Showing results by narrator "Patience Tomlinson" in All Categories

1990. On the luxurious private island of Angel Cay, four privileged students toast the end of their exams. Self-assured Miles, clever Grace, talented Alex and beautiful Sasha have the world at their feet. But one dark night will change their perfect lives forever. As the friends move into glamorous careers – fashion, music, politics – each tries to put the past behind them. But no matter how far their stars rise, they cannot escape the dreadful truth.

In Paris, January 1943, 230 French women resisters were rounded up and sent on a train to Auschwitz - the only train, in the four years of the German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. The youngest was a schoolgirl of 15, the eldest a farmer’s wife of 68; there were among them teachers, biochemists, sales girls, secretaries, housewives and university lecturers. The women turned to one another, finding solace and strength in friendship and shared experience.

In the spring of 1939, with the Second World War looming, two determined 24-year-olds, Heather Jenner and Mary Oliver, decided to open a marriage bureau. They found a tiny office on London's Bond Street and set about the delicate business of matchmaking. Drawing on the bureau's extensive archives, Penrose Halson - who, many years later, found herself the proprietor of the bureau - tells their story and the stories of their clients. We meet a remarkable cross section of British society in the 1940s.

Melissa's life is in disarray. There are cracks in her marriage, and her mother, Elizabeth, is losing her memory. Elizabeth presents her daughter with a gift that suggests a very secret history - one that leads Melissa to Kalami, where Julian Adie, poet, traveller and novelist, once lived. But what is the connection between the hedonistic Adie and Melissa's mother? As Melissa chases Adie's shadow across the places he loved, she finds her mother may not have been the person she thought.

March 1915. Caroline Lilley's fiancé, Reggie, is away at the front, and Caroline gives up her job and returns home at his request. Frustrated in her desire to help the war effort, she throws herself into saving the harvest by organising the village women - and runs up against Reggie's mother, the formidable Lady Hunney. Caroline's sister, Felicia, departs to become an ambulance driver on the Western Front, and Phoebe and George eagerly await their chance to leave the village.

A woman of independent means with a healthy dose of cynicism about the male persuasion, Harriet Tremayne is content with her circle of spinster friends and their devotion to literature, women's rights, and intellectual interests. However, when she determines to undertake a London Season for her beautiful but featherbrained niece, she concedes she must appear less a bluestocking and more fashionable to successfully sponsor this impossible young lady whose only real desire, it seems, is to consume chocolate.

When Gina Bianchi returns to the beautiful Italian resort of Portofino to attend her father’s funeral, she is beset by vivid memories of World War 2, when she joined the Resistance, alongside her identical twin sister, Adele. In her childhood bedroom, Gina reads Adele’s diary, left behind during the war. As Gina learns the shocking truth about her sister, she’s compelled to face the harsh realities of her own past.

In 1664, four years after Charles II is restored to the throne, Mercia Blakewood stands to lose everything: her father to the executioner's ax, her freedom to her treacherous uncle, her son to his resentful grandparents. But when her father leaves her a cryptic message in his last speech, she seizes her chance to fight back. With would-be lover Nathan Keyte and unlikely new friend Nicholas Wildmoor, Mercia must unravel her father's mystery to find a great prize long thought lost.

Henriette d'Entragues isn't satisfied with simply being mistress of Henry IV of France, she wants a crown too. Despite his promises to marry her, the King is obliged by political necessity to ally himself with Marie de Medici, an Italian princess who will bring riches to the treasury. But Henriette isn't one for giving up easily. She has a written promise of marriage which she intends to use to declare the royal marriage illegal. All she has to do to achieve her ambition is to give Henry a son.

My only regret is that I shan't be alive to savour my retrospective triumph. But that is of small account. I savour it every day of my life. I shall have done the one thing I resolved to do when I was 12 years old - and the world will know it. Follow the 'Queen of Crime' as she takes us into the mind of a man who has waited decades to enact his patient, ingenious revenge on a school bully.

England, June 1944. Exactly one week after the Allied armies invade Nazi occupied Normandy, Hitler strikes back with his Vengeance Weapons: the terrifying V-1 Flying Bombs. In August, one of these "doodlebugs" falls on an Anglican convent near Camberwell, killing three nuns.

February 1665. With winter passing, Mercia Blakewood is at last headed back to England from America, hoping to leave behind the shadow that death and heartache have cast. She expects a welcome from the King, considering her earlier, mostly successful mission on his behalf, but the reception is not exactly warm. Mercia faces more manipulation and must accept a clandestine and uncomfortable role at the heart of the royal court, posing as a mistress to find a spy and traitor.

All was quiet in the Bodle home in Plumstead village on the morning of 2 November 1833. In the large ten bedroom farmhouse, the maid Sophia Taylor began preparing breakfast while, at the cottage down the track, Mary Higgins came down to set the fire. But all was not as it seemed that morning... When the local doctor was summoned several hours later he found four women suffering from severe vomiting and stomach pains whilst the master of the house was delirious with pain.

Christmas 1917, and as the Lilley family gathers at the Rectory in the Sussex village of Ashden, the mood is far from festive. But while the sisters face heartache and the new year brings fresh tragedy, the Rectory opens its doors to a new world, its inhabitants strengthened by the grief and happiness shared during the long years of war.

Negotiating their way through Stalinist terrors, Nazi slavery, and British colonial brutality, Pasha Zayky and his wife, Tanya, tell firsthand how a loving family fight for survival during the hell of the 20th century. Listeners follow this family from a war-torn Berlin to a forbidding postwar London, with flashbacks to 1930s Soviet Russia along the way, until they arrive in Africa, where nationalist forces are challenging British rule.

By the summer of 1916, there is still no end to the war in sight and in the Sussex village of Ashden, optimism has given way to stoicism. While George Lilley leaves the Rectory to join the Royal Flying Corps, each of his four sisters finds her own way of contributing to the war effort. Gradually coming to terms with her broken engagement, Caroline Lilley numbly continues with her agricultural work at home, until tragedy forces her into leaving Ashden.

Following adventures she would sooner forget in the newly renamed New York, Mercia Blakewood is hopeful that she has gained the leverage with the king she needs to reclaim her family's home back in England. The breathtaking new world piques her curiosity, and a burgeoning friendship with Clemency Carter, a local medicine woman, prompts Mercia to delay her return.

For nearly four years Blake Templeton had left his wife, Jaime, and their daughter, Fern, strictly alone. So why had he now decided to re-enter their lives? Was it just chance that his arrival coincided with the proposed sale of the Abbey - and the attacks on Jaime to stop her from joining the campaign against its sale? And just what was his involvement with the beautiful Caroline Travers - the owner of the Abbey? Jaime just could not believe that her husband had changed so much, but all the evidence was there, plain to see. Or was it?

Life wasn’t easy as a single parent, but somehow Win had managed to raise a child that any parent could be proud of. And now Charlie’s father was back on the scene and demanding a share in his son. Was a share all he wanted, or did he intend to take Charlie away from her? All Win knew was that in the space of a few days James had managed to turn her from a calm, self-assured adult into an insecure bundle of nerves. But was her concern all for Charlie?

A perfect family…but shocking revelations and heartache lie just beneath the surface of their charmed lives. Saul Crighton was every woman’s dream - head of a thriving law firm, devoted single father to three young children, and the sexiest man alive…perfect marriage material! Evena Tullah couldn’t deny that Saul made her heart beat faster. But, even though she was tormented by erotic fantasies about him, Tullah was determined to resist his family’s matchmaking plans.