Showing results by narrator "Clare Corbett" in All Categories

There are some things you can never leave behind… Kate Forrest is invisible…her husband doesn’t seem to know she’s alive and her two children have become stroppy adolescents. With her fortieth birthday approaching, Kate walks out of her life, and gets on a plane to Italy. With no responsibilities, she soon finds herself caught up in the arms of a man half her age. But eventually Kate will be forced to choose between her past and the future.

In the sweltering summer of 1997, straight-laced, straight-A student Karen met Biba - a bohemian and impossibly glamorous aspiring actress. A few months later, two people were dead and another had been sent to prison. Having stood by Rex as he served his sentence, Karen is now married to him with a daughter, Alice, who runs a vintage clothing company in London. They're a normal family, as long as they don't talk about the past, never mention the name Biba, and ignore Alice's flashes of dark, dangerous fury.

It is 1740 and when Louise Fletcher is offered work as a maid in the bustling port of Harwich she leaps at the chance. Fifteen-year old Luke is in a Harwich tavern when it is raided by His Majesty's Navy and he is press ganged and sent to sea on board the warship Essex. The worlds they find are more dangerous and more exciting than they could ever have imagined…

Elise loves the farm that is her home; she loves playing with beetles and chameleons in the garden, buying sweets from the village shop and listening to the stories of spirits and charms told by her nanny, Beauty. As a young white girl in 1990s Zimbabwe, her life is idyllic. Her clothes are always clean and ironed, there is always tea in the silver teapot, gin and tonics are served on the veranda, and, in theory at least, black and white live in harmony.

Rebecca is a wife, mother and the author of an unmanageable number of to do lists. Her attempts to coerce her life into something she has any hope of controlling are failing. Her family can’t manage without her but she’s starting to think they should. So she makes a decision. Only it doesn’t quite go to plan. Rebecca finds herself in therapy with a doctor poking around in her brain, asking questions about her childhood. She wants to get better but that means telling someone how she feels. How she really feels. She’s gone to pieces. Can she put herself back together?

'The girl knows', he whispered.... Four-year-old Sami is deeply traumatised, and it's up to psychologist Dr. Jessie Flynn to unlock his terrifying memories. She needs to find out who 'the girl' is - but nothing can prepare her for the truth about what haunts him. Meanwhile, Jessie's former patient, Captain Ben Callan, is investigating the suspicious death of an officer in Afghanistan - the problem is the only suspect refuses to talk.

London, 1905: The city is alight with change, and the Stephen siblings are at the forefront. Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby, and Adrian are leaving behind their childhood home and taking a house in the leafy heart of avant-garde Bloomsbury. There they bring together a glittering circle of bright, outrageous artistic friends who will grow into legend and come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. And at the center of this charmed circle are the devoted, gifted sisters: Vanessa, the painter, and Virginia, the writer.

You love your family. They make you feel safe. You trust them. But should you? When 15-year-old Billy Wilkinson goes missing in the middle of the night, his mother, Claire, blames herself. She's not the only one. There isn't a single member of Billy's family who doesn't feel guilty. But the Wilkinsons are so used to keeping secrets from one another that it isn't until six months later, after an appeal for information goes horribly wrong, that the truth begins to surface.

A Bev Morriss crime novel. A good police officer doesn't get emotional, but some cases just make you want to cry.... Taken off a high-profile rape investigation to lead the hunt for a missing baby, Detective Sergeant Bev Morriss is torn professionally and personally. When the baby-snatching turns into something more sinister, it forces Bev to face uncomfortable feelings of her own, and when she takes her eye off the ball for a split second, she finds herself in serious trouble.

In 1875, Sisi, the Empress of Austria is the woman that every man desires and every woman envies. Beautiful, athletic, and intelligent, Sisi has everything - except happiness. Bored with the stultifying etiquette of the Hapsburg Court and her dutiful but unexciting husband, Franz Joseph, Sisi comes to England to hunt. She comes looking for excitement and she finds it in the dashing form of Captain Bay Middleton, the only man in Europe who can outride her.

Frances is a 30-something sub-editor, an invisible production drone on the books pages of the Questioner. Her routine and colourless existence is disrupted one winter evening when she happens upon the aftermath of a car crash and hears the last words of the driver, Alys Kyte. When Alys's family makes contact in an attempt to find closure, Frances is given a tantalising glimpse of a very different world: one of privilege and possibility.

Some love stories never end. Sophie Brady is funny, beautiful, a force of nature. One January evening she kisses her adored husband and young son goodbye, closes the door of number 33. At 10 PM she's with her best friend Jenny in Soho, polishing off a second bottle of wine. By midnight, she's dead. Except she doesn't feel dead. And she isn't going anywhere until she helps Ollie find love again.

It's 1960 in Birmingham and Lella Florence is looking for women to help with trials of the contraceptive pill. Married women in a certain age and weight bracket are required.Three very different women decide to take part. Ditsy June's fed up with being under the influence of her overbearing in-laws and would rather save up for a new bathroom than for another baby. Glamorous Jeanette wants to avoid another agonising labour and to keep her wealthy husband happy. And Isobel has her own secret reasons for signing up. All three women couldn't guess the ways their lives will be changed....

France 1670. Carlo Demirco's mastery of the extraordinary new art of creating ice creams has brought him wealth, women, and a position at the court of Louis XIV. Then Carlo is sent to London, along with Louise de Keroualle, an impoverished lady-in-waiting. The most powerful ministers of two countries have decided that Louise is to be Charles II's new mistress and Carlo must decide where his loyalties lie..?

There’s something in my neighbour’s attic. Something steeped in shadows. A secret to everyone. Seen by no one… He stands sometimes at the window. Hidden in the corner of my eye. I know he’s there. I know he’s watching. Now my son is dead. My neighbour is not. And I’m going to find out why.

Austria, 1938. Anne von Korvacs watches in horror as Hitler's tanks roll through the streets of Vienna, amid crowds of cheering supporters. Her embittered ex-husband, now a fervent member of the Nazi cause, is among the cavalcade - he is burning with hatred for Anne, seeing her as a symbol of the old Austrian empire he once served. A chance encounter with a British journalist leaves Anne with a secret that must be smuggled out of the country, and Anne knows that she must forsake her beloved Vienna and with her children flee to Britain.

In the spring of 1938 Elise Landau arrives at Tyneford, the great house on the bay. A bright young thing from Vienna forced to become a parlourmaid, she knows nothing about England except that she won't like it. As servants polish silver and serve drinks on the lawn, Elise wears her mother's pearls beneath her uniform and causes outrage by dancing with a boy called Kit. But war is coming, and the world is changing. And Elise must change with it. At Tyneford she learns that you can be more than one person. And that you can love more than once.

You can control want, but desire controls you. When literary writer Anna falls on hard times, she tries her hand at erotic fiction to make money, and faces an uncomfortable truth. Though she's a wife and mother of two, her stories fail to fly because she's never experienced true sexual desire. Even her Sicilian grandmother - wearer of diamante sunglasses and knock-off Louis Vuitton - knows more than she does about real passion. Anna turns to her friends for inspiration. As secrets and desires are revealed, she discovers more about the people close to her than she ever knew.

Often compared to Catherine the Great or Elizabeth I, Caroline of Ansbach is the great queen Britain forgot it had - a thinker, politician, schemer, patroness and matriarch. This book offers a remarkable portrait of a woman of great political astuteness and ambition, a radical icon of female power. The intellectual superior of her husband, George II, Caroline is credited with bringing the Enlightenment to Britain through her sponsorship of red-hot debates about science, religion, philosophy and the nature of the universe.

The laugh-out-loud funny girl series returns - and Nat is more embarrassed than ever! From TV and radio comedy writing talent Nigel Smith. Nat's class is going on a weeklong field trip to hunt for fossils. Cue mouldy log cabins, potholing, map reading and other totally boring geography-related stuff - all the things that Nat hates...and Dad loves! Of course he volunteers to come along with the class as a parent helper.