Showing results by narrator "Louise Brealey" in All Categories

It is 1685, England is on the brink of a renewed civil war against the Stuart kings and many families are bitterly divided. Ned Ferryman cannot persuade his sister Alinor that he is right to return from America with his Pokanoket servant Rowan to join the rebel army. Instead, Alinor has been coaxed by the manipulative Livia to save the queen from the coming siege. The rewards are life-changing: the family could return to their beloved Tidelands, and Alinor could rule where she was once lower than a servant.

When two police officers knock on Laura's door, her life changes forever. Her nine-year-old daughter, Betty, has been killed in a hit-and-run car accident. When the death is ruled an accident, Laura takes revenge into her own hands. But will her daughter's killer be brought to justice? Laura's loss and bereavement reopen old wounds, and she is thrown back to the story of her passionate love affair with Betty's father, David, their marriage, and his subsequent love affair with another woman.

Rose, newly married to surgeon Nathan Winter, wants for nothing in her perfect life–except the one thing she can’t have: for her sister, Daisy, who’s lying unresponsive in a coma, to wake up. Daisy’s psychologist has been a constant presence at her hospital bedside. But he’s taken an unnatural interest in Rose, and now he’s made a shocking accusation: that Rose’s husband is a psychopath and that she’s in danger.

When Leonard and Ellie Franks leave London for retirement in secluded Dartmoor everything seems perfect. Until their new life is shattered. One evening Leonard heads outside to fetch firewood - and never returns. Nine months later, with the investigation at a dead end, Leonard's family turn to David Raker - a missing persons investigator. Nothing could prepare Raker for what he uncovers.

1759, Ipswich. Sisters Peggy and Molly Gainsborough are the best of friends and do everything together. They spy on their father as he paints, they rankle their mother as she manages the books, they tear barefoot through the muddy fields that surround their home. But there is another reason they are inseparable: from a young age, Molly has had a tendency to forget who she is, to fall into mental confusion, and Peggy knows instinctively that no one must find out.

Louise wakes up. Her head aches, her mouth is dry, her memory is fuzzy. But she suspects she's done something bad. She rolls over towards her husband, Niall. The man who, until recently, made her feel loved. But it's not Niall who's lying beside her. In fact, she's never seen this man before. And he's dead. As Louise desperately struggles to piece her memories back together, it's clear to Detective Jonah Sheens and his team that she is their prime suspect - though they soon find she's not the only one with something to hide.

For almost a decade, Rachel Caine has turned her back on home, kept distant by family disputes and her work monitoring wolves on an Idaho reservation. But now, summoned by the eccentric earl of Annerdale and his controversial scheme to reintroduce the grey wolf to the English countryside, she is back in the peat and wet light of the Lake District. The earl's project harks back to an ancient idyll of untamed British wilderness.

As a 13-year-old World War Two evacuee, Edie’s mother was chosen by the mysterious Juniper Blythe and taken to live at Milderhurst Castle with the Blythe family. In the grand and glorious Milderhurst Castle, a new world opened up for Edie’s mother. She discovered the joys of books and fantasy and writing, but also, ultimately, their dangers. Fifty years later, as Edie chases the answers to her mother’s riddle, she too is drawn to Milderhurst Castle and the eccentric Blythe sisters. Inside the decaying castle, Edie begins to unravel her mother’s past.

Ex-journalist Tash has been searching for a story to launch her freelance career. But she has also been searching for something else: new friends to help her navigate motherhood. She sees them at her son’s new playgroup. The other mothers. The sleek, the sophisticated, the successful mothers… The women she wants to be. And then one day they welcome her into their circle and Tash discovers the kind of life she has always dreamt of; their elegant London townhouses a far cry from her cramped basement flat and endless bills. They seem to have everything. But they also have their secrets.

Edinburgh, 1850. Despite being at the forefront of modern medicine, hordes of patients are dying all across the city, with doctors finding their remedies powerless. But it is not just the deaths that dismay the esteemed Dr James Simpson - a whispering campaign seeks to blame him for the death of a patient in suspicious circumstances. Simpson's protégé Will Raven and former housemaid Sarah Fisher are determined to clear their patron's name.

Letters of Note, the book based on the beloved website of the same name, became an instant classic on publication in 2013, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. This new edition sees the collection of the world's most entertaining, inspiring and unusual letters updated with 14 riveting new missives and a new introduction from curator Shaun Usher.

The One State is the perfect society, ruled over by the enlightened Benefactor. It is a city made almost entirely of glass, where surveillance is universal and life runs according to algorithmic rules to ensure perfect happiness. And D-503, the Builder, is the ideal citizen, at least until he meets I-330, who opens his eyes to new ideas of love, sex and freedom.

Mariana Andros is a psychologist struggling to make sense of life after the death of her husband. So when her niece, Zoe, calls - traumatised by the murder of her best friend - Mariana rushes to be with her and away from her own grief. St. Christopher's College, Cambridge, is a closed world to most - but it's where Mariana and her late husband met as students. Days which seem long buried rise to the surface, as memory and mystery entangle Mariana in the secretive society of campus.

The powerful new novel from number one Sunday Times best seller Clare Mackintosh. Max and Pip are the strongest couple you know. Only now they're facing the most important decision of their lives - and they don't agree. As the consequences of an impossible choice threaten to devastate them both, nothing will ever be the same again. But anything can happen after the end....

Speeches of Note is a celebration of oratory old, new and unspoken. It is an obsessively curated, richly illustrated and sumptuously produced collection of speeches from throughout the ages. Some are surprising, inspiring, hilarious; others are moving, comforting, enlightening. Some of these speeches changed the course of history; others are all but unknown, even undelivered to this day, such as the chilling public announcement to be made by President Nixon should Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become stranded on the moon. All are extraordinary.

The story begins in 1970. The day after Jimi Hendrix's death...dairy farmer Michael Eavis invites revellers to his field in Somerset to attend a 'Pop, Folk & Blues' festival. Tickets are £1 each, enticing more than a thousand customers with the promise of music, dance, poetry, theatre, lights and spontaneous entertainment - as well as free milk from his own Worthy Farm cows. Fast forward through five tumultuous decades, and the Eavises' vision now encompasses a gigantic 'city in the fields', with a total annual population nearing a quarter of a million.

Young women are being discovered dead across the Old Town, all having suffered similarly gruesome ends. In the New Town, medical student Will Raven is about to start his apprenticeship with the brilliant and renowned Dr Simpson. Simpson's patients range from the richest to the poorest of this divided city. His house is like no other, full of visiting luminaries and daring experiments in the new medical frontier of anaesthesia.

In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. Her life will draw to an end in the coming days. Downstairs, the studio is a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit. The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and feverish world.

Near the dying English seaside town of Ilmarsh, local police Detective Alec Nichols discovers 16 horses’ heads on a farm, each buried with a single eye facing the low winter sun. After forensic veterinarian Cooper Allen travels to the scene, the investigators soon uncover evidence of a chain of crimes in the community - disappearances, arson and mutilations - all culminating in the reveal of something deadly lurking in the ground itself.

In the midst of a mysterious environmental crisis, as London is submerged below flood waters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later the family are forced to leave their home in search of safety. As they move from place to place, shelter to shelter, their journey traces both fear and wonder as Z's small fists grasp at the things he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds.