Showing results by narrator "Anne Dover" in All Categories

The village of Burracombe is looking forward to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, but the year of 1953 is to prove a year of heartbreak as well as celebration. While Stella Simmons begins to plan her wedding, her sister Maddy is only just coming to terms with the loss of her own fiancé; Val and Luke Ferris are wondering if they will ever become parents, and Hilary Napier wonders if love will ever find her. The Tozer family also face anxiety.

1957. Newly-wed Val Walker is looking forward to starting a family. Her best friend, the previously flighty Cissie, is expecting her second child, content to settle down to full-time motherhood. Their mutual friend Janice is engaged to boyfriend Paul. But life doesn't always turn out as one would expect. Val doesn't find it as easy as she'd expected to fall pregnant. Cissie is jealous when her husband, Walter, takes an interest in a new female colleague. Janice feels guilty for leaving her widowed father and young brother behind in Blackpool to start a new life in Yorkshire.

Rose Pritchard and her seven-year-old daughter Maddie have left everything behind to come to the village of Millthwaite, Cumbria, in search of the person who once offered Rose hope. Almost immediately Rose wonders if she's chasing a dream - but she knows in her heart that she cannot go back. She's been given a second chance - at life, and love - but will she have the courage to take it?

The slums of Dublin are a lonely place for Katherine Donovan. Her father is one of the most hated men in the district, notorious for his viciousness. Her one friend is eight-year-old Ceppi, as much an emotional orphan as 18-year-old Katherine. When her father is murdered in the unrest surrounding the docker's strike, Katherine, fearing for her life, flees to Liverpool with her father's money, taking Ceppi with her. She finds a refuge for herself and Ceppi with the Moore family, until the eldest Moore boy's unnatural interest in Ceppi convinces Katherine that they must move on.

Hilary Napier is upset and angry when her father brings in a new manager for the family estate, which she's been running for the past year. Even though she resents his presence, she cannot help liking Travis Kellaway. When her defences are broken down by the illness of her brother's much-loved horse, she realises Travis' strength and compassion. It isn't long before their relationship moves to a new footing.

Seventeen-year-old Maddie has grown up in a boarding house on one of Blackpool's poorest streets. Life is busy, but happy, as she works alongside her mother taking care of their visitors. But when war breaks out, her happiness is shattered as her fiancé is called up to fight for his country, and suddenly Maddie's future is filled with uncertainty.

Britain is at war and Ruth, a gifted pilot, is determined to join the Air Transport Auxiliary. Over in America, Jack and Lucy Nelson, are also keen to join. After a perilous journey by sea, Jack is posted to White Waltham, where he quite literally bumps into Ruth.

When Carrie Chapman signs up to be an ambulance attendant at the outbreak of World War Two, she has little idea of what lies in store. The job is gruelling, yet it will also bring her freedom, and a love affair that gives her more happiness than she has ever known. But on a summer evening, five years after the war, horrific events change Carrie’s life forever.

Hilary Napier has had enough of secrets. The engagement party at the Barton is finally a chance for her and David to celebrate their good news. But the course of true love never did run smooth. At the school, Frances and James are readying the children for the play at the annual Summer Fair and doing their best to ignore their feelings for each other. Will the chaos-causing Crocker twins make it to the dress rehearsal? And, more importantly, will Frances find a way to let herself love again?

Nine hours and eleven minutes... That's how long it's been since Ella Hope was left for dead. She lies, unable to move and praying for somebody to find her, as she counts down the minutes and wonders who could have hated her so much to have hurt her so badly. Was it the man she went on a date with the previous evening, the man linked to the deaths of two other women? Or somebody else, somebody who wants her out of the picture so much they're willing to kill? Whoever it is, they will pay.

Ten years ago, deeply in love, I would have done anything for Thomas Kirkwood. But on the night of our graduation, fuelled by drink and drugs, Thomas’s lifeless body was found floating in the Kirkwood family lake. That weekend changed everything, and I swore I would never return to Kirkwood manor. Now, ten years later, I have been invited back to the place that holds such terrible memories for me, to a memorial weekend for Thomas, organised by his still-grieving mother Ada. But this is no ordinary weekend. This is a reunion to catch a killer.

Whitby 1901. Sarah Brook has kept diaries for most of her life. Now eighty-five and at the end of her own journey, she allows her favourite great-niece Esther to read them. But while full of Sarah's thoughts and dreams, and family stories, the diaries also hold dark family secrets about the past, which are about to be exposed... Whitby 1832. When their mother tragically dies, life changes dramatically for Sarah and her siblings.

Pemberley is Mr Darcy’s splendid house, and it is there that, amidst their relatives one Christmas, his pride and his wife Elizabeth’s prejudice find themselves once again provoked. Told with stylish irony combined with insights into the emotions and mores of eighteenth century English high society, Pemberley is an elegant and diverting social comedy, a novel of genuine originality.

Liverpool, 1938. It’s Christmas in the Courts, and single mother Rosheen Clarke and her mischievous twin daughters, April and May, have no idea of the cataclysmic events which will soon overtake them. When war is declared, April and May are evacuated to the countryside, and Rosheen joins the WAAF, where she befriends fellow Liverpudlian Cassie Valentine. While Rosheen worries about what trouble the twins will cause next, Cassie is fighting her love for her childhood friend, Andy.

Nell Goodman is a good daughter. Her job in the local brewery is the only thing keeping her and her mother afloat. But with her mother becoming increasingly eccentric, Nell is starting to feel the burden of her responsibilities. When Nell goes to George Wilmot, the brewery's owner, for help he offers her a job as a live-in servant. She begins to grow closer to Devlin, George's son, and it looks like Nell's luck is finally changing. An unwelcome discovery and tragedy mean that things suddenly change.

The extraordinary true story of surviving the unimaginable … In 1945, seven-year-old Barbie and her sister Eva were trapped, terrified, in wartorn Germany. With their father missing, and hundreds of miles from their mother, news of the approaching army left them confronted with an impossible choice: to face invasion, or to flee on foot.Eva, aged nineteen, was determined to find her mother.

Back in 1950 Pamela Rhodes became one of the first policewomen in the country. But the force's new female recruits faced a sceptical public in rural Yorkshire and even before they stepped out on the beat there were the prejudices of older male officers to overcome. Yet from the first Pam was thrust into the front line. From runaway bulls to investigating ladies of the night and cases of vice, her innocent eyes were quickly opened.

High above the Mediterranean, on the French Riviera, stands a beautiful pink stucco villa. Once a playground for the rich and glamorous, now—in the aftermath of World War I—it is a convalescent home for sick and wounded nurses. Scottish Flora Garvie is here recovering from four traumatic years on the ambulance trains. And here she will meet again charismatic but troubled Kit Carlyle, a regimental chaplain who no longer believes in his calling and certainly doesn't believe himself worthy of Flora's love.

At the age of 21, Monica Baldwin - the niece of Stanley Baldwin - entered one of the most strictly enclosed contemplative orders of the Roman Catholic Church. At the age of 48, and after struggling with her vocation for many years, she left the convent. But the world Monica had known and forsaken in 1914 was very different from the world into which she emerged at the height of the Second World War.

In 1998, Helga Schneider, in her sixties, was summoned from Italy to the nursing home in Vienna in which her 90-year-old mother lived. The last time she had seen her mother was 27 years earlier, when her mother asked her daughter to try on the SS uniform which she treasures, and tried to give her several items of jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider rejected.