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A Woman's Life
Three women, born at the outbreak of World War II, who've grown up in widely differing circumstances, form an improbable friendship that sustains them through forty years. Connie is the youngest member of a large Irish family and Ireland's too small to contain her. She is beautiful and impulsive. Men love her, while she roars through life, never looking before she leaps - sometimes onto rocks. Nina is English and middle-class, the shy, thoughtful, daughter of an army officer. She marries her boyhood love and has two children before realising how unfulfilled she is, and that painting is her true passion. Fay is American and Jewish, the granddaughter of a holocaust survivor. She's the ambitious one, who fulfils her dream of becoming a doctor before admitting a darker, more complex side to her nature. Through love, marriage, children, work, divorce and tragedy, this is a beautifully written and compelling novel of friendship.
Lies and Loyalties
An emotional, gritty family drama exploring the power of frustrated love and intense sibling rivalry - from the acclaimed author of ONE SUMMER and A WOMAN'S LIFE One cool March morning in London, MP Leo Barr is told that his brother, Charlie, is dead. He has hanged himself from a chestnut tree in the grounds of a mental hospital. His family reacts in different ways. Charlie's mother, Imogen, sees no point in pretending that life is still worth living - he was always her favourite. Leo and his lawyer brother Roland fight, as they always have over Charlie. The fourth brother Ron, a Catholic priest, must break the news to Charlie's wife, presently in HMP Holloway. In the days following Charlie'...
The Space Between
From the critically acclaimed author, a stylish and compelling novel about a woman making a new life for herself. Alice Lightfoot is far too young to be a widow and a grandmother. Perhaps she'd been too young to be a wife, although she was happy enough at the time. Now, nearly three years after her husband's death, the world suddenly seems to be changing. Her daughter expects Alice's life to revolve around her grandchild, Lily, and everyone else seems to think that Alice must be looking for a new husband - after all, she's such a WIFE. There doesn't seem to be space to decide what Alice wants for herself: does she want a man around, or would independence give her the full life she craves? Alice is a woman at a turning-point, coming out from the protection of a long marriage into the hurly-burly of the wider world. She has far-reaching choices to make and the seriously unexpected to face...
Poppy's Angel
Poppy's dad is still in prison. Her mum has rushed back to Poland to look after her seriously ill mother, and Poppy is sent to stay with her friend Jude. But Poppy feels stifled. At times like this she needs Angel, the joker among her friends - dodgy, wild, can't read or write much, yet bursting with energy and one of life's natural wits. But Angel, like Poppy, feels a bit orphaned, and has joined a gang. At half-term Poppy goes to stay with her friend Will in the country, and they write their second children's book. Poppy comes back to discover a note from Angel: At yor place. Need help. She finds him lying under the kitchen table, bleeding from an arm wound. Has he been stabbed? Why hasn't he rung 999? Who else is involved? And will her dad, now in an open prison, find out about her oddball friend? Rachel Billington's dramatic follow-up to Poppy's Hero features two opposing kinds of London kids, with Poppy straddling the gulf between them as she and her friends are drawn into a strange, unimaginable world.
Poppy's Hero
When Poppy discovers that her father Frank is in prison, she is angry and bewildered. Seeing her wonderful, heroic father in a London prison looking pale, subdued and in prison clothes, she suddenly has a brilliant idea: to free her father. She and her friend Will invent all kinds of escape ideas for him - until she hears that he has been removed to a prison far away on an island, with five years to serve. But when the prison decides to stage a musical using professionals and prisoners, Frank is picked for the lead role. It is then that the questions begin... The story of a feisty girl, and how she deals with the pain of her dad's downfall, has much to say about the harsh realities faced by the unlucky children of prisoners.
Maria and the Admiral
A sweeping historical drama, based on the true and enduring love of Thomas Cochrane and Maria Graham. 'Touching and dashing in equal measure' SPECTATOR 'Intense and moving' THE LADY 'Rachel Billington imagines their intense relationship in this engrossing novel' CHOICE Chile, June 1822. Maria Graham, a young British widow, watches as her compatriot Admiral Lord Cochrane sails triumphantly into the Valparaiso Bay, fresh from leading the Chilean fleet to victory over the country's Spanish rulers. Cochrane, a popular yet outspoken hero of the Napoleonic wars, is drawn to Maria, a woman whose intelligence and spirit of adventure rival his own. Yet their intense and extraordinary relationship must contend with a climate of uncertainty, political turmoil and civil war. Inspired by Maria Graham's own journals, MARIA AND THE ADMIRAL vividly brings to life the story of one woman who tested the limits of society, and of her enduring love for one of the most colourful figures of her age.
One Summer
'This great romance reads like a thriller' - BELLA 'A real emotional roller-coaster of a read, and Billington expertly sustains the suspense' - DAILY MAIL 'A heady literary cocktail that hurtles towards its tragic denouement with this author's characteristic flair' - EASY LIVING K, a middle-aged painter, has returned from a hermit-like existence in Chile to attend the wedding of a girl he once loved to the point of obsession. He arrives at the English country church to find it empty and silent. The wedding has been postponed. He drives back to his hotel - a place he'd visited many years before - opens a bottle of champagne and with it, a door to the past. When K first saw Claudia fifteen yea...
The Missing Boy
The disappearance of a teenage boy tears a family apart in this poignant, highly topical and searching story. Thirteen-year-old Dan hasn't returned home and his parents don't know whether he's run away, been kidnapped - or something worse. For one family the world as they know it is about to fall apart. At first Dan is sleeping rough, revelling in his independence. But with every passing day, his world is becoming darker and more frightening. A hundred thousand children run away each year. Most come back. But will Dan? Dan's mother, Eve, a drama teacher, can't focus; his father, Max, only knows how to flee his own demons; and his aunt, Martha, while trained to control difficult situations as...
There's More to Life
Faced with some unappealing choices for how to spend his school holiday, Ned finally decides to spend two weeks with his aunt in a seaside cottage. But then nothing turns out the way it is planned. There is no aunt, there are strange noises in the cottage and food is diseappearing. And is someone watching him from the house next door? Suggested level: primary, intermediate, junior secondary.
Clouds of Love and War
Occasionally panoramic, more often intimate, in Clouds of Love and War author Rachel Billington balances a detailed and highly researched picture of the life of a Second World War Spitfire pilot with the travails and ambitions of a young woman too often on her own. The result is both a gripping story of war and a sensitive story of love, a love that struggles to survive. 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. Through the connecting stories of these young people and their wider families, and against a background of southern county airfields, London, Oxford, Dorset and France, Rachel Billington brings the world of war time England, now eighty years in the past, back to life.
