Shattered

Sample

Jessica Stirling

Glasgow, 1928. Alison Burnside is sixteen when her mother dies. Her father, Alex, a shipyard worker, unexpectantly supports the idea that Alison should become a doctor, and the family's whole destiny changes. When the 1930s depression hits Glasgow, Alison faces a dilemma, abandon her medical studies to care for her younger brothers and her widowed and unemployed father, or carry on? The grandmother says duty to family comes first, get a job, but the father says pursue glory. Alison will soon encounter temptations that will threaten her ambition, and she turns for support to her teacher and mentor, Jim Abbott, only to realize that they both want more than friendship. Alison finds that she must choose at last between love and marriage, and a medical career and self-fulfillment.

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Lynn Freed

"Seventeen-year-old Thea lives a strange and sheltered life with her mother, Nalia, retired opera singer and Holocaust survivor. A virtual prisoner of her mother's obsessive love, Thea escapes with a mysterious and suave friend of her father's and is taken to the remote island on which he lives. "The rule is this," she says. "I am to pretend that my other life does not exist. And yet, pretending, it seems to be true."". "What Thea discovers on the island is that the house in which she grew up - with its gates and padlocks and dogs - has been replaced by a prison of a different kind. "All my life," she says, "I have noticed keys. I like to know where they fit, how they work. 'What do you need your own keys for?' my mother would shout. 'When you're old enough for keys, you'll be old enough to understand a lot of things.'""--BOOK JACKET.

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Emily Grayson

What if you had a second chance at love that was denied you long ago? This is exactly what happens to Casey Becket two days before she and her husband Michael are to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary. Suddenly, standing in her back yard by the fountain is Will Combray, the man she once deeply loved and was engaged to marry, yet who jilted her on her wedding day. Older and wearier now, yet still handsome and unpredictable, Will tells Casey that he's come back in order to try and piece together his own life, which has been a series of emotional failures. He knows in his heart that everything went wrong for him the day he left her.Will's reappearance throws chaos into Casey's ordered life. Her marriage to the kind and faithful Michael Becket, who has been her best friend since childhood, has been a source of great comfort, if not passion.Long ago, after Will's cruel and inexplicable disappearing act, followed by a family tragedy, Michael promised to take care of Casey and give her a happy life, and he has kept his word. But now, with Will's sudden return, over twenty years after he left, Casey is forced to ask herself a difficult question: Which is the better life: one that is calm and contented, or unpredictable and deeply charged?Tugged in one direction by faithfulness and honor, and in another by pure desire, Casey Becket must relive her own troubled history to discover which choice will satisfy her heart.

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Jo Beverley

Leander, Lord Charrington has a problem. Raised to be a charming diplomat, women fall in love with him. He, however, seems unable to fall in love with them. For wife, therefore, he wants a woman he can live with on honest terms, and an impoverished widow seems ideal. Judith Rossiter thanks heaven for this escape from disaster. But can she keep to the terms of their agreement and not fall in love with her charming husband?