Showing results by narrator "Jilly Bond" in All Categories

The news of Henry III's death reached his son Edward on the long road home from the Holy Land. Now he was England's king and a man fit for his destiny. Through all the years of his reign, through stark personal tragedy and chill forebodings as his son grew into a weak, corrupted price, Edward I strove to weld a nation united from England, Scotland and Wales.

It was the night that shattered his life. One year ago, Rina’s dear friend Detective Mac McGregor witnessed something unspeakable: the murder of a child on a golden sandy beach. The girl died in his arms while her killer fled into the night, never to be seen again. But then, out of the blue, Mac gets a call that changes everything. His old adversary is back in town, and this could be Mac’s final chance to put him away.

With her awful secondhand uniform and stuck-up classmates, Binny's new school is horrible. And life gets even worse when a storm damages the roof of her house, forcing Binny and her family to move to the countryside whilst it's being fixed. Binny; her sensible older sister, Clem; and her rambunctious brother, James (and his chickens) begin adjusting to life in the country. Then one of James' beloved chickens vanishes, and Binny finds strange footprints in the mud. What kind of creature is lurking in the undergrowth?

Scotland has been torn apart by civil war, and the young and passionate Catholic Mary Queen of Scots is in the hands of her enemies. Under duress, Mary abdicates in favour of her son, James VI, and flees to England for safety, boldly seeking refuge with her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. But Elizabeth has never trusted the ambitious Catholic queen and has Mary imprisoned.

In this beautifully nostalgic memoir, eminent author Angela Thirkell recalls in rich detail the three houses in which she grew up. Focusing first on 'The Grange', where her grandfather, the celebrated painted Sir Edward Burne-Jones, set the cultivated tone, Thirkell also reminisces about her parents' home in Kensington Square and the Burne-Jones' seaside retreat, where Angela's cousin, Rudyard Kipling, lived across the green.

Binny Cornwallis has lost something. Something that wasn’t really hers in the first place. With her best enemy Gareth and her beloved dog Max she turns detective to track it down, but the Cornwallis family are anything but helpful. Little brother James and his friend Dill are having an adventure of their own and big sister Clem is acting very strangely. And on top of all this, Binny suspects their next-door neighbour may be a witch....

Christian Lamb is one of the last surviving Wren officers to have served throughout the Second World War, from Blitz ravaged London, to the important radar and operations rooms and undertaking a vital role in D Day. Escaping both the Spanish Flu pandemic when she was born and the pandemic we are emerging from today, she has reached the impressive age of 101. Now she leads us through the story of her extraordinary life and the wartime experiences of her fellow Wrens.

Tess believed matrimony was, is for life - until her husband decided that their marriage was the relationship equivalent of a starter home: cramped, claustrophobic, and something he'd outgrown. Now, at thirty-five, Tess is in the biggest mess of her life. Known to her friends as "Tip-Top Tess" because of her pursuit of the perfect home, she's now a candidate for How Clean is Your House? But there's a life raft on the horizon: the Divorce Survival Class - a boot camp for the broken-hearted.

If you could change your life, would you? For fans of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, the story of a woman who runs a sewing shop in a small town in France, and a chance in a million... Jocelyne is 47 and runs her own dressmaking shop. She's a bit overweight, her husband is very ordinary and her best friends are the twins who run the hairdresser next door. Jocelyn has reached the point where she is examining her life and measuring it against what her teenage self had imagined.

Sixteen-year-old Frances Stuart arrives at the Restoration court to find her innocence and beauty are highly prized commodities, envied by the women and desired by the men. Before long, King Charles II falls passionately in love with her and will stop at nothing to make her his mistress. But Frances is no conventional court beauty. She is determined to make her own choices in life and to be with the man she loves. Can she overcome the dangerous pitfalls of the King's obsession, the Queen's jealousy, and the traps set for her by the King's notorious mistresses?

The profound emotion felt around the world upon seeing images of Notre-Dame in flames opens up a series of questions: Why was everyone so deeply moved? Why does Notre-Dame so clearly crystallise what our civilisation is about? What makes ‘Our Lady of Paris’ the soul of a nation and a symbol of human achievement? What is it that speaks so directly to us today?

Grace is living through every mother’s worst nightmare. Her daughter Abi went away on a dream vacation—and was murdered. Overwhelmed by grief and fighting off old demons, Grace tries to make sense of it—who would want to kill her beautiful girl? But as she learns more about Abi’s life, she realizes she didn’t know her own daughter very well. How did Abi acquire all those designer clothes? And what was she doing on those mysterious trips to the city? Grace desperately needs to find answers. But soon it becomes clear that someone doesn’t want her digging into Abi’s past.

Married four times, Susannah Forbes had a starry career as a top model. Now, with an instinctive eye for design, she finds herself in constant demand as an interior designer. Offered a commission by a recently divorced American to make over his lavish Long Island home, Susannah accepts, bringing as her assistant young divorcee Daisy Mitchell. Taking off from Heathrow, Susannah is transported back to a time when, at the height of her modelling career, she lived in New York.

Drawing on hundreds of previously unseen letters from the sisters as well as from their grandmother Queen Victoria, The Princesses of Hesse takes us on a sweeping journey across the tumultuous landscape of the turn of the century - from the dramas of the Russian Court to the Russian Revolution, and through both World Wars in which they often found themselves on opposing sides.

1918: Freddie was destined for a different life, determined to make his fortune in the plantations of Ceylon. But just as the great war comes to an end, the eldest brother and heir to Coombe Hall, Edward, doesn’t return. Torn between duty and freedom, Freddie must now sacrifice his own dreams to keep the estate – and the future of Coombe – alive. And now he must now marry for an heir, not for love. But the turmoil of war didn’t end on the battlefield; the country faces upheavals like never before.

March 1920: Life has turned unsettlingly quiet for former British Intelligence agent Verity Kent and her husband, Sidney. But even that false calm is about to end. As threats remain, the French authorities soon request Sidney's help with a suspect who claims to have proof of treason--shortly before she is assassinated. And Verity, too, is called to investigate a mystery. The murder of a Belgian lawyer aboard a train seems at first to be a simple case of revenge. But the victim was connected to British Intelligence.

The evacuation of Philip Masson's body near Mrs Griffin's cottage resurrects several old ghosts that send the newshounds scurrying to dig in their clippings archives. Rumours, matured with the passing years since Masson's "disappearance" way back in 1978, once more abound. But the investigative team of Ian Robinson and Jenny Fielding are already on a trail of discovery that leads back to the end of the Wilson/Callaghan era.

It's 1782. The 13-year-old daughter of a Venetian merchant family is lured naked from her bath by a stray cat and finds herself in the arms of Casanova - the legendary seducer of women. Twenty-five years later Cecilia is in Albania, now a portrait painter of some renown. Enter a young man from England, a troubled poet, looking for adventure at any price - a man who begins his affair with Cecilia.

Tess and Simon Sparrow may have a few more grey hairs than they used to, but that doesn’t stop them from being swept up in a whirlwind romance and starting over. Swapping their city lives for an escape to the Cornish countryside, they fall in love with a crumbling hotel and impulsively buy it to renovate as their forever home. But soon the newlyweds have had their first fight (and their second and third...) and building costs are spiralling out of control. Their families think they’re mad and Tess is starting to agree – she just wants to escape back to civilisation.

Malaya, 1941: As the glamorous wife of a plantation owner, Connie Hadley appears to lead a pampered and comfortable life. But she is hiding devastating secrets that could destroy her marriage. Life is changed forever on the day of the infamous attack on Pearl Harbour. As Japanese Zero aircraft attack the town of Palur, Connie makes the decision to flee to Singapore on the family's boat, the White Pearl