Jilly Bond has narrated 98 audiobooks on Listento.it by 75 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 259 ratings. The most-rated is Battle Cruiser.
Stately Pursuits
Summary
Penguin presents the audio edition of Stately Pursuits by Katie Fforde. Just the thing for a broken heart. A wonderfully romantic novel from the number one Sunday Times best-selling author of Recipe for Love, A French Affair and The Perfect Match. 'I don't suppose you'd care to house-sit for a while....' Hetty Longden's mother thinks that looking after Great Uncle Samuel's crumbling stately home will be just the thing for Hetty's broken heart. Hetty doesn't mind; at least she can be miserable in private. But 'private' is a relative term in a village which revolves around the big house. Particularly when you are expected to thwart Great Uncle Samuel's awful heir and his nefarious plans for his inheritance. Pitchforked into the community's fight to save the manor, Hetty has no time to wallow. And once she has shared her troubles with one neighbour (Caroline: a very understanding shoulder, despite her glamorous appearance and impossibly long legs), and cast an appreciative eye over another (Peter: equally long-legged, but offering rather more practical help), she wonders if her heart is irretrievably broken after all....
©2019 Katie Fforde (P)2019 Penguin Audio
Rules
Summary
For the first time, the girls caught sight of the turreted, castle-like building that would be home for the next nine months, the four towers of the main houses nestled in the hills, with the cliffs behind, leading down to the still turquoise sea. Maggie loves teaching English at beautiful Downey House but she is less keen on planning her wedding to dependable Stan. Instead, she's working on ignoring her crush on David McDonald, who teaches English at the local boys' school. Just as Simone and Fliss have become friends, Zelda arrives to upset everything. Zelda is loudly, glamorously American, and she's full of ways to improve life at boring school. Soon, quiet, mousy Simone is undergoing a makeover. And Fliss is about to jeopardise everything to impress a boy. In a new year at school, the girls of Downey House will be breaking all the rules - and not all of them will escape unscathed.
©2009 Jane Beaton (P)2011 Hachette Digital
A Summer at Sea
Summary
Emily is happy with her life just as it is. She has a career as a midwife that she loves . She enjoys living on her own as a single woman. But she also feels it's time for a change and a spot of some sea air. So when her best friend, Rebecca, asks whether she'd like to spend the summer cooking on a 'puffer' boat just off the Scottish coast, she jumps at the chance. But she barely has time to get to grips with the galley before she finds herself with a lot on her plate. Rebecca is heavily pregnant and is thrilled to have her friend onboard doing most of the work. Then there's Emily's competitive and jealous kitchen assistant, who thinks she should be head cook, not Emily. And there's Alasdair, the handsome local doctor whom Emily is desperately trying not to notice. Because if she falls in love with him, as he appears to be falling for her, will she ever want her old life back again?
©2016 Katie Fforde Ltd (P)2016 Random House AudioBooks
Stockings and Cellulite
Summary
As the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve, Cass finds her husband lying naked on a coat-strewn bed, entwined with another woman. She's determined to get over him - and soon. Luckily, there are plenty of distractions: juggling a young family with a burgeoning social life and a return to work...and narrowly avoiding arrest. Then one day, she falls for the last person she could ever have predicted....
©2017 Debbie Viggiano (P)2017 W.F. Howes Ltd
The Brandons
Summary
Lavinia Brandon is quite the loveliest widow in Barsetshire, blessed with beauty and grace as well as two handsome grown-up children, Delia and Francis. So thinks their cousin, Hilary Grant, when he comes to stay and - like many before him - promptly falls for his fragrant hostess. Meanwhile the Brandons' ill-tempered dowager aunt is stirring up controversy over her legacy, and Lavinia's attention is further occupied by the challenges of making a match between the vicar and gifted village helpmeet Miss Morris and elegantly deterring her lovestruck suitors. Angela Thirkell's 1930s comedy is bright, witty and winning.
©2016 Angela Thirkell (P)2016 Hachette Audio UK
Hello, Mallory
Summary
The hit series is back, to charm and inspire another generation of baby-sitters! Mallory Pike has always wanted to be a member of the Baby-Sitters Club - they're so much fun to be around, and she's practically a baby-sitter already. Now the club members have invited Mallory to a meeting. This might be her big chance! But the BSC isn't making it easy - they make Mal feel like a baby on a job, and make her take an impossible written test. Mallory's beginning to think she doesn't want to be a part of the BSC...or maybe she and her new friend Jessi should start a club of their own. It's time to show those baby-sitters what a couple of new girls can do!
©1988 Ann M. Martin (P)2018 Audible, Inc.
A Place of Secrets
Summary
A runaway best seller in Britain with over 100,000 copies sold, a riveting historical mystery in the tradition of Kate Morton. Auction house appraiser Jude leaves London for her dream job at Starbrough Hall, an estate in the countryside, examining and pricing the manuscripts and instruments of an 18th-century astronomer. She is welcomed by Chantal Wickham, and Jude feels close to the old woman at once: they have both lost their husbands. Hard times have forced the Wickham family to sell the astronomer's work, their land, and with it, the timeworn tower that lies nearby. The tower was built as an observatory for astronomer Anthony Wickham and his daughter Esther, and it served as the setting for their most incredible discoveries. Though Jude is far away from her life in London, her arrival at Starbrough Hall brings a host of childhood memories. She meets Euan, a famed writer and naturalist who lives in the gamekeeper's cottage at the foot of the tower, where Jude's grandfather once lived. And a nightmare begins to haunt her six-year-old niece, the same nightmare Jude herself had years ago. Is it possible that the dreams are passed down from one generation to the next? What secrets does the tower hold? And will Jude unearth them before it's too late?
©2012 Rachel Hore (P)2012 WF Howes Ltd
The Christmas Stocking and Other Stories
Summary
A brand-new audiobook by the number one best-selling author Katie Fforde containing never before published Christmas short stories. Perfect for anyone who loves romance, humour and happy-ever-after endings. It's Christmas morning. The tree is decorated, the presents are wrapped and the turkey's in the oven. Outside, the first flakes of snow are beginning to fall. And here it is! A personal present from Katie Fforde: six new perfectly themed seasonal short stories!
©2017 Katie Fforde (P)2017 Random House Audiobooks
A Bookshop in Berlin
Summary
Winner of the JQ-Wingate Literary Prize "A beautiful and important book" (The Independent) in the tradition of rediscovered works like Suite Française and The Nazi Officer’s Wife, the prize-winning memoir of a fearless Jewish bookseller on a harrowing fight for survival across Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1921, Françoise Frenkel - a Jewish woman from Poland - fulfills a dream. She opens La Maison du Livre, Berlin’s first French bookshop, attracting artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets. The shop becomes a haven for intellectual exchange as Nazi ideology begins to poison the culturally rich city. In 1935, the scene continues to darken. First come the new bureaucratic hurdles, followed by frequent police visits and book confiscations. Françoise’s dream finally shatters on Kristallnacht in November 1938, as hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses are destroyed. La Maison du Livre is miraculously spared, but fear of persecution eventually forces Françoise on a desperate, lonely flight to Paris. When the city is bombed, she seeks refuge across Southern France, witnessing countless horrors: children torn from their parents, mothers throwing themselves under buses. Secreted away from one safe house to the next, Françoise survives at the heroic hands of strangers risking their lives to protect her. Published quietly in 1945, then rediscovered nearly 60 years later in an attic, A Bookshop in Berlin is a remarkable story of survival and resilience, of human cruelty and human spirit. In the tradition of Suite Française and The Nazi Officer’s Wife, this audiobook is the tale of a fearless woman whose lust for life and literature refuses to leave her, even in her darkest hours.
©2019 Françoise Frenkel (P)2019 Simon & Schuster Audio
Mrs Griffin Sends her Love
Summary
From organising the school summer fete - 'Because of our inability to recognise our climatic shortcomings from the outset, arrangements for outdoor jollities get completely out of hand' - to the sometimes rather odd passions of childhood - 'I collect stones with holes in them' - Miss Read captures the essence of rural life, and in particular of village schools, as only she can. This collection also includes extracts from her letters: 'Michael Joseph wrote after the Observer thing and is throwing out feelers for a book. I shall know if he still feels like it - me too! - after we've met'. It will also include an Introduction on how 'Miss Read' was first created: Miss Read was born fully clothed in sensible garments and aged about forty. She was born, in fact, when I was struggling to write my first book and needed a village schoolmistress as the narrator.
©2013 Miss Read (P)2015 Audible, Ltd
The Perfect Lie
Summary
For Lucy Riddick, Venice has always been the dream destination, the ideal place to lose herself. And now she needs to do just that. The secret she's been keeping has finally caught up with her and Lucy needs to disappear - fast. But what if, when she sets foot in Venice, Lucy finds the one thing she has been running from?
©2010 Emily Barr (P)2012 W F Howes Ltd
The Siege
Summary
Leningrad, September 1941. German tanks surround the city, imprisoning those who live there. The besieged people of Leningrad face shells, starvation, and the Russian winter.... Interweaving two love affairs in two generations, The Siege draws us deep into the Levin's family struggle to stay alive during this terrible winter. It is a story about war and the wounds it inflicts on people's lives. It is also a lyrical and deeply moving celebration of love, life, and survival.
©2002 Helen Dunmore (P)2010 Isis Publishing Ltd
An Absolute Scandal
Summary
A searing portrait of wealthy living, and the highs - and lows - that come with it in a dazzling novel from Sunday Times best-selling author Penny Vincenzi. Perfect for any reader of Kate Morton, Elizabeth Buchan or Harriet Evans. There's nothing like the contentment and security that money can bring. That's how it is for Lucinda, Elizabeth and Flora, living the risk-free dream in the glittering eighties. Houses, holidays, happiness - everything is there for the taking. The financial slide comes crashing into their lives with a vengeance, and everything they've built up so carefully dissolves into a pool of hopelessness, taking self-respect and relationships with it. Now, the secrets will out and within a year, someone will be dead.
©2007 Penny Vincenzi (P)2012 Headline Publishing Group Limited
Landed
Summary
Owen Ithell’s sense of self is rooted in his long, vivid visits to his grandparents’ small farm in the Welsh hills. As an adult, he moves away from the country and meets Mel, with whom he has children. He believes he has found happiness. But following a car accident, in which his daughter is killed and he loses a hand, the course of his life is changed forever. In his despair, he resolves to reconnect with both his past and the natural world. Abducting his children, he embarks on a long, fateful journey, walking to the Welsh borders of his childhood. In his confusion, his journey is a grasping at some kind of an understanding of his loss.
©2010 Tim Pears (P)2010 Isis Publishing Ltd
House of Orphans
Summary
Finland, 1901. Eeva, the young orphaned daughter of a revolutionary, is sent from the orphanage to work as housekeeper for Thomas, a widowed country doctor. Her enigmatic presence disturbs Thomas as much as it fascinates him, shattering all the certainties of his life. Eeva longs to be back in Helsinki with the comrades of her childhood, particularly Lauri. But life there is full of danger. The power of the Russian Empire over its subject peoples is growing more oppressive, but resistance to the Tsar's rule is growing too. Some call such resistance terrorism; others call it a fight for freedom. This spellbinding story of love and loneliness is also about the tensions that arise in a country emerging into independence.
©2006 Helen Dunmore
The Painted Lady
Summary
Sixteen-year-old Frances Stuart arrives at the Restoration court to find her innocence and beauty are highly prized commodities, envied by the women and desired by the men. Before long, King Charles II falls passionately in love with her and will stop at nothing to make her his mistress. But Frances is no conventional court beauty. She is determined to make her own choices in life and to be with the man she loves. Can she overcome the dangerous pitfalls of the King's obsession, the Queen's jealousy, and the traps set for her by the King's notorious mistresses, and make the life she wants for herself?
©2011 Maeve Haran (P)2017 Isis Publishing Ltd
Orange Blossom Days
Summary
From the internationally best-selling author and "prolific queen of contemporary Irish popular fiction" (The Sunday Times), a heartwarming novel set in Spain where the new tenants of a seaside apartment building test the limits of marriage, money, and ambition. In a beautiful southern Spanish town, where the sea sparkles and orange blossoms scent the air, the gates of a brand-new apartment complex, La Joya de Andalucía, glide open to welcome the new owners. Anna and Austen MacDonald, an Irish couple, are preparing to enjoy their retirement to the fullest. But the demands of family cause problems they could never have foreseen and shake their marriage to the core. Sally-Ann Connolly Cooper, a feisty Texan mother of two young teenagers, is reeling from her husband's infidelity. La Joya becomes a place of solace for Sally-Ann, in more ways than one. Eduardo Sanchez, a haughty native from Madrid, has set out with single-minded determination to become el presidente of the complex's management committee. But pride comes before a fall. Jutta Sauer Perez, a sophisticated German who aspires to purchase her very own apartment in La Joya, works hard to reach her goal. Then the unthinkable happens. As their lives entwine and friendships and enmities develop, it becomes apparent that La Joya is not quite the haven they all expect it to be....
©2017 Patricia Scanlan (P)2018 Simon & Schuster Audio
Notre-Dame: The Soul of France
Summary
The profound emotion felt around the world upon seeing images of Notre-Dame in flames opens up a series of questions: Why was everyone so deeply moved? Why does Notre-Dame so clearly crystallise what our civilisation is about? What makes ‘Our Lady of Paris’ the soul of a nation and a symbol of human achievement? What is it that speaks so directly to us today? In answer, Agnès Poirier turns to the defining moments in Notre-Dame’s history. Beginning with the laying of the corner stone in 1163, she recounts the conversion of Henri IV to Catholicism, the coronation of Napoleon, Victor Hugo’s 19th-century campaign to preserve the cathedral, Baron Haussmann’s clearing of the streets in front of it, the Liberation in 1944, the 1950s film of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, starring Gina Lollobrigida and Anthony Quinn, and the state funeral of Charles de Gaulle, before returning to the present. The conflict over Notre-Dame’s reconstruction promises to be fierce. Nothing short of a cultural war is already brewing between the wise and the daring, the sincere and the opportunist, historians and militants, the devout and secularists. It is here that Poirier reveals the deep malaise - gilet jaunes and all - at the heart of France.
©2020 Agnès Poirier (P)2020 W. F. Howes
Ambition
Summary
Be bold. Be brave. Embrace your ambition. Ever have that nagging feeling that you are better than the sum of your current achievements? Do you have a secret desire to be achieving much more, to change the world, or to reach the top of your game? Then it is time to use your ambition to your advantage. It has been proven that ambitious people achieve greater levels of success, whether that be a higher level of education, a more prestigious job, a higher income, or more satisfaction in life. Grounded in scientific research and with contributions from people at the height of their success in business, music, the arts, and sport, Ambition will help you to harness your aspirations to achieve your lifetime goals. It will give you practical insights into how to use your talents and learn from others who have done it before, so that you can get to where you want to be. If you want to get that promotion, achieve that big life-changing goal, start your own successful business, receive that distinctive acclaim, or make a positive difference to the world, then the good news is that you already have the fuel of ambition in you. This book will show you how to use it to drive your success. Reveals how you can do more than you think with what you've already got Helps discover your true motivation using a psychology model and shows you how to use that as the fuel for greater success Contains insights from successful people in all fields including John Torode, Myleene Klass, Will Greenwood, Katie Hopkins, and Gavin Patterson Shows that the world is an exciting place and you can do anything if you use your ambition to help you
©2016 Rachel Bridge (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
Gulliver's Wife
Summary
From the best-selling author of The Lace Weaver. London, 1702. When her husband is lost at sea, Mary Burton Gulliver, midwife and herbalist, is forced to rebuild her life without him. But three years later when Lemuel Gulliver is brought home, fevered and communicating only in riddles, her ordered world is turned upside down. In a climate of suspicion, poverty and violence, Mary is caught in a crossfire of superstition and fear driven by her husband’s outlandish claims of the wonders he has seen, and it is up to her to navigate a passage to safety for herself and her daughter, and the vulnerable women in her care. But when a fellow sailor, a dangerous man with nothing to lose, appears to hold sway over her husband, Mary’s world descends deeper into chaos, and she must set out on her own journey to discover the truth of Gulliver’s travels...and the landscape of her own heart.
©2020 Lauren Chater (P)2020 W. F. Howes Ltd