Review Copies

The Chilbury Ladies Choir by Jennifer Ryan (due 23 Feb)

The village of Chilbury in Kent is about to ring in some changes.
This is a delightful novel of wartime gumption and village spirit that will make your heart sing out.

Kent, 1940. The women of Chilbury village have taken umbrage at the Vicar’s closure of the choir now that its male singers are at war. But when spirited music professor Primrose Trent arrives, it prompts the creation of an all-female singing group. Resurrecting themselves as The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir, the women use their song and unity to embolden the community as the war tears through their lives.

Dependable Mrs Tilling sees the choir as a chance to finally put herself first, and a welcome distraction from thoughts of her son fighting on the front line. For Kitty Winthrop, the precocious youngest daughter of Chilbury Manor, singing is the only way to outshine her glamorous sister Venetia, who isn’t letting the war ruin her plan to make every bachelor in the county fall in love with her. Meanwhile, when midwife Edwina Paltry is presented with a dastardly job which she’s convinced will make her rich, she will have to misuse more than the trust of the choir’s women to carry out her scheme – and nothing is going to stop her.

Filled with intrigue, humour and touching warmth, and set against the devastating backdrop of the Second World War, this is a lively and big-hearted novel told through the voices of four very different but equally vibrant characters, who will win you over as much with their mischief as with their charm.

Then. Now. Always. by Isabelle Broom ( due 20 April)

Twenty-eight year old Hannah certainly is. She and her colleagues are in Spain for a month to film a documentary, and it’s a dream come true. Not least because Hannah will get to spend long summer days with Theo, her boss (and crush). If only Tom (Hannah’s best friend and cameramen) and Claudette (the presenter) would stop getting in the way…

Then things become even more complicated when Nancy, Hannah’s half-sister arrives. What is she doing here?

For once in her life, can’t Hannah just have one perfect summer, free of any drama?

 

Kindle Purchases

Bloq by Alan Jones (99p)

A gritty crime thriller. Glasgow man Bill Ingram waits in the city’s Central Station to meet his daughter, returning home from London for Christmas. When the last train pulls in, and she doesn’t get off it, he makes a desperate overnight dash to find out why. His search for her takes over his life, costing him his job and, as he withdraws from home, family and friends, he finds himself alone, despairing of ever seeing her again.

Crime on the Fens by Joy Ellis (99p)

THE DETECTIVE DI Nikki Galena: A police detective with nothing left to lose, she’s seen a girl die in her arms, and her daughter will never leave the hospital again. She’s got tough on the criminals she believes did this to her. Too tough. And now she’s been given one final warning: make it work with her new sergeant, DS Joseph Easter, or she’s out.

HER PARTNER DS Joseph Easter is the handsome squeaky-clean new member of the team. But his nickname “Holy Joe” belies his former life as a soldier. He has an estranged daughter who blames him for everything that went wrong with their family.

THEIR ADVERSARY is a ruthless man who holds DI Galena responsible for his terrible disfigurement.

The town is being terrorised by gangs of violent thugs, all wearing identical hideous masks. Then a talented young female student goes missing on the marsh and Nikki and Joseph find themselves joining forces with a master criminal in their efforts to save her. They need to look behind the masks, but when they do, they find something more sinister and deadly than they ever expected . . .

Kindle Freebies (when downloaded)

 

Catherine Dickens: Outside the Magic Circle by Heera Datta

“Give these letters to the British Museum so that the world may know he loved me once.”
Poignant words, more so when spoken from the deathbed.
Catherine was Charles Dickens’ wife and mother of his ten children. Yet, after twenty-one years of marriage, her illustrious husband plucked her out of his life and home, and labeled her an unfit mother and wife. In truth, he was enamored of an eighteen-year-old actress.
Why didn’t Catherine fight? Why couldn’t she fight?
Outside the Magic Circle is as much Catherine’s story as of most women of those times.

 

Push Not the River by James Conroyd Martin

A panoramic and epic novel in the grand romantic style, PUSH NOT THE RIVER is the rich story of Poland in the late 1700s–a time of heartache and turmoil as the country’s once peaceful people are being torn apart by neighboring countries and divided loyalties. It is then, at the young and vulnerable age of seventeen, when Lady Anna Maria Berezowska loses both of her parents and must leave the only home she has ever known.

With Empress Catherine’s Russian armies streaming in to take their spoils, Anna is quickly thrust into a world of love and hate, loyalty and deceit, patriotism and treason, life and death. Even kind Aunt Stella, Anna’s new guardian who soon comes to personify Poland’s courage and spirit, can’t protect Anna from the uncertain future of the country.

Anna, a child no longer, turns to love and comfort in the form of Jan, a brave patriot and architect of democracy, unaware that her beautiful and enigmatic cousin Zofia has already set her sights on the handsome young fighter. Thus Anna walks unwittingly into Zofia’s jealous wrath and darkly sinister intentions. Forced to survive several tragic events, many of them orchestrated by the crafty Zofia, a strengthened Anna begins to learn to place herself in the way of destiny–for love and for country. Heeding the proud spirit of her late father, Anna becomes a major player in the fight against the countries who come to partition her beloved Poland.

 

DeerLeap by Sarah Walsh

What would you do if you saw someone you thought was dead?

When Grace Chalk sees her dead boyfriend Alex standing on the opposite side of the street in Bristol no-one believes her. Alex died 7 years ago when the car he and Grace’s sister Rita were in plunged into the river Avon. Rita survived the accident, but Alex’s body was never found and Grace has always suspected her sister’s version of events.

Now Grace won’t rest until she finds out the truth and her search makes her confront her past and takes her into a future she could never have imagined, one that leads her back to Deerleap, the old farmhouse at the foot of the Mendip Hills in Somerset, where it all began..

Charity Shop Purchases

Into the Free by Julie Cantrell

A Leap of Faith by Trisha Ashley

After You by Jojo Moyes

Under a Cornish Sky by Liz Fenwick

The Terrace by Maria Duffy