Showing results by narrator "Patience Tomlinson" in All Categories

We know what life was like for Victoria and Albert. But what was it like for a commoner like you or me? How did it feel to cook with coal and wash with tea leaves? Drink beer for breakfast and clean your teeth with cuttlefish? Dress in whalebone and feed opium to the baby? Surviving everyday life came down to the gritty details, the small necessities and tricks of living. Drawing on Ruth's unique firsthand experience gained from living on a Victorian farm for a year, this book will teach you everything you need to know about 19th-century living.

When someone hacks into the systems of eight self-driving cars, their passengers are set on a fatal collision course. The passengers are: a TV star, a pregnant young woman, a disabled war hero, an abused wife fleeing her husband, an illegal immigrant, a husband and wife - and parents of two - who are travelling in separate vehicles and a suicidal man. Now the public have to judge who should survive but are the passengers all that they first seem?

It was odd that Harriet should always have been so fond of curates. They were so immature and always made the same kind of conversation. Now the Archdeacon was altogether different...'Together yet alone, the Misses Bede occupy the central crossroads of parish life. Harriet, plump, elegant and jolly, likes nothing better than to make a fuss of new curates, secure in the knowledge that elderly Italian Count Ricardo Bianco will propose to her yet again this year.

Lady Jane Grey was born into the most dangerous of times. Child of a scheming father and a ruthless mother for whom she was a pawn in a dynastic game with the highest stakes, she lived a life in thrall to political machinations and lethal religious fervour. Growing up with the future Queen Elizabeth and her reluctant nemesis, Mary, she soon learned the truth of the values imparted to her by Henry VIII's last Queen, Katherine Parr.

The Tudor era encompasses some of the greatest changes in our history. But while we know about the historical dramas of the times, what was life really like for a commoner? To answer this question, the renowned 'method historian' Ruth Goodman has slept, washed and cooked as the Tudors did. She is your expert guide to this fascinating era, drawing on years of practical historical study to show how our ancestors coped with everyday life, from how they slept to how they courted.

Less Than Angels follows the loves, works and hopes of a group of young anthropologists. Catherine Oliphant is a writer and lives with handsome anthropologist Tom Mallow. Their relationship runs into trouble when he begins a romance with student Deirdre Swann, so Catherine turns her attention to the reclusive anthropologist Alaric Lydgate, who has a fondness for wearing African masks. Added to this love triangle are the activities of Deirdre's fellow students and their attempts to win the competition for a research grant.

Wilmet Forsyth is well dressed, well looked after, suitably husbanded, good looking, and fairly young - but very bored. Her husband Rodney, a handsome army major, is slightly balder and fatter than he once was. Wilmet would like to think she has changed rather less. Her interest wanders to the nearby Anglo-Catholic church, where at last she can neglect her comfortable household in the more serious-minded company of three unmarried priests and Piers Longridge, a man of a different character altogether.

An investigation into the sale of a plot of land takes a darker turn when a body is found on a cliffside. Libby Sarjeant and her friend Fran reluctantly agree to investigate the case. It's clear that there's more than a dodgy development deal at play—but can Libby and Fran unravel the puzzling case before it's too late?

Seven-year-old Jocelyn Holt loves her nanny Hannah more than her own mother. When Hannah disappears one summer night, Jo never gets over the loss. Thirty years on, now a young widow with a daughter of her own, Jo is forced to return to her family home, and the mother she’s always despised, just as a skull is pulled out of the lake in the grounds. Could this explain her beloved nanny’s disappearance? What other secrets will that lake give up to the police?

March, 1941. After Flo Butterworth loses everything in Manchester's Christmas Blitz, she decides to leave the area and join the Women's Land Army. Putting the past firmly behind her, she arrives at Rookery House in Norfolk hoping for a new start and a chance to do the gardening work she loves. The grip of war has intensified and growing more food is vital to keep the nation going. Thea buys an extra field to grow crops, and in the village, her sister Prue leads members of The Mother's Day Club and Women's Institute as they take on a derelict allotment.

After a health scare, 77-year-old Barbara goes to convalesce in the sleepy Somerset village of Winsleigh Green with her sister, Pauline, who is now a widow. The sisters are like chalk and cheese - Barbara, outspoken and aloof and Pauline, good natured and homely - so it’s not long before the tension starts to rise. But when Pauline accidentally knocks down a vagrant who goes by the name of Bisto Mulligan, the ladies find themselves with another houseguest.

Cosy crime writer Carmen Cunningham is in trouble. Her inspiration has vanished, her deadline is looming, and her meddling elderly mother Betty consumes her every waking moment. Hoping to revive her creativity, Carmen books a dream cruise, featuring workshops with her literary idol, Ruskin Reeve. It’s the perfect plan – until Betty insists on tagging along… However, as the Diamond Star sails through sun-soaked ports and magical Mediterranean islands, Carmen finds the escape she needs as she discovers new friendships, and unexpected sparks with the grumpy, but charming, Ruskin.

Mrs Bradley, sharp-eyed detective and celebrated psychiatrist, has decided to spend Christmas with her nephew at his beautiful house in the Cotswolds. It isn’t long before a mystery unfolds. There are strange events occurring in the nearby wood, and local villagers are receiving anonymous threatening letters. Then the snow begins to fall - and a body is discovered. Mrs Bradley is on the case, but she’ll have to hatch an ingenious plan to reveal the truth and find the culprit....

Faye is 39 and single. She's terrified she may never have the one thing she always wanted: a child of her own. Then she discovers a co-parenting app: Acorns. For men and women who want to have a baby, but don't want to do it alone. When she meets Louis through it, it feels as though the fates have aligned.

For Miss Cordell, principal of Persephone College, there are two great evils to be feared: unladylike behaviour among her students and bad publicity for the college. So her prim and cosy world is turned upside down when a secret society of undergraduates meets by the river on a gloomy January afternoon only to find the drowned body of the college bursar floating in her canoe.

I used to love the rattle and whoosh of my grandma's buttons as they scattered from their Quality Street tin. An inlaid wooden chest the size of a shoe box holds Lynn Knight's button collection. A collection that has been passed down through three generations of women: a chunky '60s-era toggle from a favourite coat, three tiny pearl buttons from her mother's first dress after she was adopted as a baby, a jet button from a time of Victorian mourning. Each button tells a story.

Bea Abbot and her husband have been running a highly successful domestic agency for many years, but when he falls ill and dies, she is pressured by her MP son and novelist daughter to retire. Bea is so tired from the long years of nursing her husband that all she wants is peace and quiet, and to have her pretty early Victorian house in Kensington, London, all to herself. What she gets is a couple of young lodgers with troubled backgrounds and an old friend banging on her door, asking for help.

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Virginia Nicholson's Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in the Second World War. A special multi-voice recording featuring five actresses that bring to life the hundreds of personal testimonies, diary entries and books that make up this superb study. Read by Patience Tomlinson, Annie Aldington, Rachel Bavidge, Julie Maisey and Georgina Sutton.

Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine - in touch only with his daughter and still trying to reconcile him to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset - he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The return address on the box - Dussmann - unsettles him completely.

Born on a Somerset pea-field in 1941, the second of eight children in a Romani family, Maggie Smith-Bendell has lived through the years of greatest change in the travelling community's long history. As a child, Maggie rode and slept in a horse-drawn wagon, picked hops and flowers, and sat beside her father's campfire on ancient verges, poor but free to roam. As the twentieth century progressed, common land was fenced off and the traditional ways disappeared.