Showing results by narrator "Gareth Bennett-Ryan" in Genre Fiction

Finn and Kaz are about to meet for the first time. Ten-year-old Finn, a quirky, sensitive boy who talks a lot and eats only at cafes with a five-star hygiene rating, is having a tough time at school and home. Outspoken Kaz, 59, who has an acerbic sense of humour and a heart of gold, is working at the café when Finn and his mum come in. They don't know it yet, but the second time they meet will be a moment which changes both of their lives forever....

Dare you close your eyes for even a few seconds? One, two, three... Lisa Dale shuts her eyes and counts to 100 during a game of hide-and-seek. When she opens them, her four-year-old daughter, Ella, is gone. Disappeared without a trace. The police, the media and Lisa's family all think they know who snatched Ella. But what if the person who took her isn't a stranger? What if they are convinced they are doing the right thing? And what if Lisa's little girl is in danger of disappearing forever?

Life is tough and cheerless for Billy Casper, a troubled teenager growing up in the small Yorkshire mining town of Barnsley. Treated as a failure at school, and unhappy at home, Billy discovers a new passion in life when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk. Billy identifies with her silent strength, and she inspires in him the trust and love that nothing else can, discovering through her the passion missing from his life.

When Will - soon to be known as 'Posh Lad' - starts as an apprentice for Stanley Lampitt, he expects horses, fresh air and a solid training in forge-work and horses. What he gets is Stanley, 'six-foot-six of tattooed muscle, with a gleaming shaven head', and Ewan, raised at the bad end of the Cribbs Estate. It's a baptism of fire. After a rocky start - Will doesn't drink Yorkshire tea - the three settle into a rhythm, barrelling around Yorkshire in a series of dodgy vans, forging iron and shoeing horses.

It is dawn on a May morning. On a long, straight Roman road between two sleeping fields a car slows as it arrives at the scene of an accident. As the lives of four people coalesce, we realize that mysterious layers of history are not only buried within them but also locked into the landscape. A captivating novel of immense clarity, At Hawthorn Time is about identity, consumerism, changing boundaries and our own long, straight path into the unknown.

Will Harker has always believed the best things in life are free: the great outdoors, a good laugh, a perfectly steeped brew. He's earning his keep as an apprentice farrier at Stanley Lampitt's workshop - although his gaffer would say he makes half the money and causes double the trouble. But business isn't exactly booming. While Stanley's trying to make ends meet Will is handed a wedge of family inheritance - and a problem as big as a horse to sort out. As every Yorkshireman knows, where there's muck there's brass. So just how dirty are Will's hands going to get?

From the author of The Palace of Curiosities and Vixen comes a bold new novel exploring questions of identity, sexual equality and how well we really know ourselves. Rich are the delights of late 19th-century Manchester for young siblings Edie and Gnome. They bicker, banter, shout and scream their way through the city's streets, embracing its charms and dangers. But as the pair grow up, it is Gnome who revels in the nighttime while Edie wakes exhausted each morning.

An incredible debut novel: a coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, ‘full of daring, authenticity and wit' (Rachel Cusk). "The milkman found her. On Prince Philip Playing Fields. He crossed the dew-soaked grass toward what he took to be a bundle of clothes, but then he came across a discarded shoe, and then t' mutilated body. Her name wor Wilma McCann." Leeds, late 1975, and a body has been found on Prince Philip Playing Fields.