Deerbrook

Sample

Anne Baker

Childhood sweethearts Mary and Jonty have battled against the odds to be together. Forced to run away from home because Mary's father disapproved of their relationship, they've built a happy new life for themselves. Now they long for a child, but it seems that's not to be. Until one stormy night when a yacht is dashed upon the rocks near their home. Mary and Jonty rush to the rescue and, amid terrible carnage, save a baby. They name her Charlotte - and keep her as their own. Charlotte grows up to be devoted to her parents. But fate intervenes when she decides to train as a nurse in Liverpool. For Liverpool is where her 'real' family lives: and it seems that past secrets are to be uncovered -- with shocking consequences.

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Sallie Day

Blackpool, 1959. The Singleton family is on holiday. For seven-year-old Beth this means avoiding her mother Ruth's supervision. Her sixteen-year-old sister Helen, meanwhile, has befriended a waitress whose fun-loving ways hint at a life beyond Ruth's strict rules. But Ruth's husband, Jack, a foreman of the local cotton mill, is caught between unions and owners whose cost-cutting measures threaten an entire way of life. When a letter arrives from Crete, a secret re-emerges from the rubble of Jack's wartime past that could destroy his marriage. Over the holiday week, all four Singletons must struggle to find their place in a shifting world.

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Katie Flynn

Marianne is married to a naval officer, Neil Sheridan. They have a daughter, Libby, and a home in Liverpool. When war comes, Marianne takes war work and moves into Crocus Street with her mother, Mrs Wainwright, and sister. Neil disapproves because the Wainwrights live so near the docks, which are bound to be a bombing target, but Marianne is firm.

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Ruth Rendell

Dex works as a gardener for Dr Jefferson at his home on Hexam place in Pimlico: an exclusive street of houses inhabited by the rich and serviced by the not so rich. The hired help, a motley assortment of au pairs, drivers and cleaners, decide to form the Saint Zita Society (Zita being the patron saint of domestic servants) as an excuse to meet at the local pub and air their grievances. When Dex is invited to join them, they find him to be a strange man, ill at ease - and these first impressions are compounded when they discover he has recently been released from a hospital for the criminally insane, where he was incarcerated for attempting to kill his own mother ...