Showing results by author "Dilly Court" in All Categories

The heartwarming and nostalgic new novel from the Sunday Times top ten best-selling author of The Beggar Maid. Motherless since she was five, Mirabel Cutler was raised by her father to be a lady. But when he dies suddenly, Mirabel finds herself cast out on the street by her ruthless stepmother. She is taken to a place of refuge by charismatic sea captain Jack Starke. But the safe haven turns out to be a house of ill repute.

She longed to be reunited with her family. The compelling new novel from the Sunday Times top ten bestselling author of The Workhouse Girl. Eleven-year-old Stella Barry is forced into service when her family find themselves living hand-to-mouth.Leaving her mother and younger brother and sister behind, Stella goes to a big country house outside London. When she returns home one Sunday, she discovers they have disappeared.

London, 1875. Taking one last look around her little room in Covent Garden, Nettie Carroll couldn’t believe she wouldn’t even be able to say good-bye to her friends. Her father had trusted the wrong man, and now they would have to go on the run. Once again.

London, 1854: 20-year-old Essie Chapman lives with her father in poverty-stricken Limehouse, working on the river as a boatman. Her life seems set before her, never to leave this part of London and forever at her father's beck and call. Then, one night, she must transport a mysterious man from a foreign ship to the banks of the Thames, a man who ends up renting a room in Essie's house, identifying himself only as 'Raven'.

Paradise Row, London. December 1865. Snow is falling fast, and Sally Suggs is working tirelessly to bring in enough money to keep bread on the table. Her father, a skilled rag-and-bone man, has fallen ill, and now Sally has taken up his trade. But this is a man’s world and competition is fierce, and Sally’s rival, Finn Kelly, always seems to be one step ahead.

Lottie Lane is all alone in the world. As a chambermaid at one of London's busiest inns, condemned to a life of drudgery and at the mercy of a vicious landlady, Lottie is too worn out to even dream of a better life. Until one night an injured soldier is brought to The Swan. Lottie nurses him back from the dead, and suddenly everything changes.

Left on the steps of an orphanage when she was just days old, Nancy Sunday was brought up in hardship—until the kindly Rosalind Carey took her in. Now 18 years old, Nancy is an adopted member of the Carey family. But she can’t help wondering who her parents really were. When Nancy is sent away to finishing school, she finds herself in the midst of London society. There she meets Freddie Ashton—kind and warm-hearted, he might just be the man of Nancy’s dreams. But she knows his wealthy parents would never let him marry a penniless foundling.

Standing on London’s Victoria docks with the wind biting through her shawl, Rose Munday realises she’s been abandoned by her sweetheart. She had risked everything to get to London, but, stumbling through the pea-soup fog, she has nowhere to go and no one to turn to. Scared and alone, Rose steps straight into danger, only to be rescued by two women with even less to their names - a woman of the night and her young sidekick, Sparrow.

Abandoned by their parents and left to fight for themselves, headstrong Rosalind Carey has no choice but to take charge of her younger brothers and sister in Devonshire’s grand Rockwood Castle. But their once much-loved home is crumbling like the family that lives within it. Living hand to mouth and desperate to provide for the estate that depends on them, the Carey family are one debt away from ruin. Until the day comes when the dashing Piers Blanchard appears on their doorstep from Cornwall, claiming he is Rosalind’s distant cousin and that Rockwood Castle is his.

The wonderfully nostalgic, vivid and compelling new novel from the Sunday Times top-five best-selling author of A Loving Family. From the age of eight, 16-year-old Charity Crosse has been living rough with her grandfather and begging on the streets. When her grandfather passes away, Charity is helped by a kindly doctor who introduces her to bookseller Jethro Dawkins. Jethro takes Charity in to help in his bookshop and keep house in their one room behind the shop.

Clinging tightly to the penny in her palm, Flora’s fortune was about to change… Flora is forever grateful for the day the Stewart family rescued her from her life of poverty on London’s streets. Adopted as one of their own, she shed her rags and was finally given a place to call home. When a twist of fate calls her back to the cobbles, Flora’s new life is torn apart. Flora must make her own way if she is ever to find where she truly belongs…

Lily Larkin is the youngest of six and the least important member of her family. With their father dead and their mother a stranger to them, she must stay at home and keep house whilst her elder siblings go out to work. As she goes about her daily chores, her head is full of dreams. And she longs for the day she can have a life of her own. When a fire threatens to destroy the nearby docks, Lily's act of kindness towards a handsome foreigner has disastrous consequences for the whole family.

With the fate of her family in her hands, Rose has to make a terrible choice: be thrown onto the streets without a penny to her name or watch her loved ones fall into ruin.... Rose is keeping a dreadful secret, and, too scared to ask her strict father for help, it's down to her to keep her brother from the hangman's noose - whatever it takes. Her innocent sister, Cora, is on a different road to ruin, bewitched by a handsome cad whose intentions are anything but gallant.

After the sudden death of her husband, Patricia Greystone is left with nothing, and at 24, she finds herself a penniless widow. As the youngest child of a large family, she has always been headstrong and proud, so she’s determined not to return to her family cap in hand. Instead she strikes out on her own. The dark streets of London are the perfect place to hide from the world, and Patricia makes her living singing on the streets. But the city is a dangerous place.

Dolly Blanchard dreams of a bigger life. She wants to make a mark on the world, not simply wait for a husband to come along. So when an impoverished actress offers her a lifeline, Dolly flees to London, determined to make it on the stage and prove to her family – and herself – that she can strike out alone.

When Poppy Robbins is targeted by a blackmailer threatening to reveal secrets from her family’s past, she turns to the mysterious Edward Taverner for help. Taverner proposes an escape to his country manor, and to maintain a respectable appearance, he asks her to pose as his fiancée. She reluctantly agrees, but then finds herself trapped, unwelcome and alone in a threadbare mansion. Has her engagement secret put her in greater danger, or will it change her life forever?

When 17-year-old Belinda Phillips falls in love with a handsome Anglo-Indian officer, she knows that he is a man she can never hope to marry. When he is reported missing, believed killed in action, Belinda discovers that she is pregnant. Facing disgrace and ruin, she has no option other than to accept an arranged marriage with a middle-aged widower, knowing she must keep the secret of her child's birth for ever. Reluctantly she sends her beloved daughter to a foster mother in Cripplegate, little realising she has entrusted Cassy's care to Biddy Henchard, a woman who runs a notorious baby farm in an area full of poverty and disease.

On a bitter winter's day, an unnamed girl lies dangerously ill in hospital. When two coarse, rough-speaking individuals come to claim her, she can remember nothing of the events that brought her to her present state, not even her name. According to the men, she is their young sister, Lucy. As her health improves and her memory gradually returns, she realises she's been kidnapped. But she has no means of escaping the hideous confines of the filthy basement room in which they have imprisoned her in.

Since the untimely death of her husband, young mother Effie Grey has been forced to live on a narrowboat owned by her tyrannical father-in-law Jacob. In spite of her own despair, she is determined to protect her brother Tom and her baby son Georgie from Jacob's bullying ways - for she is all they have in the world. But when Jacob hires villainous Salter and his vile wife Sal to run the barge, Effie's life becomes even more unbearable, and Tom is sent packing without a penny to his name.