Showing results by narrator "Patience Tomlinson" in All Categories

After learning of a suspicious attempt to burn down a beloved old pub, The Crooked Horse, amateur detective Libby Sarjeant and her friend Fran reluctantly agree to investigate. But when a local antiques dealer mysteriously disappears after apparently taking out his boat, it appears there are dark and sinister forces at play. Can Libby and Fran uncover a connection between the fire and the missing man? And will unravelling a deadly case put them in terrible danger?

We know what life was like for Victoria and Albert. But what was it like for a commoner like you or me? How did it feel to cook with coal and wash with tea leaves? Drink beer for breakfast and clean your teeth with cuttlefish? Dress in whalebone and feed opium to the baby? Surviving everyday life came down to the gritty details, the small necessities and tricks of living. Drawing on Ruth's unique firsthand experience gained from living on a Victorian farm for a year, this book will teach you everything you need to know about 19th-century living.

It was odd that Harriet should always have been so fond of curates. They were so immature and always made the same kind of conversation. Now the Archdeacon was altogether different...'Together yet alone, the Misses Bede occupy the central crossroads of parish life. Harriet, plump, elegant and jolly, likes nothing better than to make a fuss of new curates, secure in the knowledge that elderly Italian Count Ricardo Bianco will propose to her yet again this year.

Lady Jane Grey was born into the most dangerous of times. Child of a scheming father and a ruthless mother for whom she was a pawn in a dynastic game with the highest stakes, she lived a life in thrall to political machinations and lethal religious fervour. Growing up with the future Queen Elizabeth and her reluctant nemesis, Mary, she soon learned the truth of the values imparted to her by Henry VIII's last Queen, Katherine Parr.

Former cook Hettie Brown hears some shocking news, making her question her new life at Rookery House. Expectant mother, Gloria Jessop, is having doubts about her new evacuated life in the village. She's missing her family, and she's tempted to return to London. But is that the right thing to do? Hettie and Gloria decide to take action and quickly hatch a plan. Can they support each other, celebrate Christmas, and bring the whole village together in their time of need?

I used to love the rattle and whoosh of my grandma's buttons as they scattered from their Quality Street tin. An inlaid wooden chest the size of a shoe box holds Lynn Knight's button collection. A collection that has been passed down through three generations of women: a chunky '60s-era toggle from a favourite coat, three tiny pearl buttons from her mother's first dress after she was adopted as a baby, a jet button from a time of Victorian mourning. Each button tells a story.

From the summer of 1938, British women from all walks of life joined the Women's Voluntary Services (WVS). This disparate band of women came together for the common good - to help serve and protect their communities. By 1941 a million women had enrolled. These brave and dutiful women played a vital role in Britain's victory. The positive impact of the WVS on wartime society was universally acknowledged. They were instrumental in implementing the large-scale evacuation of children from bomb-targeted cities, in the care of the wounded, and in keeping those in war service fed.

Thea welcomes her best friend, Violet Steele, to Rookery House. Violet has been in charge of an ambulance station in London's East End during the Blitz, and is in need of a holiday. Will a week in the countryside give her the rest she deserves? VAD nurse Evie Jones receives unwelcome news that stirs up her past and forces her to make an uncomfortable decision. Though she has a surprise when her friend Ned Blythe returns to start a new job in the hospital gardens. Can Evie let go of the past and give her future happiness a chance?

Less Than Angels follows the loves, works and hopes of a group of young anthropologists. Catherine Oliphant is a writer and lives with handsome anthropologist Tom Mallow. Their relationship runs into trouble when he begins a romance with student Deirdre Swann, so Catherine turns her attention to the reclusive anthropologist Alaric Lydgate, who has a fondness for wearing African masks. Added to this love triangle are the activities of Deirdre's fellow students and their attempts to win the competition for a research grant.

For Miss Cordell, principal of Persephone College, there are two great evils to be feared: unladylike behaviour among her students and bad publicity for the college. So her prim and cosy world is turned upside down when a secret society of undergraduates meets by the river on a gloomy January afternoon only to find the drowned body of the college bursar floating in her canoe.

When a woman's body is found on the local golf course after an illicit New Year's party, news quickly spreads, and Libby finds herself being tracked down by locals desperate to share information about the victim, Jackie Stapleton. But things are never that simple in Libby's world. Whilst everyone had an opinion on Jackie, it seems nobody really knew much about her. Libby's chum DCI Connell is being more tight-lipped than usual, and even with her friend Fran Wolfe's help, discovering a motive for the killing is frustratingly difficult.

Bea Abbot's domestic agency does not investigate murder...that is, until she finds herself in the company of a dead man dressed as a pantomime dame. It looks like suicide, but why don't his red-spangled shoes fit? Matthew Kent was an entertainer known to be a modest man in private, so why had he staged this grotesque charade in death? And why is his daughter so keen to hustle away his remains?

Bea Abbot and her husband have been running a highly successful domestic agency for many years, but when he falls ill and dies, she is pressured by her MP son and novelist daughter to retire. Bea is so tired from the long years of nursing her husband that all she wants is peace and quiet, and to have her pretty early Victorian house in Kensington, London, all to herself. What she gets is a couple of young lodgers with troubled backgrounds and an old friend banging on her door, asking for help.

Norfolk, 1939. When the residents of Great Plumstead, a small and charming community in Norfolk, offer to open their homes to evacuees from London, they're expecting to care for children. So when a train carrying expectant mothers pulls into the station, the town must come together to accommodate their unexpected new arrivals....

When someone hacks into the systems of eight self-driving cars, their passengers are set on a fatal collision course. The passengers are: a TV star, a pregnant young woman, a disabled war hero, an abused wife fleeing her husband, an illegal immigrant, a husband and wife - and parents of two - who are travelling in separate vehicles and a suicidal man. Now the public have to judge who should survive but are the passengers all that they first seem?

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Virginia Nicholson's Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in the Second World War. A special multi-voice recording featuring five actresses that bring to life the hundreds of personal testimonies, diary entries and books that make up this superb study. Read by Patience Tomlinson, Annie Aldington, Rachel Bavidge, Julie Maisey and Georgina Sutton.

For Eveleen Hardcastle life gets no better than growing up on Pear Tree Farm in the Lincolnshire countryside. Her family works hard for the Dunsmore estate and Eveleen finds it impossible to resist the charms of their employer's son, Stephen Dunsmore. But Jimmy, ever quick to antagonize, ensures that his sister's clandestine trysts do not remain so for long. Mary Hardcastle reacts to the news of her daughter's affair with a shocking ferocity, which seems to be borm more of bitterness than maternal protectiveness.

A S Byatt's fairy tales and fables are among the best-loved features of her fiction. Innumerable listeners have asked for the two marvellous fairy tales in Possession - 'The Glass Coffin' and 'Gode's Tale' of the Breton Naie des Trepasses - to be published separately. Here they take their place with three other stories with medieval and oriental settings.