NNELS Upgrade

Thirteen-year old Polly is following in her sister's footsteps to a boarding school in Victoria. Will her sister's new secret tear her family apart again?

A successful pediatrician believes she is finding her balance after a devastating divorce. She's newly engaged and her daughter is happy again after a period of turmoil on losing her stepfather in the divorce. But the relative peace is soon shattered when Jill Ruspoli's ex-stepdaughter arrives on her doorstep and announces that her father has died under suspicious circumstances, Jill is forced to choose between the past and the present, challenging her notions of motherhood and family.

David Bergen has created an indelible portrait of a seemingly ordinary woman who struggles to accept herself as she is, and in so doing becomes unique.

When Stella Simmons comes to the Devonshire village of Burracombe to start her teaching career, she is alone in the world. This book begins with the story of life in a Devonshire village in the 1950s and shows us a picture of Britain coming to terms with the aftermath of the Second World War and entering a new decade.

Life seems to be one step forward, two steps back, but Katie never gives up hope. When she is only a girl, her handsome but wicked father, Lewis, is imprisoned for theft, leaving Katie and her mother homeless and penniless. When Lewis is released years later, it seems that life must improve. But to Katies? horror, it becomes worse than she has ever known it. When she and her father are left alone together, Katie seeks happiness and love elsewhere but, as she struggles to make a new life for herself, there is difficulty and danger at every turn.

Julia leaves home when she discovers she is pregnant. She finds work in a hotel. Eunice, wife of the manager, is also expecting. Julia's baby is stillborn but Eunice has a healthy baby girl, Amanda. Although heartbroken at the death of her own baby, Julia helps to look after Amanda. But, the Hawkins hide a secret too terrible to reveal.

Amy Pearson's family is desperately poor, even by the standards of Edwardian Liverpool, but they have each other - until Amy is torn from her home by her rich aunt, a woman obsessed by religion and snobbery who wants a girl she can mould as she wishes. Clever and pretty, ten-year-old Amy is perfect for her purposes. It is the beginning of a long journey for Amy, as she desperately searches for the family she lost, and a home where she can be free at last from her aunt's possessive tyranny.

In 1905, Emma Hart is sixteen, single and pregnant. By 1968, she is one of the richest women in the world, ruler of a business empire stretching from Yorkshire to America and Australia. Emma is a woman of substance-but what is the price she has paid?