Showing results for "Annette Chown" in Literature & Fiction

Newly married Natasha has the perfect house, a loving husband, and a beautiful little girl called Emily. She’d have it all if it wasn’t for Jen, her husband’s ex-wife who just won’t leave them alone. Then Natasha returns home one day to find her husband and Emily gone without trace. Desperate to get her daughter back, Natasha will do anything even if it means accepting an offer of help from Jen.

Everyone thinks I’m living the perfect life. I have my dream job, a stunning apartment, and glamourous friends – who know nothing about my dark past. So I’m shocked when I run into Anna, who I haven’t seen in eighteen years. Everything about her reminds me of the life I’ve left behind. But as her eyes fill with tears and she tells me she’s lost her job and can’t pay her rent, I reluctantly offer her my spare room.

There are two sides to every secret. When her beloved father dies, Josie is devastated to uncover a secret life he has led with another family: another house, another woman, and a half sister, Valentina. Born in the same week, in the same hospital, they look so physically alike they could be mistaken for twins. But the similarities end there.... Josie is sweet and reserved, a counsellor with the perfect boyfriend and the perfect life. Valentina is damaged and reckless, and she always gets what she wants.

It was a misty Wednesday morning. Inside the Gestapo headquarters, you could cut the tension with a knife. There was a traitor in their midst: Someone had leaked a list of the SS to the British press. The head of the Gestapo called me into his office. Panelled oak walls, a grand piano in the corner, rugs lining the floor—the place where he ordered executions every day.

July, 1914: In their sunlit Hampshire workshop, Alice Dalton mixes paints for the stained-glass artwork she and Edmund are working on, pausing only to joyfully cradle the soft swell of her stomach. But the looming war threatens her hard-won happiness. A knock at the door announces the arrival of Victor, her estranged brother, returning after six long years in America. But her elation at being reunited is short-lived as she realizes he still hasn’t forgiven her for her part in the heartbreak that sent him abroad.

England, 1908: Alice Dalton never intended to rebel against her aristocratic parents. But after her father’s failed attempt to arrange a marriage for her with Edmund Cutler, son of a wealthy stockbroker, she flees the family home humiliated – and determined to make a life for herself as an independent woman, however hard that might be. When a chance opportunity leads to her taking a position as a stained-glass artist’s apprentice, Alice is stunned when she meets the man she’ll be working for: the hateful Edmund Cutler.

Hampshire, 1916: Alice traces her hand over the cold glass of the window as the pale morning light slips into the empty room. The pain of loss is worse than a physical one. Reminders of Edmund are all around her. The coldness of the sheet on the other half of the bed. The unrelenting silence in the cottage when her stepdaughter Lottie is at school or tucked up asleep at the end of another day. Keeping up with their stained-glass commissions takes every ounce of her strength, and as Lottie becomes more withdrawn, Alice worries desperately about how best to care for the troubled girl.

In Nazi-occupied Poland, Sofia cannot look her father in the eye. Sofia’s mother, her papa’s cherished wife, is Jewish—how dare he work as a doctor for the SS? She cannot forgive him, even if the bargain was made to spare their lives. In the middle of the night, Isaac emerges from a packed train with hundreds of others. Beneath Auschwitz’s barbed wire, the SS decide prisoners’ fates on the spot—and Isaac is chosen to work. Every breath feels like it could be Isaac’s last, so when he sees a beautiful auburn-haired girl peering out of the farm window, it feels like a dream.

Nadia is an abstract thinker coming to terms with the harsh realities around her. She is a bookworm, a prankster, a wanderer, and a note-taker. She sees people gambling with life and soul for little apparent gain and wonders what she can do to make a difference. Progressively, her life is pulled apart by her family’s migration to Ukraine, a dubious courtship, the Chernobyl disaster, police surveillance, and an Afghan war. As Nadia comes of age, she finds that the bonds of family and friendship create an inseparable fate: to rescue one another or to drown.

Upon the death of her husband, self-involved social climber Cora Pringle assumes her recent dalliance with a wealthy gentleman will be her second chance at a happily ever after. That is, until her paramour turns out to be a penniless imposter. Despite his betrayal, Cora can't quite let go of the tug the handsome playwright has on her heart. Desperate for an income, Cora becomes a séance-performing spiritualist and gets a taste for celebrity - and it's so delicious. So what if she can't actually communicate with the dead? Her eager patrons don't need to know that.

Alec Reid’s ghosts of the 21st century seldom lurk in old houses or waft across chilly moors. His dark tales may breathe alongside the supernatural, but they take place in broad daylight, in our daily lives. Their themes include dead warriors resurrected via Bluetooth, Rumpelstiltskin in the suburbs, an algorithmic fear of ghosts, and the shattered dreams of immortality. The world they describe is the one you inhabit, but you would live in terror were you to recognize it for what it is.