Showing results by narrator "Jilly Bond" in All Categories

Born in 1921, Pippa Latour was a covert special operations agent who parachuted into a field in Nazi-occupied Normandy. Trained by the British as a Special Operations Executive, Pippa was lauded for her fluency with languages and her coding ability—both attributes she put to remarkable use as she posed as a teenage soap seller, often selling soap to the German soldiers, and sending back information via code to the UK.

Lulu loves animals. When Lulu's next door neighbour doesn't seem to be looking after his rabbit properly, Lulu and her cousin Mellie devise a scheme to make him pay more attention to his pet.

When Juno Browne returns to the picturesque Dartmoor town of Ashburton after a brief holiday, she’s relieved to find that no one has been murdered while she was away. Though uncharitable friends suggest the quiet was simply due to her absence. Just as she’s settling back into her routine at the antiques shop and as domestic helper and dog walker, the brutal killing of local journalist Sandy Thomas shocks the town.

A pair of silver Regency candlesticks. Pieces of well-worn family jewelry. More than a thousand documents, letters, and photographs. Lotte Meyerhoff's best friends risked their lives in Nazi Germany to safeguard these and other treasured heirlooms and mementos from her family and return them to her after the war. The Holocaust had left Lotte the lone survivor of her family, and these precious objects gave her back a crucial piece of her past. Four Girls from Berlin vividly recreates that past and tells the story of Lotte and her courageous non-Jewish friends.

Merry lives a simple life. For work, she writes cryptic crossword puzzles. For pleasure, she swims in the icy cold sea. And in between she keeps a careful eye on her neighbour, Lucas Manning, the son of her late best friend Julia. One day Lucas's wife reports him missing. Merry has known Lucas his whole life; he would never walk out like this. Bad things have always hovered around the Manning family. Lucas's abusive criminal father disappeared decades ago, and his brother Sean is in jail. But Lucas is different. A good man. He was the one who turned Sean in to the police, after all.

Seduced, abandoned and pregnant, Arabella Shelley is determined her baby’s father will support them. Horrified to discover his death, she is shocked at the demand of his brother, the handsome, inscrutable Viscount Hadleigh. To legitimize her unborn child, she must marry him instead! As Bella struggles with her unfamiliar, luxurious new lifestyle, and her scandalous desire for her stranger-husband, will she find a love that matches the passion of their marriage bed?

Anton Pallis is livid! As the adopted son of the Kanellis patriarch, he's set to inherit the vast family fortune. Until it's revealed there's a true heir - in the rather appealing shape of Zoe Ellis. Zoe's Greek heritage means nothing to her - and to be involved with the Kanellis dynasty is to be cursed with scandal! Except now, it's pounding on her front door - or rather, Anton is, in all his dark, chiseled glory. And she has no idea what he's going to do next....

Love is not a singular concept. In this collection, seven award-winning authors explore seven concepts of love: from philautia (self-love) to agape (love for humanity) and from storge (a natural affection for family) to mania (a frenzied, obsessive love).

The Tree of Heaven follows the fortunes of the Harrison family as the children grow up in the shadow of the First World War and Dorothy's brothers go off to the trenches, while she becomes involved with the suffrage movement, and later joins a version of the Women's Social and Political Union.

Victoria and Albert have been destined for one another since birth. However, the passive Albert is well aware that marriage to a quick-tempered, demonstrative woman like Victoria could result in unnecessary scenes and stormy court feuds. And he is right. The young queen, as well as having to endure her constant pregnancies, is in perpetual revolt against anyone encroaching on her position – and Albert is doing just that. Despite attempts on her life and political crises

Dutiful daughter Arabella Shelley is bitterly unhappy at home with her tyrannical father. Both her sisters have run away and the future looks bleak until handsome Rafe Calne, Viscount Hadleigh, sweeps her off her feet. A few weeks, later pregnant and abandoned, Bella sets out to force Viscount Hadleigh to do the right thing. And he does - the problem is, it isn’t the viscount she had been expecting…

For almost fifty years, sisters Dolly and Greta have lived together—getting each other through the good times and the bad. Except this year, Greta isn’t there and Dolly is feeling lost and alone. In memory of her sister, Dolly heads to the lost luggage auction where she and Greta go each Christmas. But her bid reveals a gift she never imagined. Amongst the clothes is the notebook of a reclusive woman who has hardly been outside for an entire year, but who isn’t ready to give up on life.

This collection includes a selection of 21 royal stories starring the Little Princess - a character who has many exciting adventures as she explores her independence. Full of familiar situations including: 'I Don't Want to Go to Bed', 'I Want My Dummy' and 'I Want My Mum' - the books are perfect for little princesses and princes aged three and over.

Albert is dead and the queen is preparing to spend the rest of her life in mourning. Yet the last years of her reign are to be momentous ones. Palmerston, then Gladstone and Disraeli, govern her empire through the high noon of its heyday. However, the court at Windsor, Balmoral, Osborne at Buckingham Palace is perpetually shocked by the actions of the queen’s son, the Prince of Wales. Forever in pursuit of horses, women and scandal, this is the heady harbinger of Edwardian years to come.

Brought to you by Penguin. The First Rule is the most important: 'Always run, never fight'. Over 100 generations, Mia's family has shaped Earth's history to push humanity to the stars, making brutal, wrenching choices along the way. And now Mia finds herself about to help launch the first people...

In a remote, crumbling house in the Fens live four sisters - Agatha, Milly, and Ellen and Esther - identical twins so closely linked as to be almost one person. They have lived there all their lives, trapped still by the fear of their dead father, who governs his daughters' lives from beyond the grave. And then there is George, another inhabitant, imprisoned in the cellar. Little by little, macabre events come to light: events that transform an idyllic country childhood into a world of eccentric isolation.

A young widow in search of a new life, Meg happens upon the unconscious Major Brandon on the Bordeaux docks. Posing as his wife, she helps him aboard a ship for England. With some convincing, the major agrees to take her on as his housekeeper - and possibly much more.

It's 1940, Guernsey. Vivienne de la Mare waits nervously for the bombs to drop. Instead comes quiet surrender and insidious occupation. Her husband is fighting on the frontline, and her new life is one where the enemy lives next door. Small acts of kindness from one Nazi soldier feel like a betrayal. But how can you hate your enemy when you know his name, when he makes you feel alive, when everything else is dying around you?

On the morning of 20 June 1837, an 18-year-old girl is called from her bed to be told that she is Queen of England. The young queen’s first few years are beset with court scandal and malicious gossip: There is the unsavoury Flora Hastings affair, a source of extreme embarrassment to the queen; the eternal conflict between Victoria and her mother; and the young queen’s hatred for Sir John Conroy, her mother’s close friend. Then there is the Prime Minster, Lord Melbourne - "Lord M" - worldly cynic and constant companion to the queen, himself a veteran of many a latter-day scandal.

When her mother telephones from France with news of her imminent arrest, Ella along with her aunt and an eccentric friend rush to her aid. But what starts as a simple disappearance quickly turns to murder and Ella finds herself embroiled in a mystery which is far more complex than she'd anticipated.