検索キーワード： ナレーター "Joan Walker" すべてのカテゴリー

Tales to soothe tired souls. A nighttime companion for frazzled adults, including calming stories and poems for a good night's sleep. This cheering audiobook of best loved short tales, extracts and poems will calm and restore an anxious mind before sleep. A good night's sleep is essential for our well-being and our health, but in our busy lives sleep is often poor and overlooked. Now is the time to stop a while and find consolation and wonder in other worlds where all is well.

Minnie and her sister, Clara, spinsters both, live in a dilapidated country house in the middle of a housing estate, built when their father sold off the family's land. Now in their 70s, their days follow a well-established routine: long gone are the garden parties, the tennis lessons and their suffocating strict mother. Gone, too, is any mention of what happened when Minnie was 16 and the secret the family buried in the grounds of their estate. Over the course of the summer, both begin to tell their stories....

Laura Horsley, in a moment of uncharacteristic recklessness, finds herself agreeing to help organise a literary festival in the English countryside. But her initial excitement is rapidly followed by a mounting sense of panic when reality sinks in and she realises just how much work is involved - especially when an innocent mistake leads the festival committee to mistakenly believe that Laura is a personal friend of the author at the top of their wish-list. Determined to rise to the challenge, she sets off to meet her literary hero.

Nel is the owner of a houseful of animals and the organiser of the farmer’s market in the picturesque Paradise Fields. She is always super-busy, but not so busy to want to preserve the meadow and market she loves when its owner dies. But who can she trust to help her save Paradise Fields? Her sensible boyfriend, Simon? Or Jake, the devilishly handsome man who kissed her under the mistletoe?

In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. An estimated one million pages eventually found their way to the archive - and it soon became clear this was more than anyone could digest. Today, the diaries are stored at the University of Sussex, where, remarkably, most remain unread.

From the ashes of war rose a song of hope.... A warm-hearted, nostalgic and uplifting saga, The Songbirds of Colliers Row by Jennifer Hart is perfect for fans of Call the Midwife, Donna Douglas and Kate Thompson's Secrets of the Singer Girls and for anyone with a song in their heart.... A village without a voice. That's what the locals are saying about Llandegwen, deep in the Welsh valleys.

Newly married to dashing RAF officer Tom, Irene Farley leaves behind her safe countryside life to move in with his family by the docks in South Shields. Little prepares her for the devastation the Jerry bombers have wreaked on the Sixteen Streets or that they would be living under her mother-in-law's roof, alongside Tom's three brothers and two wives!

Marguerite had been living a comfortable but dull existence in a suburban town with her straitlaced lawyer husband. When he dies, she realises that life has passed her by. Marcel had been in a loving relationship with Nora since they left Algeria 60 years before. Now that he has lost her, he has lost his way. Marguerite and Marcel live in two very different worlds - one rich, one poor. They never should have met. And yet their paths cross at a retreat, and a connection forms....

Erykah Macdonald has a nice life - the kind of life you're meant to want. But on her 20th wedding anniversary, she's about to cross a line. Several hundred miles away in the shallow waters of a Hebridean island, a body is found. It's been in the water long enough to make identification tricky, but it's clear this is no accidental death. Erykah knows she's about to make a choice she can't reverse - but she's lived with secrets most of her life. She thinks she's ready.

Our Summer Together is an uplifting story about family, friendship and the happy surprise of finding love later in life. Caro knows how to be a mother - advising her grown-up daughters on career and relationship worries. She knows how to be a grandmother - enjoying the hectic energy of her three-year-old grandson. She knows how to be a daughter - helping her aging mother retain her independence.

It's 1939 and little Dot May Dun is playing with her brothers in the quiet lanes of their Derbyshire village. The grown-ups' talk of war means very little to Dot but things are starting to change in the village, for good. When a prisoner of war camp is built close to Dot's village, and a Yankee base is stationed nearby, Dot makes friends with the most unlikely of soldiers. But her friendships are threatened when telegrams start to arrive in the village and the real impact of war bears heavily on this close-knit mining community.

'I'm good at secrets,' Libby says. Yes, thinks Jessica, I bet you are... Jessica should have everything to make her happy: a loving husband, a growing reputation as a jewellery designer, hope for a family of her own in the future. Then she meets Libby - flattering, attentive - and believes she has found the friendship she missed out on as a child. Until Jessica catches her husband and Libby alone, heads together in whispered collusion. With her life unravelling, Jessica flees home to the seaside town where she grew up.

Jerusalem, 1920: in an already fractured city, 11-year-old Prudence feels the tension rising as her architect father launches an ambitious and wildly eccentric plan to redesign the Holy City by importing English parks to the desert. Prue, known as the 'little witness', eavesdrops underneath the tables of tearooms and behind the curtains of the dance halls of the city's elite, watching everything but rarely being watched herself.

Can you remember how photosynthesis works? Well, what about quadratic equations? Or the names of all the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice? How about Henry VIII’s wives, conjunctions, inertia, the continents of the world and the Seven Deadly Sins? And what on earth is the point of pi? Let’s face it, there are an awful lot of half-remembered things floating around in our heads.

Eddie and Eva meet on the eve of the Second World War. Eddie only wants to be a flyer, to find escape in the clouds from his own complicated family. However, the Battle of Britain makes a pilot's life a dangerous way to flee reality. Eva has her own passionate longing: to become a painter. When Eva's Jewish mother disappears to Germany, she is left alone with her elderly father. Both Eddie and Eva come of age at a time that teaches them that happiness is always fleeting, but there are things worth living - or dying - for.

Sixteen years have passed since Sephy Hadley first met Callum McGregor. For Callie Rose, growing up mixed race in a world where bitter prejudice divides Noughts and Crosses has meant she's an outsider wherever she turns. Enter Jude McGregor. Jude teaches Callie about her real family history, and the more she learns the more he persuades her where her loyalties really lie. But soon Callie is caught in a trap she can't get out of - one which will have deadly consequences.

A frightened girl running barefoot on a knife edge - that's how 18-year-old Sephy feels as she gazes down at her newborn daughter, Callie Rose. Whilst Sephy is a Cross, the baby's father, Callum, was a nought, giving Callie Rose dual heritage in a society where the ruling Crosses treat the pale-skinned noughts (blankers) as second-class citizens.

James Lionel Falconer has risen quickly from a mere shop worker to being the right-hand man of Henry Malvern, head of the most prestigious shipping company in London. With Malvern's daughter Alexis running away to the country after a terrible tragedy and refusing to return, James' ascent to head of the company seems inevitable. But even a charmed life like James' is not without its setbacks. A terrible fire threatens to end his merchant career before it's had a chance to truly begin. Mrs. Ward, James' former paramour, has a secret that could change his life forever.

Victorian England is a country of sharp divides between rich and poor, but James Lionel Falconer, who spends his days working at his father’s market stall, is determined to become a merchant prince. James quickly rises through the ranks, proving himself both hardworking and trustworthy and catching the eye of Henry Malvern, head of the most prestigious shipping company in London. But when threats against his reputation - and his life - begin to emerge, James will have to prove he truly is the master of his fate.

May of Teck, only daughter of a noble family fallen from grace, has been selected to marry the troublesome Prince Eddy, heir to the British throne. Submitting to the wishes of Queen Victoria and under pressure from her family, young May agrees. But just as a spark of love and devotion arises between the young couple, Prince Eddy dies of influenza. To her horror, May discovers she is to be married to the brother, Georgie, instead, a cold and domineering man. But what can she do? A gripping account of the life of Queen Mary, one of the most formidable queens of Britain.