War brings changes three friends could never foresee…
‘Highly recommended’ Anna Jacobs
‘A warm domestic drama’ People’s Friend

It’s 1942 and as shortages of staff – and goods – begin to bite, young Lily Collins is nervously stepping up to sales junior at Marlow’s department store.

Bombs are still falling and Lily and fellow shop girls Gladys and Beryl need a stiff upper lip to wave boyfriends, husbands and brothers goodbye, especially with a baby on the way and grim news on the wireless. Jim, who works with Lily at the store, seems restless, and nothing can prepare Lily for the secrets that come tumbling out when her favourite brother comes home on leave…

Somehow, she must keep smiling through. Community, family and friends rally round as her home town – and the whole country – is tested once again.

Not even the Blitz will stop the shop girls…The perfect, uplifting book to curl up with this spring
‘Such a good read!’ 5* Goodreads reviewer
It’s 1941 and as the air raid sirens blare, Lily Collins is starting work in Midlands department store Marlow’s. She learns the ropes from her sophisticated boss Miss Frobisher alongside shy fellow junior Gladys. But her friendship with young salesman Jim draws her into a swirl of secrets. And with the war progressing to crisis point, Cedric Marlow and his staff must battle nightly bombings and the absence of loved ones to keep going.

A Store at War weaves together a strong sense of community with a vivid evocation of a time when every man, woman and child was doing their bit.

In 1963 Joe Kaufmann is a Jewish doctoral student in history at Indiana University. He is unwittingly dragged into a waking nightmare when he befriends freshman music major Robert Stangarden. At the end of the school year, Joe helps Robert move back to his home in Indianapolis. However, he comes face-to-face with Robert’s parents, Henry and Ada Stangarden, whom he recognizes as Nazi civilians who had worked at the Buchenwald concentration camp where he and his parents had been prisoners in 1944. In mind-numbing shock, Joe descends into a deep depression as he relives those awful childhood memories of seeing unimaginable cruelty and barbarity and losing his parents. He attempts suicide but survives. He then retreats to his home in Ithaca, New York, to put 700 miles between himself and this wicked Nazi civilian and his kind but defeated wife.
However, this is not the end of Joe’s contact with the Stangardens. When fall semester at I. U. approaches, Robert is eager to go back. But Henry must keep Robert away from Joe. He cannot risk exposing his sinister past if the two young men meet again, and Robert learns who his parents really are. So, during their argument, Henry viciously beats Robert, almost killing him. Robert’s mother, Ada, helplessly witnesses the assault in their living room. Because she fears her husband, she takes Robert by taxi to the hospital and abandons him. Later, despite Robert’s subsequent insistence that he and his father just had a “discussion,” wanting just to get back to a normal family life, Henry is arrested for the near-murder of his own son. While the lawyers prepare for trial, tensions build as both Joe and the Stangardens desperately try to hide their toxic past relationship when they are interviewed. Joe is the lynchpin to this whole nasty affair, and he wants no involvement. He fears this Nazi thug will come after him sooner or later. To his utter surprise, Henry Stangarden is convicted of attempted voluntary manslaughter.
Joe is relieved, believing he can move on with his life. But long-buried secrets from Buchenwald remain. Henry’s wife, Ada, knows what happened at Buchenwald. Unable to hold her silence, she reveals the true story of Joe Kaufmann and her only son, Robert. The black cloud of depression and suicidal thoughts appear once again. And Robert’s self-identity is in question.
One family is shattered; another is created out of the embers of a Nazi concentration camp.

An American army doctor, Major Grayson Pierce, finds a little boy hiding in a stench-filled barrack at the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945. A devout Catholic, Pierce realizes that God is allowing him to save one precious life among the ubiquitous piles of naked corpses in this notorious Nazi slave labor camp. After the war, the doctor, a widower, brings Joe to his home in Ithaca, New York, and becomes his guardian. At the Pierce mansion, Joe struggles with his nightmares of Buchenwald and with three old women who see him as an intrusion--Grayson’s “fire-breathing” mother, Nina Cassandra, his “drill sergeant” older sister, Mildred, and a benign but indifferent Aunt Elvie. Making things worse is Grayson's eight-year-old insolent daughter, Irene, who refuses to accept Joe as her new "brother."
Grayson nearly comes to blows with his mother and sister when he chooses to rear his ward as a Jew while they insist that the boy must be converted to Catholicism. To escape the family "pressure cooker," Grayson and Joe take a two-week excursion around New York State. Joe learns English and bonds with his guardian in trust and love. Back at the mansion, he is better prepared to deal with the old women, but the bitter fight over his soul continues for the next several months, coming to an acrimonious conclusion at Christmastime.

Book of the Year, Historical Fantasy 2020, The Coffee Pot Book Club Historical Fiction Awards
How many secrets can one family have? For 13 years, Sorley has taught music alongside the man he loves, war and betrayal nearly forgotten. But behind their calm and ordered life, there are hidden truths. When a young girl’s question demands an answer, does he break the most important oath he has ever sworn by lying – or tell the truth, risking the destruction of both his family and a fragile political alliance? Empire’s Reckoning asks if love – of country, of an individual, of family – can be enough to leave behind the expectations of history and culture, and to chart a way to peace.

A reprieve from death. A city of legend. And a gamble to save everything – and everyone – Lena loves.

Exiled for treason, Lena has few chances of survival in the mountains she must cross. Her companion is of little help. But the fabled city of Casil may lay somewhere to the east – and reaching it is their last, desperate hope for help against the enemy who is overrunning their lands. But does the Eastern Empire still exist – and if it does, will it come to the help of its long-forgotten province?

An Emperor's request. A lover's refusal. And a young woman who must choose between them.

Many generations past, the great empire from the east left Lena's country to its own defences. Now invasion threatens...and to save their land, women must learn the skills of war. But in a world reminiscent of Britain after the fall of Rome, only men fight; women farm and fish. Lena's choice to answer her leader's call to arms separates her from her lover Maya, beginning her journey of exploration: a journey of body, mind and heart.

Winner of multiple awards, both individually and as part of the first Empire's Legacy trilogy, Empire's Daughter is neither magical fantasy nor historical fiction, but a unique world both familiar and unfamiliar - an empire on the edge of history.

A task she cannot refuse. A land that holds secrets. And a man Lena doesn't know if she can trust.

Now a soldier, Lena is sent to stand hostage to a truce with a country that holds knowledge long forgotten in her own. Kidnapped by the fierce Marai, she faces a future she cannot accept. When she learns of immediate danger to her land, Lena must cooperate with a man she neither knows nor likes. But when their actions have consequences neither could foresee, will the outcome be worse than the Marai threat?

1665 and The Great Plague has London in its grip.

As the summer heat rises, red crosses mark the doors, and wealthy citizens flee. Only the poor remain to face the march of death...

Ambitious and attractive Bess Bagwell is determined her carpenter husband, Will, should make a name for himself. So she schemes to meet Samuel Pepys, diarist, friend of the King, and an important man in the Navy shipyards.

But Pepys has his own motive for cultivating Bess, and it is certainly not to benefit her husband.

With pestilence rife in the city, all trade ceases. Will is forced to invest in his unscrupulous cousin Jack's dubious 'cure' for the pestilence. But this only horrifies Bess and leaves them deeper in debt. Now they are desperate for money, and the dread disease is moving ever closer. Pepys's help seems to be the only answer.

But as with all bargains, there's a price to pay. A price that could cost more than Bess has to give.

England 1660
When artist Alice Ibbetson discovers a rare orchid, the lady's-slipper, growing in a nearby wood, she is captivated by its beauty. It is the last surviving specimen and she wants to preserve it for future generations.

There is only one problem - it is growing on the land of Richard Wheeler, a newly-converted Quaker, who will not allow her to touch it.

Fearing for the flower's fragility, she steals the orchid, little dreaming that this seemingly simple act will set off an unstoppable chain of events - a web of intrigue that will lead to murder and exile, and change her comfortable life forever.

Set in an England riven by civil war and divided loyalties the novel explores the nature of faith, and who should control the land we all inhabit.

London, 1666. Elizabeth 'Bird' Carpenter has a wonderful singing voice, and music is her chief passion. When her father persuades her to marry horse-dealer Christopher Knepp, she suspects she is marrying beneath her station, but nothing prepares her for the reality of life with Knepp. Her father has betrayed her trust, for Knepp cares only for his horses; he is a tyrant and a bully, and will allow Bird no life of her own.

When Knepp goes away, she grasps her chance and, encouraged by her maidservant Livvy, makes a secret visit to the theatre. Entranced by the music, the glitter and glamour of the surroundings, and the free and outspoken manner of the women on the stage, she falls in love with the theatre and is determined to forge a path of her own as an actress.

But life in the theatre was never going to be straightforward - for a jealous rival wants to spoil her plans, and worse, Knepp forbids it, and Bird must use all her wit and intelligence to change his mind.

Based on events depicted in the famous Diary of Samuel Pepys, Entertaining Mr Pepys brings London in the 17th Century to life. It includes the vibrant characters of the day such as the diarist himself and actress Nell Gwynne, and features a dazzling and gripping finale during the Great Fire Of London.

Winter, 1661.
In her short life Sadie Appleby has never left rural Westmorland. But one night she is rudely awoken by her older and bolder sister, Ella. She has robbed her employer and is on the run.

Together the girls flee their home and head for London, hoping to lose themselves in the teeming city. But the dead man's relatives are in pursuit, and soon a game of cat and mouse ensues amongst the freezing warren that is London in winter.

Ella is soon seduced by the glitter and glamour of city life and sets her sights on the flamboyant man-about-town, Jay Whitgift, owner of a beauty parlour for the wives of the London gentry.

But nothing in the capital is what it seems, least of all Jay Whitgift. Soon a rift has formed between Ella and Sadie, and the sisters are threatened by a menace more sinister than even the law.

Set in a brilliantly realised Restoration London, The Gilded Lily is a novel about beauty and desire, about the stories we tell ourselves, and about how sisterhood can be both a burden and a saving grace.