Item category 1: Family Saga

1941. England is at its lowest ebb and terrified of imminent invasion. Even at Eden Park, confidence is at an all-time low, and that is before the authorities discover there is a double agent operating from its MI5 unit.

When Stella Simmons comes to the Devonshire village of Burracombe to start her teaching career, she is alone in the world. Orphaned as a child and brought up in a children's home, she was separated from her sister and has never been able to trace her.

The Wideacre estate is bankrupt, the villagers are living in poverty, and Wideacre Hall is a ruin. But in the Dower House two children are being raised in protected innocence. Equal claimants to the inheritance of Wideacre, rivals for the love of the village, they are tied by a secret childhood b...

From the author of 'Light a Penny Candle' and 'The Lilac Bus', 'Firefly Summer' tells the story of four fateful years in the life of a small, sleepy Irish town, focusing on the family who run the local pub.

When Elsa Gripper dies in childbirth on Christmas Eve, 1912, her grief-stricken husband is unable to cope with the babies, Lucy and Patsy, so the twins are separated. Lucy is spoiled, but Patsy has to be responsible from an early age.

This is the first volume of a trilogy about Lyttons, a great publishing house and the family that own it. The three books are set in the period before, during and after the Second World War and they cover the lives of three generations of this family.

Carrie, the oldest child of ten, is devastated when her father dies and her family is thrown out of their terraced house in Hedderby. But she finds work as a cleaner in a local pub, while her idle mother falls straight into the arms of the town's stingiest landlord.

This is the comic tale of two theatrical families, the Hazards and the Chances. The novel is populated with as many sets of twins, and mistaken identities as any Shakespeare comedy, and celebrates the magic of over a century of show business.