It is the year 2021 and Kaela is twenty-three years old when her father shares his secret about an extraordinary event that changed his very existence fifteen years earlier. She was taught many lessons in moral principles growing up, but it's rare that the most profound of them would be put to the test. A convergence of events gives her father the opportunity to teach her one of the greatest lessons of all.

Black Country Orphan is a moving story of the courage and strength of women, by the Sunday Times bestselling author Annie Murray. The early 1900s: Cradley Heath, a town in the Black Country near Birmingham and centre of the world's chain-making trade. Lucy Butler, a young girl crippled by a cruel accident, lives with her two brothers and widowed mother, a chain-maker barely making ends meet. When tragedy strikes, the Butler family is separated and Lucy is taken in by Bertha Hipkiss, another impoverished chain maker, struggling to look after her own family. Lucy, while feeling the loss of her own family, relies on the company of Bertha's two sons, charming Clem and straight-laced John. Though clever at school, Lucy knows she must leave and earn her keep, working many hours in the backyard forge. The five women toiling side by side, inevitably have their own friendships and squabbles. But they're united in their hatred of loathsome middleman Seth Dawson, who treats the women with contempt, and keeps their pay punishingly low. But by the 1910s, there is a movement stirring, as across the country workers begin unionising for their rights. For Lucy, Bertha and the women of Cradley Heath, the promise of a better life seems almost too much to hope for - and the fight may end up costing them everything . . .

The last thing that Elizabeth de Burgh de Bruys, Queen of Scotland, remembers is falling into a caldera and burning up. But now, as she opens her eyes, she is amazed to find herself in an unknown land. Even more bizarre is the fact that she knows the handsome man standing before her, as she has just followed him into this strange world. She hopes that he might know who she is and what has happened.The young man, it seems, is Moses, a seeker of knowledge who has come to Amarna in Egypt to learn from Niul, a teacher and prince whose father's monumental blunder has brought him eternal retribution. As Niul and his favorite pupil, Scota, eldest daughter of the Pharaoh, witness the historic conflict between Moses and the Pharaoh, they know they will soon be caught in the crossfire of a battle of the gods. They prepare to flee and build a new nation-- taking with them a mysterious stone that was once an infant child, intimately connected to Elizabeth's past and future.In this historical fantasy, a special stone begins to melt away, revealing one with the power to change the world and transform a myth into reality, as a sentinel posts, a mother awaits her fate, and a Scythian prince wonders if he knows too much.

Involves a West Virginia mountaineer family, father, mother, five sons and daughter. Their complicated rise from abject poverty to become multi-millionaires through their efforts in the coal-mining industry. From a small outcrop of coal on their unproductive farm, they eventually own thirty production mines and become the largest coal corporation in the world, controlling the coal industry in West Virginia for over sixty years. Poverty stricken but ambitious, in the year 1850, Matt Mattison secretly kills Abe, a Jewish itinerant peddler, who visits his home periodically, using Abe's money to open a small drift mine on his farm. He is assisted in the venture by his five sons who are unaware of their father's sudden source of funds. (A true story). At the birth of his daughter's illegitimate son, Matt realized that his daughter, Gem, and Abe had a clandestine love affair, planned to marry and that Abe had impregnated to comely Gem. Matt conscious-stricken becomes psychotic. Gem, suspicious of her father, grieving that the father of her child had given his life for her family's prosperity, refuses any finances earned from their mining endeavors, leaves home, adverse circumstances impel her to become proprietress of the town's bawdy house. The plot involves Gem's life, embarrassing to the family but offers amusing incidents in the bordello that becomes public. Her brothers push the mining business to great success becoming powerful financially and politically. Her bastard son (known later as "A.P." in the industry), well educated but burdened by his mother's profession, becomes president of the world's largest coal corporation. Marries a socialite, interested in breeding show horses, they build pretentious mansion on 365 acres, own private railroad train, ocean-going yacht, lavish apartment in New York City. The novel follows several generations of family, involving many complications, romances, pathos of the five brothers, threatened loss of their mines through bitterly fought union strikes and devastating mine explosions. Much of this story is true and interwoven with fiction. All character names are fictitious. Interesting coal mining facts as they effect the family are included. As well as the complete portrayal of the cruel exploration of the miners as the greedy and often inhumane madness of the coal barons to accumulate excessive wealth. Now that coal is becoming an important factor in our energy crisis, this story is timely. Readers will become educated about the problems in this important industry as the story of this once poverty stricken family unfolds.

The start of a brand NEW series from bestselling author Rosie ClarkeCambridgeshire - March 1939 As the clouds of war begin to gather in Europe, the Talbot family of rural Blackberry Farm will be torn apart, just as so many families all over the world will be. Life will never be the same again. Whilst in London, the Salmons family will feel the pain of parting and loss. Brought together by war, the two families become intertwined and, as the outlook looks bleak, they must draw on each other's strength to fight through the hard times. Lizzie Johnson and Tom were sweethearts until a mistake caused a terrible rift. Lizzie takes herself off to London to heal the pain in a glamorous new job but she still loves Tom. His pride has been hurt - but deep down inside Tom still cares. Can they find happiness before their chance is gone and the whole world is swept into the terrible madness of war?

This is a tale of woe of Meenakshi, an orphan girl from southern India. Like the thousands of orphans in India, she lives a life in which others determine her every move. For her, every event is predestined.

Many of us are fortunate enough to be told and to believe that our destiny lies within our own hands. In the case of unfortunates like Meenakshi, that is not the case. All of their efforts to decide life for themselves are futile. Fate, for them, is the puppet master. No matter how hard they try there is no outwitting Destiny for Destiny always triumphs!

The Sunday Times bestselling sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel's Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy. Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020 Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020 'Mantel has taken us to the dark heart of history...and what a show' The Times 'If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?' England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith's son from Putney emerges from the spring's bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry's regime to breaking point, Cromwell's robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him? With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man's vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage. A Guardian Book of the Year * A Times Book of the Year * A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year * A Sunday Times Book of the Year * A New Statesman Book of the Year * A Spectator Book of the Year Sunday Times Bestseller (08/03/2020)

A dramatic saga of love, scandal and survival. When Tamar Deane is orphaned at 17 in a small Cornish village, she seizes her one chance for a new life and emigrates to New Zealand. Alone and frightened on the Plymouth quay she is befriended by an extraordinary woman. Myrna Mactaggart is also travelling to Auckland, with plans to establish the finest brothel in the Southern Hemisphere. Myrna's friendship is unconventional to say the least, but proves invaluable when tamar makes some disastrous choices in the new colony. Tamar is the first in a sweeping family saga covering several generations and encompassing the Boer War and the First and Second World Wars. Deborah Challinor successfully brings colonial New Zealand's complex social and racial interactions alive through a tight and exciting plot with compelling characters and a strong, dramatic story which will delight fans of this genre.

A richly textured novel tells a story of sex and longing, love and loss, and of the deceit that can lie at the heart of family relationships. "Each chapter...has the seductive aura of a finely crafted story. Liars and Saints is instructive and bittersweet and yet somehow never nostalgic" (Los Angeles Times).Set in California, Liars and Saints follows four generations of the Catholic Santerre family from World War II to the present. In a family driven as much by jealousy and propriety as by love, an unspoken tradition of deceit is passed from generation to generation. When tragedy shatters their precarious domestic lives, it takes astonishing courage and compassion to bring them back together. By turns funny and disturbing, irreverent and profound, Liars and Saints is a masterful display of Maile Meloy's prodigious gifts and of her penetrating insight into an extraordinary American family and into the nature of human love. "Meloy may be the first great American realist of the twenty-first century: The Santerres aren't real but they feel like they are, and the reader will not soon forget them" (The Boston Globe).

Against all odds, Brent Kingman is alive. He survived the atrocities in Vietnam, and he returned to his family home at Kingman Ranch. His loved ones surround him, including the love of his life, Jamaica Phillips, who he saved from the claws of death twice since his return home. They plan to marry, but fate intervenes, as Brent finds himself falling victim to malaria, among other unidentified illnesses picked up overseas. Brent's illnesses cause hallucinations, which take him back to the horrors of war and beyond-to a time when he was a little boy, seeking solace from his father. Time and again, Brent asks his father to "Keep the Boogeyman away." Sam Kingman is devastated to see his son so weak and ill, after all he went through in Vietnam. Why do they deserve this? Why does Brent deserve what looks like punishment? The Boogeyman is part II of the Kingman-1971 series, following part I, Jamaica. The Kingman family has suffered much, but young Brent Kingman has suffered the most. He survived the war, only to return ill and unable to adjust to normal life. As the hallucinations threaten to take him under, his family and loving fiancee must pull together. Together, they will keep the Boogeyman away. They're the only ones who can.