Showing results by narrator "Nicola Barber" in All Categories

In this short tale for fans of Cinderella and Bridgerton, Pearl’s ball gown may carry the whiff of mothballs, but her dance card for the duke’s ball is full…until she loses a shoe. In her enthusiasm, Pearl’s foot slides out of her too-big damask slipper in the middle of a dance and gets kicked around the ballroom to the amusement of the sophisticated guests. What is a spirited but clumsy heroine to do? Can her composure and good humor save her social dignity?

Eleanor, the charming manager of a cozy tea shop, enjoys the transportive ritual of making a cup of Masala Chai tea, reminisces about the tea's origins, and delights in the beauty of her quaint English village during the holidays. Bedtime stories are narrated by the world's most celebrated voices and written with no beginning, middle, or end so you don't stay up to hear what happens next. They're interesting enough to give your mind something to focus on, but delivered in a way that encourages sleep.

At the age of 22, Jennifer Worth left her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in postwar London’s East End slums. The colorful characters she met while delivering babies all over London - from the plucky, warm-hearted nuns with whom she lived to the woman with 24 children who couldn't speak English to the prostitutes and dockers of the city’s seedier side - illuminate a fascinating time in history.

First published in 1924, The Man in the Brown Suit is a thrilling adventure and murder mystery by Agatha Christie. The protagonist is Anne Beddingfield, the orphaned daughter of a famous archaeologist, who goes to live with her father’s solicitor and his wife in London. Anne is searching for an adventure and something exciting to occupy her time when she is witness to the sudden death of a man at Hyde Park Corner tube station when the man falls onto the electrified train track and is killed instantly.

London: 1968. Liz Houghton is languishing as an obituary writer at a London newspaper when a young girl’s disappearance captivates the city. If Liz can break the story, it’s her way into the newsroom. She already has a scoop: Her best friend Marisa is a police officer who is assigned to the case. Liz follows Marisa to Dorset, where they make another disturbing discovery. Over two decades earlier, three girls disappeared while evacuating from London. One was found murdered in the woods near a train line. The other two were never seen again.

Jessie Archer is a member of the Athena Protocol, an elite organization of female spies who enact vigilante justice around the world. Athena operatives are never supposed to shoot to kill - so when Jessie can’t stop herself from pulling the trigger, she gets kicked out of the organization, right before a huge mission to take down a human trafficker in Belgrade. Jessie needs to right her wrong and prove herself, so she starts her own investigation into the trafficking.

Ten years ago, the renegade demigod known as the Kinslayer returned. His armies of monsters issued from the pits of the earth, spearheaded by his brutal Yorughan soldiers. Thrones toppled and cities fell as he drove all before him. And then he died. A handful of lucky heroes and some traitors amongst his own, and the great Kinslayer was no more. Celestaine was one such hero and now she has tasked herself to correct the worst excesses of the Kinslayer and bring light back to her torn-up world. With two Yorughan companions she faces fanatics, war criminals, and the monsters and minions the Kinslayer left behind....

Ridley Pearson brings us the origins of the rivalry between literature's most famous enemies - Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty - told from the perspective of James' observant little sister, Moria. Before James grew up to be a ruthless, remorseless villain, he was a curious boy from Boston, with a penchant for trouble and an acid tongue. Thrown into a boarding school against his wishes, James winds up rooming with a most unlikely companion: a lanky British know-it-all named Sherlock Holmes.

With the apocalyptic threat of moonfall looming ever closer, Nyx and her allies must venture into the eternally sunblasted lands to search for an ancient weapon buried untold millennia ago. All the while, enemies close upon her flanks, and a greater danger lurks ahead. For beneath a desert turned to glass, hidden from the scorching heat, life thrives—both wondrous and monstrous. But a more fearsome menace lies even deeper, where an ancient army has been seeded to protect a secret from any who dare seek it out.

Tanya is no ordinary girl. She can see fairies. But not the fairies we imagine. Evil fairies who cast spells on her, rousing her from her sleep, and propelling her out of bed. At wit's end with her daughter's inexplicable behavior, Tanya's mother sends her away to live with her grandmother at Elvesden Manor, a secluded countryside mansion on the outskirts of a peculiar Essex town. There is plenty to explore, as long as Tanya stays away from Hangman's Wood - a vast stretch of forest, full of catacombs and notorious for people losing their lives.

I Let You Go follows Jenna Gray as she moves to a ramshackle cottage on the remote Welsh coast, trying to escape the memory of the car accident that plays again and again in her mind and desperate to heal from the loss of her child and the rest of her painful past. At the same time, the novel tracks the pair of Bristol police investigators trying to get to the bottom of this hit-and-run.

Elizabeth wasn’t born to be queen. But when her uncle abdicates and her father steps in as king, everything in her life changes. There is one thing that never wavers, however: her endearing love of her Corgis—especially the new puppy Susan, a gift for her eighteenth birthday. Susan is by her side during Elizabeth’s WWII service, falling in love with Philip and getting married, the death of her father King George VI, her accession to the throne, the birth of her first child, and the early struggles with running a country—an ever-present reminder to find the balance between self and crown.

Paris in the 1920s: It is a city of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche jazz venues like the Chameleon Club draw expats, artists, libertines, and parvenus looking to indulge their true selves. It is at the Chameleon where the striking Lou Villars, an extraordinary athlete and scandalous cross-dressing lesbian, finds refuge among the club's loyal denizens, including the rising photographer Gabor Tsenyi, the socialite and art patron Baroness Lily de Rossignol, and the caustic American writer Lionel Maine.

Discovered on the doorstep of a country estate in Wiltshire, England, the infant Fanny is raised to womanhood by her adoptive parents, Lord and Lady Bellars. Fanny wants to become the epic poet of the age, but her plans are dashed when she is ravished by her libertine stepfather. Fleeing to London, Fanny falls in with idealistic witches and highwaymen who teach her of worlds she never knew existed. After toiling in a London brothel that caters to literati, Fanny embarks on a series of adventures that teach her what she must know to live and prosper as a woman.

1876. Among the filth and depravity of Covent Garden's flower markets, orphaned Irish sisters Flora and Rosie Flynn sell posies of violets and watercress to survive. It is a pitiful existence, made bearable only by each other's presence. When they become separated, the decision of a desperate woman sets their lives on very different paths.

The New York Times best-selling authors of The Glass Ocean and The Forgotten Room return with a glorious historical adventure that moves from the dark days of two World Wars to the turbulent years of the 1960s, in which three women with bruised hearts find refuge at Paris’ legendary Ritz hotel. The heiress...the Resistance fighter...the widow...three women whose fates are joined by one splendid hotel.

The adventure continues in this sixth book in the New York Times best-selling series.

A gifted student foretells an apocalypse. Her reward is a sentence of death. Fleeing into the unknown, she is drawn into a team of outcasts: A broken soldier, who once again takes up the weapons he’s forbidden to wield and carves a trail back home. A drunken prince, who steps out from his beloved brother's shadow and claims a purpose of his own. An imprisoned thief, who escapes the crushing dark and discovers a gleaming artifact—one that will ignite a power struggle across the globe

When Alice TodHunter Moon was five years old, she saw a beautiful golden Dragon Boat fly over her PathFinder village. She knew at once that the boat was Magykal. That was years ago, before her mother died, her father disappeared at sea, and the Garmin took her best friend, Ferdie. Now it's up to Tod and Ferdie's brother Oskar to rescue Ferdie from the Garmins' keeper, the malevolent Lady.

Molly Murphy - now Molly Sullivan - is a year into her marriage, expecting her first child, and confined to the life of a housewife. She’s restless and irritable in the enforced idleness of pregnancy and the heat of a New York summer in 1905. So when a trip to the post office brings a letter addressed to her old detective agency asking her to locate a missing Irish serving maid, Molly figures it couldn’t hurt to at least ask around, despite her promise to Daniel to give up her old career as a detective. On the same day, Molly learns that five babies have been kidnapped in the past month.