Showing titles in World War I

When Baroness Sophie von Korvacs meets British painter James Fraser one hot summer's day in Vienna, the attraction is instant. A whirlwind romance follows, with Vienna bathed in the brilliance of the last days of the emperor. And when James proposes to Sophie it seems a fitting end to that wonderful, enchanting summer.

Back in Folkestone, the residents are dealing with the aftereffects of a devastating air raid. Howard Argent is kept busy at the Bevan while Ulysses Pilchard experiments with electroshock therapy. Meanwhile, women’s suffrage, prostitution and unmarried mothers are hot topics, and Kitty Lumley experiences the sharp end of intolerance.

From the best-selling author of The Piano Tuner comes Daniel Mason's The Winter Soldier, a story of love and medicine through the devastation of the First World War. Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a 22-year-old medical student when World War One explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains, he finds a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus.

After losing her beloved fiancé at Ypres in 1917, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Billington faces a lonely future estranged from her upper-class parents due to her association with Charlie Sayers and his working-class family. No longer able to live under her parent’s roof she is taken in by Charlie’s father, escaping the suffocating demands of her parents. Betty soon learns all too well about the realities of life after an accident at the Woolwich Arsenal munitions works.

It is two years before the outbreak of World War 1, and the Oakley family are typical of their time. Andrew has been clerk at a City solicitors for twenty years. Alice, his wife, keeps the home fires burning. Their sons plan on becoming skilled apprentices. And Mabel, their daughter, says she would rather die than go into domestic service like her cousin. She is going to go to train as a secretary. Andrew Oakley little imagines, as he sets off for work one February morning, that their lives are about to change in the most dramatic and tragic fashion.

Sheffield, 1892. Patrick Halliday rules his family with a rod of iron. He’s hard on both his wife and his elder daughter, Flora, but he spoils his youngest, Mary Ellen, because she reminds him of his beloved mother. When Mary Ellen, aged seventeen, finds that she is pregnant, Patrick throws her out of the family home and Flora goes with her. After wandering the Derbyshire countryside for miles, they find shelter on a farm, working for their keep. When Flora must return to her job as a buffer girl in Sheffield’s cutlery trade, she is reunited with her friend, Evelyn Bonsor.

Working at the Foyles bookshop was Molly Cooper's dream job. But with the country at war, she's determined to do her bit. She must face the tribulations of being the 'new girl' at Silvertown munitions factory, as well as the relentless physical work. The happy-ever-afters Molly read about in the pages of her beloved books have been lost to the war. And yet the munitions girls unite through their sense of duty in the most unlikely of settings....

Elsie’s worked her way up at Swift’s Jam Factory from the shop floor to the top, and now it’s her time to shine. But when she’s involved in an incident involving her half-sister, Millie’s, new husband, she is forced to keep it secret - the truth could threaten their sisterly bond. Dot is dogged by fear, coming to terms with her mother’s rejection of her. She should be enjoying the happiness she craves with her beloved Cess; instead, she’s trapped in an asylum, haunted by the horrifying cries of inmates.

When her husband returns shell-shocked and broken from the Great War and his mother makes her life a misery, Betty Wellow discovers how bitter and hard life can truly be. But it is not until a devastating storm sweeps through their small fishing village and endangers her life that she sees her chance to escape - and takes it. Fleeing to Bristol, she changes her name to Mabel Brook and takes a position as a maid. But tragedy strikes once more after the sudden death of her mistress, and she is cast back onto the streets.

With the Great War behind them, four friends are ready to live again. Lydia, a society beauty, has everything—wealth, status and a husband who survived the War. All she has to do now is provide an heir. Widowed Sarah cares for her wounded brother, certain that no one will ever replace her brave husband. Younger sister Beatrice finds it hard to shine, especially when there are so few men left to shine for. And independent Ava—who can light any room—is determined to seize the freedom of being a single woman.

Edvard grows up on a remote mountain farmstead in Norway with his taciturn grandfather, Sverre. The death of his parents, when he was three years old, has always been shrouded in mystery—he has never been told how or where it took place and has only a distant memory of his mother. But he knows that the fate of his grandfather's brother, Einar, is somehow bound up with this mystery. One day, a coffin is delivered for his grandfather long before his death—a meticulous, beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Perhaps Einar is not dead after all.

The sixth and final book in the War at Home series by the author of The Morland Dynasty novels. Set against the evocative backdrop of World War I, this is an epic family drama featuring the Hunters and their servants.

Needing to find a job, Betty Dean is sent into service at Stowford House. The work is gruelling, and her dreams of making something of herself seem out of reach. When Betty is forced to leave after a scandalous incident, she feels that her life is over—until a new job throws her a lifeline. Meeting Connie and Jean brings the joy of friendship, even if Betty struggles with having to keep secrets from her new pals. When soldier Duncan Kennedy enters Betty's life, it seems that she may finally find the love she's always wanted. But opening herself up to someone new isn't easy.

Edi and Ash have been best friends for over forty years, a bond formed by a lifetime of memories. Since childhood they have seen each other through life's milestones: stealing vodka from their parents, REM concerts, unexpected Scottish wakes, marriages, infertility, children. As Ash notes, 'Edi's memory is like the back-up hard drive for mine.' When Edi is diagnosed with the final stages of terminal ovarian cancer, she makes the painstaking decision to leave behind her husband and son to move to a hospice down the road from Ash.

Dublin, 1918. In a country doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city centre, where expectant mothers who have come down with an unfamiliar flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders: Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over the course of three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways.

In a dusty postwar summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life?

Jack Barlow has a dream. For generations his family have been in service at Trenwith Estate. If he can survive the ravages of war, he’ll return home to build his own mechanic business and become master of his own destiny. Louise Saint-Claire is battling against the odds to run her family farmhouse in German occupied France after her abusive husband is taken prisoner by the Germans. She is determined to survive this brutal and bloody war. But fate throws Jack and Louise together when she finds the wounded British soldier and she decides to risk everything to keep him safe

Restless, ambitious Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the Schutzruppe askari, the German colonial troops; after years away, he returns to his village to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, given away. Hamza was not stolen but was sold; he has come of age in the army, at the right hand of an officer whose control has ensured his protection but marked him for life. Hamza does not have words for how the war ended for him. Returning to the town of his childhood, all he wants is work, however humble and security - and the beautiful Afiya.

1918: As the Great War rages, Jessie Carson takes a leave of absence from the New York Public Library to work for the American Committee for Devastated France, a group of women determined to rebuild devastated French communities just miles from the front. Upon arrival, Jessie strives to establish something that the French have never seen - children's libraries. She turns ambulances into bookmobiles and trains the first French female librarians. Then she disappears.

Aleen Cust has big dreams. And no one―not her family, society, or the law―will stop her. Born in Ireland in 1868 to an aristocratic English family, Aleen knows she is destined to work with animals, even if her family is appalled by the idea of a woman pursuing a veterinary career. Going against their wishes but with the encouragement of the guardian assigned to her upon her father’s death, Aleen attends the New Veterinary College in Edinburgh, enrolling as A. I. Custance to spare her family the humiliation they fear.

Workers in the Clarks shoe factory, at the heart of the village, have left for the army in droves, and news from the Front seems to grow darker by the day. When lifelong friends Louisa, Jeannie and Kate receive the news they had been fearing, all hope seems lost. And Louisa’s world will be rocked further when she makes another discovery, one that will see her cast out by her family, changing her life forever.

1942 - Japanese bombs rain down in Darwin, Australia. Motherless Molly Hook, the gravedigger’s daughter, turns to the road, seeking the deep-country sorcerer who put a curse on her family. By her side are the most unlikely travelling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress, and Yukio, a fallen Japanese fighter pilot. As they journey from the vine forests to Australia’s wild and magical monsoon lands, they will encounter grave danger and discover true love.

From the time of William the Conqueror, the Beaumonts have enjoyed the privileges of wealth and position. Their pleasure is to be nothing more than farmers and knights of the realm. Nevertheless, with the dawn of the 20th century, a stray artillery shell slays the current baronet and Thomas Beaumont finds himself the new incumbent, but with no farming knowledge, his first instinct is to run. However, the family motto reads: Where there is a will, there is a way. Sir Thomas finds his way, and by the end of the war, the future looks brighter. Then another deadly crisis rears its head.

The Tree of Heaven follows the fortunes of the Harrison family as the children grow up in the shadow of the First World War and Dorothy's brothers go off to the trenches, while she becomes involved with the suffrage movement, and later joins a version of the Women's Social and Political Union.

1914. The old standards are going. There is bitterness in politics, talk of civil war in Ireland. But all this means little to Cynthia Weston, attractive wife of cabinet member Aylmer Weston and her nephew by marriage, Philip. They are caught up in the charmed, perilous toils of a mutual passion that will destroy all they hold most dear - while the shadow of war lengthens and darkens, ready to swallow their world whole.

After escaping the grip of the workhouse, Lily has kept her fiancé's business afloat while he is away fighting on the Western Front. Still battling on, she's now doing her bit for her country as an auxiliary nurse - but one thing above all else continues to weigh heavily on her heart: her long-lost sister. Born just before her mother died, the scandal was hushed-up and the baby spirited away. But now, at last, there is hope Lily could find her little sister for she has a clue to go on: the name of the notorious baby farmer who bought the child all those years ago. Mrs Jolley.

Three women, once enemies. Their secrets will unite them. The First World War is over. The war-torn area of Flanders near Ypres is no longer home to troops but groups of tourists. Controversial battlefield tourism now brings hundreds of people to the area, all desperate to witness firsthand where their loved ones fell.

East London, 1916: The Sanctuary Lane Animal Hospital is proving a huge success. For its founder Ruby Archer, this is a dream come true – and her blossoming romance with a local boy is the icing on the cake. But in wartime things change in the blink of an eye. When a heartbreaking tragedy shatters Ruby’s world, suddenly she is at odds with everyone - her family, her friends, and even her sweetheart. And when the hospital is threatened with immediate closure, she’s not sure who to trust.

As snow begins to fall, and word reaches their town that the Red Army are approaching, German-born mother-of-two Emma knows she has no choice: She must pack their meagre belongings and leave their home, in search of safety. Even if safety is within Nazi Germany. But as the icy grip of winter tightens around them, her four-year-old son—her blue-eyed angel—Jacob becomes ill. Desperate for him to get well enough to continue their journey, she takes him to a hospital, where she hands him to a kind nurse. Then a terrible attack separates mother and son, and their lives change forever.

Grand Duchess Olga Romanov comes of age amid a shifting tide for the great dynasties of Europe. But even as unrest simmers in the capital, Olga is content to live within the confines of the sheltered life her parents have built for her and her three sisters: hiding from the world on account of their mother’s ill health, their brother Alexei’s secret affliction, and rising controversy over Father Grigori Rasputin, the priest on whom the tsarina has come to rely.