Showing results by narrator "Patience Tomlinson" in All Categories

Everyone knows three things about the Women’s Institute: that they spent the war making jam; the sensational Calendar Girls were WI; and, more recently, that slow-handclapping of Tony Blair. About 215,000 women in the UK belong to the WI. Their membership crosses class and has recently begun to recruit huge numbers of young women.

Norfolk, 1944. Phylly is a Land Girl on Catchetts Farm. She and her friend Gracie are doing their bit to support the war effort. But times are changing at Catchetts—there's an evacuee and two POWs on their way. And then Phylly meets an American airman from the base up the road. As the War rages on the Continent, Phylly and Gracie's world will be changed forever.

“The end of the old world”, people said about the long, hot summer of 1914. That summer Aunt Tilly comes to stay with her brother, the Rector, and his four lively daughters in the sleepy Sussex village of Ashden. Aunt Tilly’s visit sparks off a chain of events which threatens to split Ashden apart. Agnes Pilbeam, the Rectory palourmaid, and her sweetheart, Jamie, find themselves bewilderingly caught up. Then, in August, the lamps go out all over Europe, and war bursts open the straitjacket of rural village life.

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.

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.

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.

Mrs Bradley, sharp-eyed detective and celebrated psychiatrist, has decided to spend Christmas with her nephew at his beautiful house in the Cotswolds. It isn’t long before a mystery unfolds. There are strange events occurring in the nearby wood, and local villagers are receiving anonymous threatening letters. Then the snow begins to fall - and a body is discovered. Mrs Bradley is on the case, but she’ll have to hatch an ingenious plan to reveal the truth and find the culprit....

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.

Martha Packer is much loved by everyone in the village of Hillsbridge. As the landlady of The Three Feathers, she runs a respectable establishment and is known for her generosity and care for her family and others around her - she even took in two orphan girls to save them from a life of cruelty in the workhouse. So when Martha announces that she has killed her son, Garth, the community is shocked. Martha refuses to give a reason, but her other children cannot believe their mother is capable of murder and they begin to believe that she is protecting someone - maybe even one of them.

Norfolk, 1939. When the residents of Great Plumstead, a small and charming community in Norfolk, offer to open their homes to evacuees from London, they're expecting to care for children. So when a train carrying expectant mothers pulls into the station, the town must come together to accommodate their unexpected new arrivals....

Edmund, a fine artist and restorer of oil paintings, had sought out finance to set up business: his very own art gallery. Eager to impress his friends, the young man signed on the dotted line. Now, his debt was spiraling out of control. He had just about given up when an invitation arrived on his mat. This was an offer he could hardly refuse.

P. D. James brings a lifetime of reading and writing crime fiction to bear on this personal history of the genre, from the birth of the detective story, through Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle, to the golden age of crime and the rise of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham. There is a chapter on great American crime writers such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, and P. D. James also discusses many of her favourite detectives, from Sherlock Holmes to Kurt Wallander.

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.

On the ancient marshlands of Somerset - a place of mists and magic - a girl grows up in the shadow of the English Civil War, knowing that one day she will inherit the rich estate which belonged to her late mother. Her father, a stern but loving Puritan, once a distinguished soldier in Cromwell's army, fears for his daughter in the poisonous aftermath of the war, and for her vulnerability as an heiress. But above all he fears and misunderstands her scientific passion for butterflies.

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.

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.

1904, London. Lydia Daye adores her husband John, but his secret government job means he is often away. She consoles herself with her small son, Adam, and the knowledge that John's salary allows them to live comfortably. Dolly Ellerway lives just two miles away, but in a different world. Pregnant, she is delighted when the father of her child says he'll marry her, even though he can barely afford it.

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.

Seven-year-old Jocelyn Holt loves her nanny Hannah more than her own mother. When Hannah disappears one summer night, Jo never gets over the loss. Thirty years on, now a young widow with a daughter of her own, Jo is forced to return to her family home, and the mother she’s always despised, just as a skull is pulled out of the lake in the grounds. Could this explain her beloved nanny’s disappearance? What other secrets will that lake give up to the police?

When the Call The Midwife series became bestsellers Jennifer Worth received mountains of letters - not only praising her books, but also from people who remembered the world her books described; life in the east end of London during the late 1940s and early 50s. Often her books touched her readers and they felt moved to write, or they wanted to share their own memories.