Showing results by narrator "Emma Gregory" in All Categories

Beverley Wilson has always loved the Beatles, but kissing a poster goodnight isn’t really an option when you’re a 50-something mum of three. So when she decides it’s time to get back into the dating game, she turns to a dating agency for help. But the long and winding road to real love is littered with dating disasters–the pantyhose pervert being the real low point, and in Bev’s opinion, it’s all too much. But meeting fellow Beatles fan Scott Smith changes everything.

Five years ago Susannah Harper's son, Joel, went missing without trace. Bereft of her son and then of her husband, Susannah has rebuilt her life around helping others. But then, on the last night of Hull Fair, a fortune-teller makes an eerie prediction. She tells her that this Christmas Eve, Joel will finally come back to her. As her carefully constructed life begins to unravel, Susannah is forced to confront the buried truths of her family's past.

The phone rings. What Eva doesn’t realize is that the call will signal the end of what she knows to be true. The end of trusting her family. And the end of everything keeping her safe. The phone call is from a hospital hundreds of miles away. A woman has been admitted with a serious head injury, saying she’s Eva’s older sister. A sister Eva never knew she had. Whose name - Nancy - has never once been mentioned by her parents. It seems impossible. Could the two people who brought Eva up have lied to her for her whole life?

Beth wants to love her new home on a quiet suburban street. She wishes she could make friends with her beautiful neighbour Oksana. She longs for a new group of friends. Welcoming neighbours to visit. Coffee dates and dinner parties. But life here feels so closed. Then Beth runs into Oksana’s garden one day to fetch her runaway dog, and she sees something shocking that makes her wonder who her new neighbours really are. A girl in the window. A pale desperate face. A hastily scribbled sign bearing only two words.

The woman who has it all. Heather has lucked out. She has a beautiful house, a happy marriage to James Jessop, with two sons, Ben and Harry — and she’s just won the lottery. £29 million! The loyal best friend. Natalie has never quite kept up, but she’s finally in a relationship with a new boyfriend, Nick. She’s been best friends with Heather since they were bullied at school. But will her friend’s new fortune change their friendship? A dream come true turns into a paranoid nightmare.

Netochka Nezvanova - a 'Nameless Nobody' - tells the story of a childhood dominated by her stepfather, a failed musician who believes he is an obscured genius. When she is rescued by a high society family, the abuse against Netochka's psyche continues in a more subtle way, condemning her to remain an outsider - a solitary spectator of a glittering society.

This is a story from the Dragon Tales collection.

Twenty-two of Greene's very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise his great novels: innocence and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence. Writer and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li, has arranged the stories into pairs, to be read together in contrast or in harmony – as a duel or a duet.

Whitehall Palace, England, 1539: When Catherine Howard arrives at the court of King Henry VIII to be a maid of honour in the household of the new queen, Anne of Cleves, she has no idea of the fate that awaits her. Catching the king's fancy, she finds herself caught up in her uncle's ambition to get a Howard heir to the throne. Terrified by the ageing king after the fate that befell her cousin, Anne Boleyn, Catherine begins to fear for her life. Pembrokeshire, Wales, 2018: Dr Perdita Rivers receives news of the death of her estranged grandmother, renowned Tudor historian Mary Fitzroy.

“A sharp-witted tragicomedy about money, morality, and a family teetering on the brink. A splendidly funny novel.” —Jenny Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street For readers of Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting and Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street, an irresistibly...

In the summer of 1983, when Helen is 16, the Dover family move in next door. She is infatuated with the bohemian Dovers, especially the petulant and charming Victoria. But the summer ends suddenly one tumultuous evening, and the next day Helen wakes up to discover that the family have simply disappeared. What went wrong that summer's evening? Why does Helen feel like something terrible happened?

Two massacred families, with signs of ritual killings. A nine-year-old-child, abandoned in the snow. As Liverpool holds its breath, DCI Eve Clay hunts a sadistic killer who knows more about her past than she does. Her search will take her deep into the tunnels beneath Liverpool, boarded up and forgotten since World War II. There, deep underground, she will come face to face with true evil for the first time.

The poignant, searching, haunting story of one family’s entanglement with twentieth-century history AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ‘Intensely involving … a fervent meditation on love and loss, with a remarkable cast of characters’ Financial Times ‘Rich, intriguing … Maybe Esther calls...

Having dropped out of university, Harmony returns to the site of the urban commune where she lived as a child, now divided into flats. She rents a room in the hope of uncovering the source of her nightmares about a redheaded woman who haunts the house and her obsession with lost objects from her childhood. As the London riots explode in the streets, the two hot summers converge, blurred by the drugs and sex and cheap wine, and Harmony begins to discover what really happened at Longhope 20 years ago. Can she grow up at last and build her own future?

Here is a collection of four delightful dragon stories by two master writers for children: "The Reluctant Dragon" by Kenneth Grahame and "The Island of the Nine Whirlpools", "The Fiery Dragon", and "The Last Dragon" by Edith Nesbit. Presented with lively music and even the occasional amusing sound effect.

Lisa remembers the first part of the night: an evening in the pub with her best friend. Then nothing. She wakes up, days later. She's in hospital. Her best friend is dead. Lisa holes up in a remote country cottage, plagued by guilt and flashbacks: how did their assailant know them? Why were they attacked? And what really happened that night? With only vague memories of the event, she cuts herself off from friends and family, spending her days wandering the hills with her dog, Riley.

Anna has everything worked out - a successful company, all the comforts she needs and no ties. But when she stumbles across the body of a young girl on a deserted beach in Lithuania, everything changes. Anna is compelled to uncover the story behind the tragedy, despite concern from her partner, Will. Everything points towards sex trafficking, but as she searches, her own deepest secrets start to surface. When Will disappears without a trace, Anna is pulled further into the murky world of organised crime. Time is running out, and there's a killer out there who will stop at nothing.

Grace Hardie has grown up in a sweeping estate on the outskirts of Oxford. But her life has been a far cry from a fairytale. Ailing and asthmatic as a child, she never really found her place - not with her brothers, not with any friends - always on the outside. And when tragedy strikes twice in the same day, Grace’s world, and her place in it, is turned upside down. Ungainly and lonely at 16, could the bloom of first love be the guiding light she needs?

A brother sent away. A sister in a loveless home. A father ruthlessly murdered. Ricky and Leonora Bates are brother and sister, best friends, allies in a loveless family. They are a constant disappointment to their domineering father. He views Ricky’s quiet bookishness as weakness and Leonora’s feisty intelligence as unbecoming. Then Ricky is sent away to a boarding school in South Africa to “toughen him up”. And Leonora is stuck dealing with her dysfunctional parents on her own. The unthinkable happens. Leonora’s father travels to South Africa to bring Ricky home. Disaster strikes.

New Hampshire, 1756: The god-fearing farmers of Sutton are suffering divine punishment for unknown sins. Crops fail, cows die and fish are poisoned by their water. Six pigs, slaughtered in their sty, bear the mark of the devils in their mouths. But to Beatrice Scarlet, the apothecary's daughter, the truth is much more chilling. Somewhere in this idyllic hamlet, a killer is hiding in plain sight. And if Beatrice does not unmask him soon, he'll be coming for her next...