Showing results by narrator "Alix Dunmore" in All Categories

Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live? Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their preconceived conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.

When Hannah's family flee from the Nazis to Amsterdam, she soon strikes up a friendship with a girl just like her freshly arrived from Germany. Precocious and outspoken, the girl's name is Anne Frank and for seven blissful years the inseparable pair navigate school, boys and coming of age.

Peri, a wealthy Turkish housewife, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground. A relic from a past - and a love - Peri had tried desperately to forget. The photograph takes Peri back to Oxford University, as an 18-year-old sent abroad for the first time. It also takes her to her home with her two best friends, Shirin and Mona, and their arguments about Islam and femininity and to the scandal that tore them all apart.

Steven is one unlucky closeted sixth former. Whenever he has a strong emotion, be that happiness or sadness, weird things happen. Like, potentially dangerous things. Recently, he kissed another boy for the first time and...the boy's head literally exploded. Steven flees to the miserable town of Grunsby-on-Sea, determined not to hurt anyone else with his "Emomancy". With a best friend as determined as Freya, it is impossible to stay hidden for long though, especially when she realises Steven might be in danger after a mysterious organisation called DEMA start asking questions about him.

In an age of social media and selfies, of pixel-perfect pictures and surgically enhanced celebrities, the pressure to change our bodies can often seem overwhelming. We are told we should conceal the signs of ageing and get our bodies back after pregnancy. We ought to perfect our complexions, build our biceps, trim our waistlines. More than ever before, we should contort our physical selves to prejudiced standards of beauty and acceptability. In this thought-provoking work, acclaimed political philosopher Clare Chambers argues that the unmodified body is a key principle of equality.

Jenna is a wife, a mother, a doctor. She’s also the victim of a stalker. Every time she leaves her house, she sees him. Disturbing gifts are left at her door. Cruel emails are sent to her colleagues. She has no idea who this man is, but she feels powerless against him. Until the day he is brought into her hospital after a serious accident, and Jenna is given the chance to find out once and for all why this man is tormenting her. Now, the power is all hers.

This is the story of three women - one an orphan and refugee who finds a place in the studio of a famous French artist, the other a wife and mother who has stood by her husband for nearly forty years. The third is his daughter, caught in the crossfire between her mother and a father she adores.

When Hanna moves to Spain for an internship at the prestigious Prado gallery, she finds herself spending her days buried in the museum's stifling archives, and her nights alone in a tiny rented flat. Then one day she sees them; Tom, Samuel, and Leah. Glamorous and elegant, they are also foreigners in the city. But unlike her they are fabulously wealthy, their lives an endless whirl of creativity and hedonism. And when Hanna discovers an uncatalogued etching by Goya in the archive, she makes a decision which changes everything...

Sophie is the definitive biography of the life of Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, written by Sunday Times bestselling royal and celebrity biographer Sean Smith. Using his long standing royal contacts, Sean explores Sophie and Edward's relationship, the challenges they have faced as a couple as well as their best achievements, how Sophie became the cherished companion to the late Queen and assesses the impact she is having on the public profile of the Royal Family in these turbulent times.

Linguist and writer Lorna Gibb will explore the history of these languages, the cultures they belong to, the tales they tell, while offering a glimpse into what we can learn from each of them. From Australia to Finland, from India to the Canary Islands, from Namibia to the United States, from Scotland to Paraguay, the book will guide the reader through contrasting stories of languages under threat and languages in resurgence.

When designer Camille Fontaine returns to the sun-drenched Spanish island of Majorca, painful memories resurface. She isn’t the only one with dark secrets to hide. Sunseeker Isobel seems to have everything. Is her perfect life a lie? Rising Hollywood star Stephanie should have the world at her feet, if only she can believe in herself. Michel has loved Camille for decades, but his search for the truth could destroy their last chance for happiness.

1936. Anglo-Breton translator Annie Wrenne is working in Madrid when the Spanish Civil War breaks out. Annie becomes a nurse on the front line, but after falling in love with a patient, she ends up pregnant - and abandoned - by a man she thought she knew. Annie passes the rest of the war in a haze, her only consolation her relationship with mysterious Republican fighter Carlos Ortega. Annie finds herself caught up in Ortega’s world, a web of intrigue, which leads to her recruitment into MI5.

In Threads of Empire, Dorothy Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world's most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world's powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers' lives, and how they were affected by events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop.

An emotionally powerful novel about four women and the incredible strength it takes to live a life made invisible by others. In a nondescript building in a gentrifying corner of London, Penny is doing daily battle with her mind. She is convinced that the world beyond her door is too dangerous for her, though her heart knows it isn't. Penny's neighbour Carla, an American expat and single mother of two teens, has lived in a coercive relationship for many years, too worn down by her controlling husband to escape her situation.

Worn out by poverty, Lettie Radley and her miner husband Tommy grasp at the offer of their very own smallholding - part of a Government scheme to put the unemployed back to work on the land. When she comes down to Essex to join him, it's not Tommy who greets her, but their new neighbours. Overbearing and unkempt, Jean and Adam Dell are everything that Lettie can't abide. But as Lettie settles in, she finds an unexpected joy in the rhythms of life. She's hopeful that her past, and the terrible secret Tommy has come to Foxash to escape, are far behind them. But the Dells have their own secrets.

In the summer of 1973, teenage Ruth and her four friends are obsessed with pre-Raphaelite paintings and a little bit obsessed with each other. They spend the scorching summer days in the river by Ruth's grand family home, pretending to be the drowning Ophelia and recreating tableaus of other tragic mythical heroines. But by the end of the summer, real tragedy has found them. Twenty-four years later, Ruth is a wife and mother of three children and moves her family into her still-grand, but now somewhat dilapidated, childhood home following the death of her father.

A schoolyard stabbing sends wingbeats echoing from the past. One shocking event. Two teachers risk their careers to help a boy who has nothing. Three worlds intersect and collide. The best way to avoid trouble, thinks Ayisha Emmanuelle, is to avoid confrontation. As an inner-city schoolteacher, she does a whole lot of avoidance. 14-year-old Shamayal Thomas trusts no one. Not the family, not the gang. And at school, trusting people is forbidden. Jim Stevens teaches history. Haunted by his own, he still believes everyone can learn from the past. History doesn’t always have to repeat itself.

Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her probing of male truths, and her adventures in motherhood and in China, and we cannot fail to be moved by the questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides.

Journalist Anna Tate is assigned as a ghost-writer to Dr. Nate Reid, a neuroscientist renowned for his work at The Pain Laboratory. Damaged by her own past, Anna finds herself becoming obsessed with Nate's late wife Eva Reid, a former patient of Nate's who was unable to experience pain. As she strips away the secrets of their relationship, she makes a shocking discovery, and the raw truth of each is revealed.

Since his adventure in Grunsby-on-Sea, Steven Percival has been thriving. He's kept his powers under control, come out of the closet, and been with his handsome American boyfriend, Troy, almost every day this summer. He can't wait to start uni in London with his best friend, Freya, especially as Troy is going to a different university just a quick train ride away. But Grunsby won't let him go. Around every corner, he's convinced that he's seeing Zachary, the evil emomancer who tried to leech his powers away.