Lara Everett is a sensitive, childless widow of twenty years. She is settled, has buried her childhood dreams, is financially solvent and addicted to being alone. She would not call herself depressed, just unhappy. However, in her forty-third year, fate allows William (Bill) Lee, a shrewd and resourceful man, a man entirely unsuitable for any woman, to cross her threshold and take hold of her heart. Hypnotised by his sheer physical presence, Lara has no choice but to take the hardest path and realise that it is not the superficial fleshly oddities that are important but something far more formidable and ultimately satisfying. Set in 1969 and with memories going back to World War Two, The Bitter Rose and the Thorn is a narrative account of a woman choosing to abandon her catastrophic past and move towards a more self-fulfilling life.
Miriam's Silver Years (part one) is the fourth in a series of novels describing the life and family of Miriam Barker, née Baxter, a busy East London woman who was born in 1907. This edition deals with the years 1948 to 1955, a period when rationing and coupons still applied, and the long shadow of the Second World War still hung over Britain. Through Miriam and her three sisters, we see how they cope with their increasingly complicated lives; the introduction of self-employment, marriages, births, deaths, moving house and television, as they embraced the second half of the twentieth century, and the radical changes which followed World War Two.
The reason the transgendered man, Margaret 'Bill' Allen became a murderer has confounded criminologists. Since his execution at Strangeways Prison in January 1949 for the brutal murder of the eccentric Nancy Ellen Chadwick, sociologists (particularly those working in the sociology of deviance) and those in the behavioural sciences, such as psychologists and psychiatrists as well as lay authors have attempted to understand why. In this short book, a transgendered woman herself, Molly Cutpurse attempts to cast some new and personal light on what has become known as a tragic and misunderstood case. Of Bill's guilt, there is no doubt. But upon examining the details of his life, there remains a degree of shame over the way he was treated at his trial and after in prison, and of the lack of mercy afforded to him.
Livina is a female orphan infant raised by the state and trained, military style, to become a professional executioner working for one of the UK's top secure prisons. Hers is a story of retribution and redemption set in an intelligent, capitalist society obsessively consumed with voting and finance.Executrix is a satirical and critical drama set in a not so distant dystopian future. Through a dark obsession, motherly pain and courage, she alters the course of her own evolution.Horror story? Love story? You decide.
A Live Lived is best described as counterfactual, and originating from a true story. The Thompson and Bywaters affair, which, during 1922-23, scandalized England. It is based upon true events. Stepping into Edith's unchallenged life, we meet that which could have been. A life authentic, emotionally moving and even humorous.A Live Lived is a family saga centering on the life of Edith Thompson had she been allowed to live. It focuses on her one child, her new husband, her family and profession. We journey with her as the twentieth century unfolds, as she experiences the Second World War, and after into her old age. She begins new relationships, watches her grandchild and her other adopted children grow. Finally, she remarries, moves out of the country, and finds refuge from the publicity she has generated all her life. The publicity of the woman who was nearly hung.
The Herb Girl is a psychological novel set in and around Purfleet in Essex in 1923 and concerns the great divide; spiritualism, the complication that may be the after-life and our relationship with it. By way of a damning gypsy's curse, a Scots-born female rogue, savage inexplicable accidents, murder and two of the oldest sexual dysfunctions known to civilisation, The Herb Girl chronicles a few months in the life and close family of a bewitching, heavily-pregnant, Cornish-bred herbalist, whose life is not entirely guiltless. The Herb Girl is a self-contained maze, a story involving poisoning, manslaughter, spiritualism, explosives, and rage. But who is the narrator? What is his wholly abhorrent secret and why is he so personally judgmental?
Hoping to emulate his hero, the great fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, Mr Gabriel Chukwumereije is an arrogant, wealthy sociopath from Ghana who arrives in London. His only problem is...it is 1960.
In 1975, Mary Park, the only daughter of a wealthy and respected dynasty whose family accommodation is in Bloomsbury Square, London, is being driven beyond endurance by domestic and marital responsibilities, financial pressures and intellectual frustration. A separation from her philandering husband and the concern of her teenage daughter taking drugs occupy a large amount of her time. However, rumours, arriving from an unprincipled and grievous mathematician, a man desperate to redeem his own family heritage, informs her that her grandfather once built an extraordinary machine which offered the possibility of changing the entire world. Mary will need to confront her family's shadowy past and endure obscure and repugnant painful memories before she can unravel the mystery of what her mother used to call, 'Bleak House'.
Harry Whittle is a sixteen year old son of an emotionally frustrated butler working in London. He fails in his attempt to join the army in 1916 because of his age. As a punishment for his recklessness, Harry is sent to work on a wealthy estate in Devon where he befriends the owner's sixteen year old daughter, Blanche who is slightly deranged due to her younger brothers abruptly disappearing five years previously. While walking in the woods, miserable and homesick, Harry and Blanche are unaccountably and instantaneously catapulted into the unsolved misadventure of what happened to Blanche's brothers. Henceforth, they are forced to endure a fantastic and inexplicable agenda of unimaginable circumstances, so scarcely credible that madness threatens to engulf them as they hope to return to normality.
Set in the classic time of 1972, this story is about a battle between the ancient and respectable company of corset makers owned by Sir Cyril Strumpet The Third and his arch enemy, Sidney Rabbit who sets up his own company Aphrodisiac, a place of swinging, knicker-clad females.
The Angel From The Sea is a supernatural story and describes the events which occur after an Edwardian young lady called Clara pleads for assistance against a member of her family who is brutal towards her. Whereupon, one of the oldest feminine forces in the world appears as the uncontrollable Moganna. However, having demanded the presence of this ungovernable intelligence, Clara and her heinous family find themselves at the mercy of Moganna's ruthlessness and inhumanity. Moganna refers to herself as an angel, but as the innocent Clare soon discovers, a better name for the power she has unleashed is, a Cacodaemon.
Mrs Miriam Baxter, an ordinary London housewife apart from being an ex convict, is devoted entirely to her family, which consists of her two children, parents and three sisters. She would call herself unremarkable. However, it was her determination and courage which took her and her family through the Second World War. In Miriam's War, there are no hints of heightened suspense, no clues as to where her story could veer to; it just is.
Obsessions is an irregular glimpse into the pennilessness life of Miss Hester Martin-Compter, the only child of a once wealthy banking family, destined by a deranged mind to live amongst the poverty of the Whitechapel area of London during the interwar years, World War Two and the nineteen fifties. A bewildering, self-obsessed passion, infatuations by others and a tenuous, bizarre connection with Whitechapel's most infamous murderer, Jack the Ripper shapes her life and destiny as she and her mother, Cecelia learns to live amongst the impoverished residents about which the child previously had no knowledge. At first, living a hand-to-mouth existence, and becoming friends with a variety of idiosyncratic local characters, as decades pass, Hester's introverted self disappears as through marriage and friendships gained, she learns to trust herself as she embraces the opportunities of the middle of the twentieth century.
On the 7 September 1940, the London Blitz began in ernest. This was when the Nazi Luftwaffe machine switched from daylight raids on military targets to heavy bomber raids at night focusing on large cities. Miriam's Family Blitz, already broadly conceived in, Miriam's War by the same author, places her family's first fifteen days of the London Blitz under a magnifying glass. A period in which the mundane lives of her close family and friends in the East End found themselves experiencing front-line warfare for the first time, undergoing the inconvenient blackout, general restrictions and rationing. From the family's once relatively quiet life, and with Miriam, released from Holloway prison only one year previously, the intense and very real fear of invasion, gassing, destruction and death occupies almost their every thought.
2001. An autumn break for a young London mother.An isolated stretch of Dorset coastline.An unexplained phenomenon.Daffodils in Autumn tells the compelling story of a young woman's horrific descent into paranoia and madness dictated by the desires of a female genius. The young woman, and her daughter's past, present and future become meaningless, as not one thing appears to be what it is.
Miriam's Presence at Christmas covers the last days of 2009 at the old house that Miriam, Roy and Rafa used to own. It is now Christmas and Miriam's now middle-aged youngest daughter, Florence and her two adult daughters, Faith and Betty are preparing for Christmas amid one of the worst snowstorms to befall London in recent years. There are incidences aplenty; Rafa to be visited in a care home, a disaster or two, headstrong children, a husband who needs to be divorced and old and long memories are stirred. But as Faith, heavily pregnant with her third child comes to realise, the spirit of Miriam (real or imaginary?) is not so far away.
It is the summer of 1945, and Miriam and her extended family are weary but disciplined by war, and accustomed to austerity. Throughout this period, she deals with more deaths, ill health, moving house, rationing and accidents; all the while guiding her loved ones through the deprivation and destitution that is the East-End of London. Yet, there are births, a new relationship for her and marriages. Conscription and the introduction of the National Health arrive at the end in 1948. As with, Miriam's War, and, A Year in Holloway, she copes daily, struggling with a situation that is unique and difficult. Her pathos, determination, humour and love are all she has.
Edith Thompson-Executed consists of two books: The Following Years is based on the true and tragic events, which occurred during 1922-1923 and ended in the deaths of two men and a woman. The Thompson and Bywaters Case. It is a semi-fictional story about how the family dealt with the the horror, guilt and shame of having a family member executed. A Live Lived is best described as counterfactual. It is based upon true events. Stepping into Edith's unchallenged life, we meet that which could have been. A life authentic, emotionally moving and even humorous. A Live Lived is a family saga centering on the life of Edith Thompson had she been allowed to live. It focuses on her one child, her new husband, her family and profession. We see she remarries, moves out of the country, and finds refuge from the publicity she has generated all her life. The publicity of the woman who was nearly hung
The Following Years is based on the true and tragic events, which occurred during 1922-1923 and ended in the deaths of two men and a woman. The Thompson and Bywaters Case. So outrageous and awful was the woman's execution that her case was discussed in parliament decades later. The ordeal she was forced to endure still evokes disgust even today, some 82 years later.The Following Years is a semi-fictional story about the family of Edith Thompson and how they dealt with the the horror, guilt and shame of having a family member executed. It follows the following years in the life of the Graydon family concentrating on Edith's sister Avis.
Holloway, House of Correction is an alternative fantasy and documents the unlikely friendship between two women; Victoria, wealthy, beautiful and recently married, and the impoverished Margaret, the only surviving daughter of Victorian England's most prolific serial murderer, Mary Ann Cotton. Both live close to the old Holloway Gaol when it became a women's only prison in the spring of 1902.
In the eighth and final novel describing the Morrow family of Newgate Street, we find them twenty-one years later during 1966. The business is now being managed by Maggie and Anthony who do not have a great deal of hope for its long-term future due to the changing requirements of Londoners, many of whom are daily commuters and not members of local families who had lived in the area for generations. Maud and Richard are now in their seventies and retired. They live above the hardware store but still show a keen interest in it, as well as their family and friends. Therefore, the elderly couple find living in the modern world difficult because not only are they surrounded by powerful memories but find it increasingly difficult to accept the contemporary concepts that the youth enjoy. With every passing year they know the world that offered them the best years of their life is fast disappearing as their deep affection for each other increases.
Miriam is now eighty-seven and after Roy's death, still lives in the large vicarage in Wanstead with Rafa alongside Rafa, Florence and her twin girls, Faith and Betty. It is now a time of reflection, the promise of a great, great grandchild, and long conversations about the events and conditions that shaped her life. Yet even as her body moves inexorably into extreme old age, events continue around her that proves that even wheelchair bound, her clear and sound mind, alongside her remarkable memory, can still dispense positive advice and be more than useful to those who are charged with caring for her. Miriam's Last Year also sees Rafa Barker in her twilight years when she too has become alone once more, abandoned by her one and only daughter over a shameful event from which she cannot face. A time when, surrounded by her close family and friend, she too takes a reflective sad look back on a lifetime of service and love as she cares for Miriam during her final days.
The last year of a lower class London family and friends living and working in Newgate Street before war engulfs them. There are funerals, affairs, deception, violence, and even a murder. And to those familiar with the Miriam series, there is a surprising visitor. A novel with domineering mothers, obsessions with famous trials and hangings and frustration that the little corporal from Germany was going to take over their lives. Yet amongst the anger and heartache of their everyday existence, many of their frustrations arrive from realising that they are subject to an unknowable future...
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