Showing results by narrator "Kate Lock"

Casey Watson is back, doing the job she does best - rolling up her sleeves and fostering the children who, on first meeting, seem like hopeless cases. But when she meets Miller and discovers the truth about his disturbing childhood, even Casey begins to doubt if this child will ever be able to accept love. Found naked and alone on a railway track, Miller was just five when he was first admitted into the care system. 

Brought to Casey as a short-term emergency placement, 14-year-old Adrianna arrives with nothing but her gratitude. Having turned herself in to a social services office some 100 miles away, she has no possessions, no English and, apparently, no history - not that she's willing to share, anyway. She is a beautiful young Polish girl, with the bearing of a ballerina, but is terrified, malnourished and unwell.

Best-selling author and teacher Casey Watson shares the horrifying true story of Kiera Bentley, a 12-year-old girl with a deeply shocking secret she's too young to even understand. When Casey first meets Kiera, a small, slight girl who's just lashed out at a fellow pupil in assembly, she immediately senses something's wrong. Something in Kiera's eyes alerts Casey that this is an "old head on young shoulders", and with Kiera's constant tiredness and self-soothing habit of pulling her hair out, she follows her instinct and takes Kiera under her wing.

A woman writer goes to Athens to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives. The more they talk the more certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the difficulty of intimacy, and the mystery of creativity itself.

Rejected by her mother and excluded by her school, Flip is a little girl desperate to be loved. ‘Am I ugly, Mummy?' are the first words that little Phillipa says to Mike and Casey as she stomps into their lives on a hot August afternoon. She has a Barbie doll in one hand and a pink vanity case in the other, and the bemused Watsons can only stare in amazement at this tiny eight-year-old girl who is being guided into the room by her social worker.

Bestselling author and foster carer Casey Watson shares the shocking true story of Tyler, an abused eleven-year-old who, after stabbing his step-mother, had nowhere else to go. Knowing a little of Tyler's past - his biological mother, a heroin addict, died of an overdose when he was three - Casey feels bound to do her best for him. It isn't easy; Tyler continuously lashes out, even trying to attack Casey herself.

It's late on Friday night when Casey's mobile starts to ring. She is expecting it to be her daughter, Riley. But it isn't Riley. It's a woman from the Emergency Duty Team. So begins Casey and Mike's latest fostering challenge - a 15-year-old girl called Keeley who's run away from her long-term foster home 25 miles away.

An 11-year-old girl stops eating but remains miraculously alive and well. A nurse sent to investigate whether she is a fraud meets a journalist hungry for a story. Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, Emma Donoghue's The Wonder - inspired by numerous European and North American cases of 'fasting girls' between the 16th century and the 20th - is a psychological thriller about a child's murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes.

Just when Casey thinks her foster care duties are done, she’s asked to look after Sam, a troubled nine-year-old with a violent streak who drove his previous guardians to release him of their care. It soon unfolds, however, that this is no simple case. Determined to get to the root of Sam’s behaviour, Casey is committed to uncover his mysterious past only to find out something far darker than she ever imagined.

Coventry Dakin's tale begins with her accidental killing of her neighbour. Forced to flee the law, she deserts her council estate, her boring husband and two demanding children for the anonymity of London's cardboard city. Originally published in 1988, Rebuilding Coventry is a brilliantly observed satire of Eighties Britain and the hypocrisy of the middle and upper classes.

It's the night before Christmas when Casey and Mike get the call. A 12-year-old girl, stuck between a rock and a hard place. Her father is on a ventilator, fighting for his life, while her mother is currently on remand in prison. Despite claiming she attacked him in self-defence, she's been charged with his attempted murder. The girl is called Bella, and she's refusing to say anything. The trouble is that she is also the only witness....

Anna Karenina is beautiful, married to a successful man, and has a son whom she adores. But a chance meeting at a train station in Moscow sets her passionate heart alight, and she is defenceless in the face of Count Vronsky's adoration. Having defied the rules of nineteenth-century Russian society, Anna is forced to pay a heavy price.

When Rosie's best friend has an affair with her husband, the consequences reverberate through the lives of two families. Relationships are torn apart, friendships shattered and childish innocence destroyed. Her daughter Daisy's fragile hold on reality begins to unravel when a letter arrives that opens old wounds. Rosie's son, Max, blames himself for everything that happened. And her ex-husband, Nick, has his own version of events.

Casey's Unit is, as ever, full of troubled, disaffected pupils, and new arrival Leo is something of a conundrum. Thirteen-year-old Leo isn't a bad lad - in fact he's generally polite and helpful, but he's in danger of permanent exclusion for repeatedly absconding and unauthorised absences. Despite letters being sent home regularly, his mother never turns up for any appointments, and when the school calls home she always seems to have an excuse.

Anna's friends and family think she is living the dream in her beautiful finca under the Spanish sun. But the reality is far from perfect. The handsome, complicated man she was building a life with has left with little more than a note to say good-bye, and the future she imagined has crashed around her ears. Anna has secretly embarked on an ill-advised affair and lives above the dingy bar she runs in the sleepy beach town of Marea, surrounded by British expats as homesick and stuck as she is.

From activist, Pussy Riot member and freedom fighter Maria Alyokhina, a raw, hallucinatory, passionate account of her arrest, trial and imprisonment in a penal colony in the Urals for standing up for what she believed in. 'People who believe in freedom and democracy think it will exist forever. That is a mistake. What happened in Russia - what happened to me - could happen anywhere.'

Lorcan was seven years old when his mother first heard him say ‘I love you’. The words were not directed at her, but at Jessi-cat, the family pet. Lorcan suffers from autism and selective mutism, rendering him unable to speak in certain situations. This all began to change with the arrival of a kitten named Jessi-cat.