Showing results by narrator "Annabelle Dowler" in All Categories

London swelters amid post-war reconstruction, while continued rationing and the black-market fuel the rising crime wave and the empires of gangland bosses are protected by corruption and bribery. During a party in Clapham a student nurse from the South London Hospital for Women and Children dies in a fall from a balcony. Is it an accident as the local police believe? Or something more sinister?

When Jemima Jenkins's beloved Pa passes away leaving her orphaned, she is cruelly thrown out of her lodgings and dismissed from her cherished job as a schoolmistress. Offered a temporary home with her best friend Betty, Jemima is determined to avoid the workhouse and get back on her feet, even daring to hope about one day opening her own school for poor children. But when she uncovers a mysterious letter, revealing shocking revelations about her past, Jemima's plans are cast into doubt.

Liverpool, 1848. Meg Shaw is the middle child of eight siblings, not quite old enough to bring in a wage to help her struggling family, but not young enough to be a babe to be cared for. When the family realise they can't feed all the children, Meg makes a choice. She volunteers to go to the workhouse for one season, and she'll take her little sister, Rosie, with her. As long as they are together, they can make it through. But the moment they enter the workhouse, Meg and Rosie are separated.

Liverpool, 1847. At seventeen, Delilah Shaw is the eldest of the eight Shaw siblings, and the one who must take charge when her mother and brother die in a tragic manner, and her father is left disabled in an accident at the docks. Taking care of the cooking, cleaning, washing and childcare is hard enough, but when they can no longer afford to live in the family home, Delilah must make the heartbreaking choice to leave it and to take two of her younger sisters to the workhouse.

Annie Shaw longs to be taken seriously. At 14, she's fed up of being babied by her big sister Delilah. It's true that Delilah has been the closest thing to a mother that Annie or any of her siblings have ever known, but she's secretive about the past and won't let her little sister out of her sight. When Annie's old friend Clara visits with tales of the good money that can be made at the cotton mill outside Ormskirk, she sees her chance at adventure and runs away. The work is gruelling and Annie is shocked to witness children as young as eight working long days around dangerous machinery.

In 1916, Sister Helen Hopgood was sent with a team of nurses to care for wounded soldiers at Merewood Farm, a temporary military hospital in Hampshire. Now the war is over, only five patients remain – and she is the only nurse. The last ward must close, and Helen is doing all she can to find new homes for the injured servicemen. Joseph Wintringham has to sell the farm to keep Merewood Manor. But since the murder of Nurse Taplin, locals believe the place is cursed - perhaps by the doomed nurse or by the patients who perished from their war wounds.

Winter 1946. One cold dark night, as a devastated London shivers through the transition to post-war life, a young nurse goes missing from the South London Hospital for Women & Children. Her body is discovered hours later behind a locked door. Two women from the hospital join forces to investigate the case. Determined not to return to the futures laid out for them before the war, the unlikely sleuths must face their own demons and dilemmas as they pursue - The Midnight Man.

The weatherworn cottage Clachan has always been Jo Wilding’s sanctuary, a blissful escape from her tumultuous home life. From the first summer Rachel invited her to join the Willoughby family in the wilds of Scotland, she fell in love with the sea air, sandy beach and Tristan, Rachel’s older brother… All these years later, Clachan is where their most important occasions and conversations take place, so when Rachel organises a weekend there, Jo never suspects that this weekend will change everything.