Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in 20th Century

May 1942. Thousands of American GIs are stationed across eastern England building airfields to bomb Germany. Cambridge is a 'liberty town' - a hot spot for 'Yanks' on leave. DI Eden Brooke is called to the aerodrome five miles east of the city when the remains of an airman, identified by his dog...

Manchester, 1936 Fascism looms in Europe, and Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts are on the rise. Meanwhile, aspiring artist Rose is drawn to an unlikely stranger, unaware her future is about to be caught up in the growing storm. Facing straitened circumstances, following the death of their clergyman...

September, 1942. Jo Hardy, a 22-year-old ferry pilot, is delivering a Spitfire when she has the unnerving experience of someone shooting at her aircraft. A few days later, she hears that another ferry pilot has been killed when her aircraft crashed in the same area of Kent. Although the death has been attributed to ‘pilot error’, Jo is convinced there is a link between the two incidents. Jo takes her suspicions to Maisie Dobbs.

Singapore, 1942. As Japanese troops sweep down Malaysia and into Singapore, a village is ransacked, leaving only two survivors and one tiny child. In a neighbouring village, 17-year-old Wang Di is bundled into the back of a troop carrier and shipped off to a Japanese military brothel where she is forced into sexual slavery. After 60 years of silence, what she saw and experienced there still haunts her present. 

In the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother, Robert, just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time. This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common?

In July 1944, Arielle von Auspeck arrives at the glamorous Hotel Ritz in occupied Paris. Half-French, half-German, she is happy to be back in France, where she her husband, Gregor, a retired colonel, will join her soon from Germany. Arielle and Gregor have thus far been able to hide their private opposition to Hitler. Then her world falls apart. She receives word that Gregor was part of Operation Valkyrie and a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in Poland, and has been shot as a traitor.

In 1930s Berlin, dark days dawn under Hitler's Third Reich. For nineteen-year-old Sophia Alexander, life will never be the same. The daughter of a respected doctor, Sophia has always believed that her destiny is to look after others, and as the persecution of Jewish families begins, she joins a group of dissidents who are committed to helping them to safety.

Since the house was built in 1810, the Danes have always lived at Woodspring. Over the generations it has given them shelter, solace and joy. War brings change, and the next three generations of the family will lead very different lives, at home and abroad. Peace is shattered, pain is unavoidable, loves are found and lost, but Woodspring is constant, and will always draw them back...

Tommaso is just about making it work: travelling abroad for his job, helping his girlfriend with her two unruly sons, and keeping up with the eccentricities of his Italian grandmother, Alma. But as Alma grows increasingly troubled by strange and unsettling memories, Tommaso realises that there...

Though war rages across mainland Europe and London is strafed by German aircraft, the little village of Pipley in Hertfordshire bustles along much as it always has. Adrift since her best friend, George, joined the Royal Air Force, 22-year-old Olive Bright fills her days by helping at her father's veterinary practice and tending to her beloved racing pigeons. Desperate to do her bit, Olive hopes that the National Pigeon Service will enlist Bright Lofts' expertise and use their highly trained birds to deliver critical, coded messages for His Majesty's Forces. 

Hetty Heinrich is a young girl growing up under Nazi rule. With an SS Officer father, a brother in the Luftwaffe and a member of the BDM, Hetty is the epitome of a perfect German child. But Walter changes everything. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, perfect-in-every-way Walter. The boy who saved her life. A Jew. As she falls more and more in love with a man who is against all she has been taught, Hetty begins to question everything. Will the steady march of dark forces destroy their world, or can love ultimately triumph?

It is 1941, and the devastating loss of life following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor leaves best friends Audrey and Lizzie distraught and bereft as they lose someone they both love deeply. As they come to terms with their grief, their resolve to play a worthwhile role towards the war effort is strengthened. As trained nurses they volunteer for the army medivac corps and are sent to England where they join a team who fly on dangerous missions to the Front to bring back wounded soldiers.

November 1944. A German rocket strikes London and five young lives are atomised in an instant. November 1944. That rocket never lands. A single second in time is altered and five young lives go on - to experience all the unimaginable changes of the 20th century. Because maybe there are always other futures. Other chances.

April, 1945. As the Americans storm the Buchenwald concentration camp, among the survivors are Jakob and Emmanuelle, barely more than teenagers. Each of them has lost everything and everyone in the unspeakable horrors of the war. But when they meet, they find hope and comfort in each other. They marry and build a happy, prosperous life for themselves and their new family, but their pasts cast a long shadow over the present....

When Julia flees her unhappy marriage for the handsome tailor Eve Perret, she expects her life from now on will be a challenge, not least because the year is 1911. They leave everything behind to settle in Vienna, but their happiness is increasingly diminished by Julia's longing for a child. Ada Bauer's wealthy industrialist family have sent her to Dr Freud in the hope that he can fix her mutism and do so without a scandal. But help will soon come for Ada from an unexpected quarter and change many lives irrevocably.

The Palazzo Colombina is home to the Uccello family: three generations of men, trapped together in the dusty palace on Venice's Grand Canal. Awkward 15-year-old Nico. His distant, business-focused father. And his beloved grandfather, Paolo. Paolo is dying. But before he passes, he has secrets he's waited his whole life to share. 

A beautifully written tale based on the true-life story of Varian Fry, called "the artists' Schindler," who rescued thousands of Europe's finest creative minds from certain death in WWII. In 2000, Sophie Cass, an ambitious journalist, may have finally found her big break. Convinced a celebrated...

Rosalind Franklin knows that to be a woman in a man's world is to be invisible. In the 1940s science is a gentleman's profession, and it appears there are plenty of colleagues who want to keep it that way. After being segregated at Cambridge, then ignored and put down in the workplace, she has no intention of being seen as a second-class citizen and throws everything into proving her worth. But despite her success in unlocking the very secret of life, the ultimate glory is claimed by the men she left in her wake.

London, 1936: At twenty-one, Kate Grifferty is a press photographer in a Fleet Street agency, an unusual job for a young woman. But Kate is both talented and daring, recklessly going wherever the story might be—including, one October day, to an anti-fascism protest in East London. There, she meets David Rabatkin, a brilliant Jewish medical student. While his idealistic brother is eager to go to Spain and join the fight for the Republic, David knows where his path lies: at home, fulfilling the expectations of his profession and his family.

1942. When Helda Dahlstrøm flees her abusive husband and Nazi-occupied Norway with her eight-year-old son she doesn't know if they'll make it out alive. In her desperate journey to safety she'll find safety on the rocky shores of the Shetland Islands, rescued by Canadian Flight Sergeant Bill Gauthier. As WWII's destruction rages at their doorsteps, can love find its way through the rubble?