Showing results by narrator "Anna Bentinck" in All Categories

This sharp, funny collection of stories begins in the 1950s in an insular northern village 'scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.' The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In Third Floor Rising' she watches, dazzled, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity. With a deceptively light touch, Mantel locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood.

Wiltshire, 1922. Fifteen-year old Pudding Cartwright has begun the career she always wanted, as 'girl groom' to the Hadleigh family's horses at Manor Farm. Irene Hadleigh is struggling to adjust to her new life in sleepy Slaughterford, having married Alistair to escape a scandal in London. At a loss to occupy herself, Irene sets about restyling Manor Farm, and during the work the chance finding of a strange object hidden away in the house for years will change everything.

Summer, 1981: The body of Kate Rokesmith is found by the River Thames in London. Her four-year-old son is wandering nearby, traumatised and mute. Detective Inspector Darnell cancels yet another trip he had promised his daughter Stella and heads for the scene of the crime. The murder is never solved. Winter, 2011: It's another busy day at the Clean Slate office. Owner and head cleaner Stella Darnell is annoyed to have her routine interrupted by the news that her father has died of a heart attack.

On 7 November 1974, a nanny named Sandra Rivett was bludgeoned to death in a Belgravia basement. A second woman, Veronica, Countess of Lucan, was also attacked. The man named in court as perpetrator of these crimes, Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, disappeared in the early hours of the following morning. The case, solved in the eyes of the law, has retained its fascination ever since.

The summer of 1976 was the hottest in living memory. In the Botanical Gardens at Kew, a lost little girl, dizzied by the heat, thought she saw a woman lying dead on the ground. But when she opened her eyes, the woman had gone. Forty years later, Stella Darnell, the detective's daughter, is investigating a chilling new case. What she uncovers will draw her into the obsessive world of botany and towards an unsolved murder that has lain dormant for decades....

Freda has never shared her history with anyone before. But now she’s ready to tell the story that has haunted her for forty years – about a 15-year-old girl falling madly in love with her teacher.   

Hardy's third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, follows the story of Elfride Swancourt. The daughter of the rector of Endelstow, a sparse, sea-swept parish in Cornwall, Elfride is caught between two suitors of very different backgrounds: Stephen Smith, a young architect restoring the old parish church; and the respectable, older man of London society, Henry Knight. The blue-eyed and high-spirited protagonist must untangle the conflicting messages of her heart and her mind.

A milestone in the history of the novel, Samuel Richardson's epistolary and elaborate Clarissa follows the life of a chaste young woman desperate to protect her virtue. The recording is divided into three volumes.

One cold January day the police are called to a sleepy little hamlet in the north of Sweden where they discover a savagely murdered man lying in the snow. As they begin their investigation they notice that the village seems eerily quiet and deserted. Going from house to house, looking for...

Subtitled 'A Story of To-day', A Laodicean occupies a unique place in the Thomas Hardy canon. Departing from pre-industrial Wessex, Hardy brings his themes of social constraint, fate, chance and miscommunication to the very modern world of the 1880s - complete with falsified telegraphs, fake photographs, and perilous train tracks. The story follows the life of Paula Power, heiress of her late father's railroad fortune and the new owner of the medieval Castle Stancy. With the castle in need of restoration, Paula employs architect George Somerset, who soon falls in love with her.

Elinor Bascombe, widowed and tied to an impoverished estate, has learned to ask little of life. Lord Ryde, exiled abroad after a scandal, has returned to strip his estate and make a new start in America. A chance encounter changes their plans, plunging Elinor and Lord Ryde into adventure and not a little peril until, finally, they are forced to confront the mystery of what happened on That Night, all those years ago. Are they both so entangled in the riddles of the past that they are about to miss this one last opportunity for future happiness?

On a sharp winter's morning, a man turns his back on prison. This is the story of Joseph, who killed his wife, Zoe. Of their three children who witnessed the event. Of Zoe's parents, Hannah and Frederick, who are bringing up the children and can't forgive or understand Joseph. They slowly adjust to life without Zoe, until the day Joseph is released from prison...

The Orient Express. Luxury. Mystery. Romance. For one group of passengers settling in to their seats and taking their first sips of champagne, the journey from London to Venice is more than the trip of a lifetime. A mysterious errand; a promise made to a dying friend; an unexpected proposal; a...

When Charlotte is mugged and breaks her hip, her daughter, Rose, cannot accompany her employer, Lord Peters, to Manchester, which means his niece, Marion, has to go instead, which means she sends a text to her lover which is intercepted by his wife, which is…just the beginning of the ensuing chain of life-altering events.

In this engaging, utterly absorbing and brilliantly told novel, Penelope Lively shows us how one random event can change the courses of many lives.

Marigold Green calls herself ‘hideous, quaint and barmy’. Other people call her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill’s daughter. Growing up in a boys’ school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence.

From the No.1 bestselling author of The American Boy and The Ashes of London comes a collection of three gothic novellas – Broken Voices, The Leper House and The Scratch – perfect for fans of The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley. Three dark tales to read by the fireside in the cold winter...

'Wonderful . . . all killer, no filler' Red Magazine 'Dazzling stories, as inventive as they are inspiring' Daily Mirror 'Where power and feminist rage meet' Stylist ______________________________ A fun and fearless anthology of feminist tales, by fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers...

BTB at her superb best. A sweeping saga set around the aristocratic Ingham family of Cavendon Hall and the Swanns who serve them, set on the eve of World War I. Two entwined families: the aristocratic Inghams and the Swanns who serve them. One stately home: Cavendon Hall, a grand imposing house nestled in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales. A society beauty: Lady Daphne Ingham is the most beautiful of the Earl's daugthers. Being presented at Court and then a glittering marriage is her destiny. 

Set against the rolling backdrop of a century of British history from the First World War to today, this is a family portrait captured in snapshots. First there is William, the factory lad who loses his life in Gallipoli. Then there is his son Billy, a champion cyclist who faces the D-Day Landings on a military bicycle, followed by his crippled son Will, who becomes an Oxford academic in the 1960s. Finally there is his daughter Billie, an artist in contemporary London.

After the untimely death of their parents, Cytheria and Owen Graye must go out into the world and fend for themselves. Cytheria's journey leads her to the dark and mysterious household of Miss Aldclyffe, a capricious and eccentric woman, who steers Cytheria into a love affair with her charismatic steward, Aeneous Manston. All is not what it seems, and Cytheria finds herself entangled in a violent web of lust, murder, deception, and blackmail.