The Forgotten Garden – Kate Morton

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The Forgotten Garden - Kate MortonThe Forgotten Garden
Kate Morton

1913. On the eve of the First World War, a little girl is found abandoned after a gruelling ocean voyage from England to Australia. All she can remember of the journey is that a mysterious woman she calls the Authoress had promised to look after her. But the Authoress has vanished without a trace.

1975. Now an old lady, Nell travels to England to discover the truth about her parentage. Her quest leads her to Cornwall, and to a beautiful estate called Blackhurst Manor, which had been owned by the Mountrachet family. What has prompted Nell’s journey after all these years?

2005. On Nell’s death, her granddaughter, Cassandra, comes into a surprise inheritance. Cliff Cottage, in the grounds of Blackhurst Manor, is notorious amongst the locals for the secrets it holds – secrets about the doomed Mountrachet family. But it is at Cliff Cottage, abandoned for years, and in its forgotten garden, that Cassandra will uncover the truth about the family and why the young Nell was abandoned all those decades before.

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The Forbidden Queen – Anne O’Brien

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The Forbidden Queen - Anne O'BrienThe Forbidden Queen
Anne O’Brien

An innocent pawn. A kingdom without a King. A new dynasty will reign…

1415. The jewel in the French crown, Katherine de Valois, is waiting under lock and key for King Henry V. While he’s been slaughtering her kinsmen in Agincourt, Katherine has been praying for marriage to save her from her misery. But the brutal King wants her crown, not her innocent love. For Katherine, England is a lion’s den of greed, avarice and mistrust. And when Katherine is widowed at twenty-one she is a prize ripe for the taking. Her young son the future monarch, her hand in marriage worth a kingdom.

This is a deadly political game; one the Dowager Queen must learn fast. The players – Duke of Gloucester, Edmund Beaufort and Owen Tudor – are circling. Who will have her? Who will ruin her?

This is the story of Katherine de Valois. The forbidden queen who launched the most famous dynasty of all time.

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Elijah’s Mermaid – Essie Fox

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Elijah's Mermaid - Essie FoxElijah’s Mermaid
Essie Fox

Since she was found as a baby, floating in the Thames one foggy night, web toed Pearl has been brought up in a brothel known as the House of Mermaids. Cosseted and pampered there, it is only when her fourteenth birthday approaches that Pearl realises she is to be sold to the highest bidder.

Meanwhile, orphaned twins, Lily and Elijah, have shared an idyllic childhood, raised in a secluded country house with their grandfather, Augustus Lamb. But when Lily and Elijah visit London, a chance meeting with Pearl will have repercussions for all of them, binding their fates together in a dark and dangerous way…

In this bewitching, sensual novel, Essie Fox has written a tale of obsessive love and betrayal, moving from the respectable worlds of Victorian art and literature, and into the shadowy demi-monde of brothels, asylums and freak show tents – a world in which nothing and no one is quite what they seem to be.

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The Book of Lies – Mary Horlock

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The Book of Lies - Mary HorlockThe Book of Lies
Mary Horlock

Life on the tiny island of Guernsey has just become a whole lot harder for fifteen-year-old Cat Rozier. She’s gone from model pupil to murderer, but she swears it’s not her fault. Apparently it’s all the fault of history.

A new arrival at Cat’s high school in 1984, the beautiful and instantly popular Nicolette inexplicably takes Cat under her wing. The two become inseparable–going to parties together, checking out boys, and drinking whatever liquor they can shoplift. But a perceived betrayal sends them spinning apart, and Nic responds with cruel, over-the-top retribution.

Cat’s recently deceased father, Emile, dedicated his adult life to uncovering the truth about the Nazi occupation of Guernsey – from Churchill’s abandonment of the island to the stories of those who resisted – in hopes of repairing the reputation of his older brother, Charlie. Through Emile’s letters and Charlie’s words – recorded on tapes before his own death – a “confession” takes shape, revealing the secrets deeply woven into the fabric of the island… and into the Rozier family story.

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The Somnambulist – Essie Fox

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The Somnambulist - Essie FoxThe Somnambulist
Essie Fox

Every heart holds a secret. But some secrets are best left buried…

When she spots an enigmatic stranger in the audience one night at Wilton’s Music Hall, seventeen-year-old Phoebe Turner doesn’t realise her lie is about to change. Mr Samuels offers her the job of companion to his reclusive wife at Dinwood Court – a grand country house that may well be haunted and which holds the darkest of secrets.

Leaving the hustle of London’s East End, Phoebe finds herself disturbed by her new surroundings. She awakes to hear sobbing in the night and it soon becomes clear that she has not been chosen to work there by chance…

A spellbinding tale of lost love, grief, murder and madness in Victorian England.

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Black Diamonds – Catherine Bailey

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Black Diamonds - Catherine BaileyBlack Diamonds
Catherine Bailey

Wentworth is today a crumbling and forgotten palace in Yorkshire. Yet just a hundred years ago it was the ancestral pile of the Fitzwilliams – an aristocratic clan whose home and life were fuelled by coal mining.

Black Diamonds tells of the Fitzwilliams’ spectacular decline: of inheritance fights; rumours of a changeling and of lunacy; philandering earls; illicit love; war heroism; a tragic connection to the Kennedys; violent death; mining poverty and squalor; and a class war that literally ripped apart the local landscape.

The demise of Wentworth and the Fitzwilliams is a riveting account of the aristocratic decline and fall, set in the grandest house in England.

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The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz – Denis Avey

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The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz - Denis AveyThe Man Who Broke into Auschwitz
Denis Avey

The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz is the true story of a British soldier who marched willingly into Buna-Monowitz, the concentration camp known as Auschwitz III.

Denis Avey was being held in a POW labour camp near Auschwitz III. He had heard of the brutality meted out to the prisoners there and he was determined to witness what he could.

He hatched a plan to swap places with a Jewish inmate and smuggled himself into the camp. He spent the night there on two occasions and experienced at first-hand the cruelty of a place where slave workers had been sentenced to death through labour.

Astonishingly, he survived.

For decades he couldn’t bring himself to revisit the past that haunted his dreams, but now Denis Avey feels able to tell the full story – a tale as gripping as it is moving – which offers us a unique insight into the mind of an ordinary man whose moral and physical courage are almost beyond belief.

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