Portrait of Stella


Susan Wüthrich - 2014
    Jemima Ashton is desperate to discover her real identity. With scant information and the burning question 'who am I?', she embarks on an incredible journey of detection. On learning of her late mother Stella's disappearance during WWII, she retraces her footsteps across the globe and at a distant vineyard, unearths a family she had no idea existed. While treading a path of narrow-minded bigotry, scandalous revelations emerge of two families inextricably linked by one woman and the drastic steps they took to hide the truth. ‘A powerful story of love and loss spanning two generations’ Frances di Plino - author of the Paolo Storey Crime Series

The Empty Nesters


Nina Bell - 2011
    Along with Clover's stylish, powerful friend, Alice, they share holidays, sleepovers, school runs and childcare. They're like one big family. But all families have their secrets. When the children leave home, Clover and Laura's lives and marriages change forever, and the old rules on love and loyalty no longer apply. And when Alice decides she wants what they've got, Clover and Laura have to find out who they really are. Without the children, can their marriages - and friendship - survive?

Philippa Gregory 9 - Books Collection (Virgin Earth, Earthly Joys, Wideacre, The Favoured Child, The Queens Fool, The Boleyn Inheritance,The Other Boleyn Girl,Zelda's Cut, The Constant Princess)


Philippa Gregory
    

Katie's Kitchen


Dee Williams - 1999
    Not only has her closest companion been taken from her, she's also lost the successful restaurant they built up together, as well as the comfortable home they shared with her young son. Now all this has been snatched away, for Edwin has left no will and his lecherous brother Gerald presumes he's inherited Katherine along with the house.With little money but full of determination Katherine escapes Gerald's violent advances and takes lodgings in Rotherhithe, with her cook's sister Milly. Despite its poverty, Docklands London is full of hope and friendship and, in helping her new neighbours through their difficulties, Katherine finally begins to tackle her troubled past. But even as she rebuilds her life around the pie-and-mash shop where she works, a terrible shadow is hanging over the country. And little does anyone know the horrors 1914 will unleash ...

West Of The War


L.J. Martin - 2016
    Captured and paroled, only if he'll head west of the war, he rides the river into the wilds of the new territory of Montana where savages and grizzlies await. He discovers new friends and old enemies...and a woman formerly forbidden to him. Action adventure at it's best from the author of Nemesis, Mr. Pettigrew, the Montana Series, and many more acclaimed westerns and historicals.

The Sun Will Shine Tomorrow


Maureen Reynolds - 2008
    Rosie is having a difficult pregnancy, while Johnny has fallen and fractured his skull on a trip to Orkney with the Home Guard. Meanwhile, Ann Neill is looking forward to meeting Greg again when he gets a much-needed break from his work at Bletchley Park, but she soon realizes that they are drifting apart. When the war finally ends, Danny Ryan does not return, although they think they see him on a cinema newsreel one day...and when Granddad becomes ill they are in crisis once again.

We Were the Mulvaneys


Joyce Carol Oates - 1996
    Ephraim, New York, are a large and fortunate clan, blessed with good looks, abundant charisma, and boundless promise. But over the twenty-five year span of this ambitious novel, the Mulvaneys will slide, almost imperceptibly at first, from the pinnacle of happiness, transformed by the vagaries of fate into a scattered collection of lost and lonely souls.It is the youngest son, Judd, now an adult, who attempts to piece together the fragments of the Mulvaneys' former glory, seeking to uncover and understand the secret violation that occasioned the family's tragic downfall. Each of the Mulvaneys endures some form of exile- physical or spiritual - but in the end they find a way to bridge the chasms that have opened up among them, reuniting in the spirit of love and healing.

Jam Butties and a Pan of Scouse


Maggie Clarke - 2017
    The story covers Maggie Clarke's upbringing in the tenements close to the docks, the River Mersey and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal: an area notorious for having the worst slums in Britain, yet the closest community as well.At the tender age of 11, Maggie Clarke finds herself the matriarch of the family when her Irish mother runs off with another man. Leaving school at 14 to work at a local factory putting sticks into lollies, she is determined to make a better life for herself and her family - before starting her own family with her childhood sweetheart, who she marries at 19 after 'falling in the family way'. She has one night of married life with her husband before he is sent to India with the Navy and is devastated when she never hears from him again, presuming him a casualty of the war that is raging at home and abroad. Another tragedy strikes when Maggie's brother Tommy is also claimed by the war, leaving her father inconsolable, but Maggie knows life has to go on and falls in love with Joseph, an Irish settler who she has 8 children with. But her happiness is short-lived as her first husband suddenly appears out of the blue demanding a divorce, and her new husband drinks away what little money they have, returning in fits of rage that leave Maggie and her children hungry and afraid. Many times she is only able to feed her brood by the kindness of neighbours putting a 'pan of scouse' on the range for her, or feeding her kids jam butties to help out. Maggie's story sweeps across the changing face of Liverpool, from its squalid dock streets, the tenement blocks and cobbled roads to the decline of the docklands, new council housing, the rise of the Mersey beat, the Beatles and the energy and passion of a city that is home to a cast of colourful characters with the resilience to withstand the heartbreak and hardships that only the poorest can know.

The Dressmaker's Daughter


Nancy Carson - 2015
    Love, passion and romance are reserved for daydreams.But then into Lizzie’s quiet world comes two men – one reliable and kind-hearted, the other heartbreakingly handsome. Just as Lizzie’s made her choice, the ominous call of war sounds, and her life changes again.Will Lizzie get her chance at happiness, or has it gone forever?

An Absolute Scandal


Penny Vincenzi - 2007
    Set during the boom-and-bust years of the 1980s, An Absolute Scandal follows the lives of a group of people drawn together by their mutual monetary woes when the great financial institution Lloyd's undergoes a devastating downturn. For Nigel Cowper, this means the destruction of his family business; his wife, Lucinda, is willing to do everything she can to help him—except give up her irresistible lover. The powerful, charismatic banker Simon Beaumont and his wife, a highly successful advertising executive, lose everything they worked so hard to acquire; but the ultimate tragedy is something that neither one could have anticipated. The well-to-do are not the only ones suffering: a self-sufficient widow is suddenly deep in debt; a single mother struggles to maintain a comfortable home for her children; and a schoolmaster and his frustrated wife find that financial problems deepen the cracks in their troubled marriage. As their lives begin a downward spiral, these characters intersect in ways they never saw coming. Written in what has become her signature style of both wit and candor, Penny Vincenzi draws back the curtain and offers an inside view of the greed and social power plays that occur behind the closed doors of upper-crust society . . . where money isn’t everything. Sometimes, it’s the only thing.