love the quiet routine of his life as a care assistant at a local nursing home where he has forged a close friendship with the homes most ill-tempered resident Dr. Paulsen. But when he meets & falls in love with Iris Bellwether a beautiful & enigmatic medical student at Kings College Oscar is drawn into her world of scholarship & privilege & soon becomes embroiled in the strange machinations of her brilliant but troubled brother Eden who believes he can adapt the theories of a forgotten Baroque composer to heal people with music. Edens self-belief knows no bounds & as he draws his sister & closed circle of friends into a series of disturbing experiments to prove himself right Oscar realises the extent of the danger facing them all... ...

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Abandoned by her parents Sameem Ali spent six & a half years growing up in a childrens home. When she was told that her family wanted to take her back she couldnt wait to start her new life with them. Instead she returned to a dirty house where she was subjected to endless chores. Her mother began to beat her & her unhappiness drove her to self-harm. So Sameem was excited when she boarded a plane with her mother to visit Pakistan for the first time. It was only after they arrived in her familys village that she realised she wasnt there on holiday. Aged just thirteen Sameem was forced to marry a complete stranger. When pregnant two months later she was made to return to Glasgow where she suffered further abuse from her family. After finding true love Sameem fled the violence at home & escaped to Manchester with her young son. She believed she had put her horrific experiences behind her but was unprepared for the consequences of violating her familys honour.. . Belonging is the shocking true story of Sameems struggle to break free from her past & fight back against her upbringing. ...

Terrible unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home the farm where she lived as a slave for so many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe's new home is not only haunted by the memories of her past but also by the ghost of her baby who died nameless & whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. ...

Arriving at the great houses of 1920s London fifteen-year-old Margarets life in service was about to begin... As a kitchen maid -- the lowest of the low -- she entered an entirely new world; one of stoves to be blacked vegetables to be scrubbed mistresses to be appeased & even bootlaces to be ironed. Work started at 5.30am & went on until after dark. It was a far cry from her childhood on the beaches of Hove where money & food were scarce but warmth & laughter never were. Yet from the gentleman with a penchant for stroking the housemaids curlers to raucous tea-dances with errand boys to the heartbreaking story of Agnes the pregnant under-parlourmaid fired for being seduced by her mistresss nephew Margarets tales of her time in service are told with wit warmth & a sharp eye for the prejudices of her situation. Brilliantly evoking the long-vanished world of masters & servants Below Stairs is the remarkable true story of an indomitable woman who though her position was lowly never stopped aiming high. Enormous gusto salty humour wisdom Evening Standard Shrewd unabashed wickedly funny a unique front-line report of her lifes experiences Jack De Manio BBC ...

This book follows the author through his experiences from the end of his apprenticeship in 1961 with The London Graving Dock Co. on the Isle of Dogs now generally known as Canary Wharf his time in the Merchant Navy as an engineer. Those were the days of what could be considered the last generation of hands-on engineers who maintained the ships engine rooms by the senses of sight sound & feel often with a bit of blood & always plenty of sweat. In those days the working conditions down below would have given todays health & safety brigade apoplexy. However it would be hard to find a ships engineer from those halcyon times that didnt consider his time at sea as the happiest time of his life. ...

Tell Sherry April called." A simple phone message that shakes Joe Picketts oldest daughter Sheridan & the rest of the family to the core. To Joe it doesnt seem even remotely possible that April could have survived the massacre described in Winterkill six years before. He was there & he was unable to save her. But Sheridan starts to believe theres a chance that April is still alive & her suspicions are confirmed when the person sending texts to her cellphone is able to recall family incidents only April could know. Joe however remains wary of the messages. But when the texts start to refer to "bad things " & when Marybeth discovers they come from locations throughout the West where vicious murders have taken place alarm bells go off. Desperate to discover if April is still alive & to save her from possible danger Joe Sheridan & Nate Romanowski take to the road to connect the texts with the crimes. Meanwhile a dying Chicago mobster named Stenko & a much younger girl cross the country. Hes on a mission to reconcile with his extreme environmentalist son before he dies. His son is less interested in reconciliation than in getting his father to repent for the environmental crimes hes committed during his lifetime. He wants his father to become not just carbon neutral but to reduce his carbon footprint to below zero
- as if hed never even existed. As the path of Stenko & his companions starts to cross with Joe Sheridan & Nate the question is raised: Is this young girl April or are the Picketts the victims of a cruel hoax?"
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