OUR WRITERS MEAN BUSINESS 
It is 1946: the war is over and three young women face a new kind of life. But peacetime brings its own pressures . . .
Katie O’Neill’s childhood has been dominated by her temperamental mother and by frightening secrets that she barely understands. Innocent, yet hungry for love, she is easily taken in by male charm and is left outcast and alone with her young son.
Emma Brown has spent the war at home in Birmingham, longing for her husband Norm to return and meet the son he has never seen. But she soon finds that the joy of homecoming only brings a whole new set of problems.
And Molly Fox, after a sad and brutal childhood, found a place to belong during the war, in the women’s army, the ATS. Now, the women are no longer wanted and Molly finds peacetime a bleak, difficult challenge. Finding work in guesthouses and holiday camps, she keeps running from herself, in search of a place she can call home.
All the Days of Our Lives is the story of three girls who first met in a Birmingham classroom in the 1930s, each facing life with all its joys, sorrows and surprises.
| Territory | Publisher/Agent |
|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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A sequel to The Hopscotch Summer.
Molly Fox has grown up in the back streets of Birmingham at the mercy of her cruel grandfather and her drunken mother. Though she has grown into a tall, beautiful woman, Molly is haunted by terrible family secrets. When she is found lying drunk in a gutter, Molly reaches a turning point. She decides to escape by joining the army as an ATS girl.
At first her new start seems fated to be a disaster but the army gives her the encouragement she hungers for and soon her life is flourishing. But war brings tragedy as well as triumph, and when Molly receives news from home, it becomes clear that she can’t escape her past so easily…
| Territory | Publisher/Agent |
|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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Emma
Brown is a happy-go-lucky child, content to work hard at school, and to
play hopscotch with her friends on the pavement outside her house in the
run-down Nechells area of Birmingham. As long as everything is alright at
home with her Ma and Pa, her little sister Joyce and brother Sid, then life
is good. But after Em’s mother Cynthia has her baby she just doesn’t
seem to be able to cope. Her life-long friend and neighbour Dot helps as
much as she can, but she has children of her own, and no man to hand; Cynthia’s
husband Bob, too, does his best, but begins to feel that he’s losing
the wife he has loved so much; and little Em just can’t find enough
hours in the day to do all the washing and cleaning. Soon, it seems, the
only thing is for Cynthia to go and stay across the city with her tyrannical
older sister.
With Cynthia away, life only gets harder for Em. Her best friend Kate ostracizes
her, leaving only poor, stinky Molly Fox at her side, and when the Board
Man comes to call, wanting to know why she’s not at school, things
are really bad. When Bob stays out later and later in the evenings, always
the worse for wear, and spending too much time with a local very merry widow,
Em decides to travel across Birmingham to fetch her mother home, but the
mother she discovers is a far cry from the proud, upright and loving figure
she has known so well . . .
| Territory | Publisher/Agent |
|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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Pretty
seventeen-year-old Greta has never known a stable family life. With no father,
and loathing her mother Ruby's latest boyfriend, Greta finds life hard at
home and is happiest at work with her friends at the Cadbury factory in
Birmingham where she is popular with the boys.
Life takes a turn for the worse when her missing vixen of a sister Marleen
turns up during the freezing winter of 1962. Greta soon decides that her
only way out is marriage, but all too soon she discovers that life with
her old class mate Trevor is not a ticket to freedom and happiness.
She finds herself on the streets, pregnant and homeless.She is taken in
by her mother's old friends, Edie and Anatoli Gruschov. In Anatoli, Greta
finds the father she has never had. Kindly Edie loves to mother people and
is desperately missing her son David and his family who have settled in
Israel.
But the love and security of this haven is soon shattered by appalling tragedy,
which affects all the chocolate girls and their children and changes life
forever.
| Territory | Publisher/Agent |
|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
| Portugal | ASA |
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Beautiful,
dark-haired Lily has been abandoned in a Birmingham slum as a tiny child.
With few clues as to her identity she endures a childhood of loneliness
and loss.
At eighteen she applies for a post as nanny with the family of a Captain
Fairford, a soldier in Ambala, north India and his highly strung wife Susan.
Lily is drawn into the emotional life of the Fairford family and adores
her charge, two year old Cosmo.
When, in 1907, Captain Fairford orders a new Daimler car, it is brought
out by a young motor mechanic, Sam Ironside. Sam and Lily fall deeply in
love, and it is only later that Lily learns that Sam is married and feels
utterly betrayed. When Cosmo is later sent home to school, Lily finds another
post with a Dr. McBride and his invalid wife, in a beautiful Himalayan hill
station.
The place is idyllic, and Lily settles for a quiet life. However, she is
unprepared for the pain and misunderstandings that follow and force her
to run from everything she has known ...
Where Earth Meets Sky takes us from Edwardian
England and the British Raj, through the darkness of the Great War to the
glamour of Brooklands Race Track in the 1920s. Spanning two continents,
it is a story of enduring friendships and two hearts which cannot be kept
apart.
| Territory | Publisher/Agent |
|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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1950
- Seven year old Carol Martin lies encased in an iron lung, struck down
by the killer disease, polio. Distraught at her side, her mother, Violet,
wonders if this is her punishment - for Carol is the love child who should
not have been born..."Family of Women" is the story of three generations
of women: Bessie: scarred by a childhood of poverty in the slums of Victorian
Birmingham and left a young widow with four children, is a hard, bullying
woman who will go to disturbing lengths to keep her family under her thumb.
Violet: one of Bessie's four children, marries young to escape, into the
arms of a man whose life will be broken by war, Linda: grows up on a large
housing estate in the 1950s with older sister Joyce and her beloved young
sister Carol. Intelligent and energetic, she craves education and something
more than the life she sees around her. Torn from her longed for place at
the grammar school, she gives up hoping for anything better. It takes a
tragic love affair to make her question the limitations of her life and
the secrets which haunt her family. Spanning more than half of the last
century, "Family of Women" is a story of one family - and of the joys, struggles
and changes in women's lives.
| Territory | Publisher/Agent |
|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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In
the New Year of 1936, Gwen Purdy, aged 21, leaves her home to become a schoolteacher
in a poor area of Birmingham. Her parents are horrified, but she has the
support of her fiance, a recently ordained clergyman. Her early weeks in
Birmingham are an eye-opener: at the school she faces a class of 52 children,
some of whose homes are among Birmingham's very poorest. One of the teachers,
the elderly Miss Drysdale, proves an inspiration, and Gwen begins to understand
the appalling hardships endured by the children as she is drawn into their
lives. Little Lucy is a 'cripple' and an epileptic.
Through her, Gwen meets Daniel Fernandez, the elder brother in a fatherless
household. The family has roots in a Wales' small Spanish community, and
Daniel is a young man as fierce and passionate in his emotions as in his
social concerns. Gwen falls in love, and is quickly engaged in his battle
to win rights for the working classes. As the Brigades are mobilized to
fight the Spanish Civil War, Gwen has to face the fact that Daniel has secrets
in his past which she would rather not face up to...
| Territory | Publisher/Agent |
|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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It
is 1942, and after a childhood of suffering in Birmingham Maryann Bartholomew
has built a life of happiness and saftey with her husban Joel and their
children, working the canals on his narrowboat, The Esther Jane. But the
backbreaking work and constant childbearing take their toll on Maryann,
and the tragic loss of her old friend Nancy, followed by a further pregnancy,
leads her to commit a desperate act which nearly costs her life.
The walls of her security are broken down when Joel suffers an accident
and, to keep the boats working, Maryann is forced to allow Sylvia and Dot,
two wartime volunteers , into the privacy of her life.And when she discovers
that someone keeps calling for her at Birmingham's Tysely Wharf, the dark
memories of her past begin to overwhelm her.For that someone who seems to
be watching her every move, is becomming more dangerous than ever she could
imagine...
| Territory | Publisher/Agent |
|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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Young
Maryann Nelson is devastated at the loss of her beloved father. But worse
is to come when her mother, Flo, sees an opportunity to better herself and
her family in a marriage to the local undertaker, Norman Griffith. Though
on the surface a caring family man, Norman is not all he seems, as Maryann
and her sister, Sal, soon discover.
Unable to turn to their sympathetic mother for support, the girls are left
alone with their harrowing secret. But for Sal it is too much to bear…
The chance of a new life for Maryann when she befriends Joel Bartholomew.
Aboard his narrowboat, The Esther Jane, she finds herself falling in love
with life on the canal, as she is swept away from Birmingham and all her
worries.
Until Joel’s feelings for Maryann begin to change, awakening all the
old nightmares she had thought long buried, and in panic and confusion she
takes flight…
“Full of warmth and domestic detail which inspires the reader,
Annie Murray brings her characters vividly to life” Denise
Robertson
| Territory | Publisher/Agent |
|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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It
is 1942, and after a tough childhood in Birmingham, Maryann Bartholomew
has built a happy life with her husband and children working the canals
on a narrowboat. But hard work and constant child bearing take their toll,
and the death of a friend and another pregnancy lead her to a desperate
act.
| Territory | Publisher/Agent |
|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
| Portugal | ASA |
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Jessica
Hart’s unhappy childhood as the daughter of a country blacksmith is
changed forever by the sudden death of her mother. Her father, absorbed
in his own grief, leaves her to cope with her loss alone.
It is her manipulative new stepmother who tries to force her into marrying
an older man. To Jess, a bright, pretty girl who dreams of finding true
love, the idea of being trapped in a loveless marriage in unthinkable. So
she escapes to Birmingham to her Aunt Olive – the last remaining connection
to her mother.
Happily settled with her cousins in Birmingham, Jess’s life seems
set fair. But it soon becomes apparent that in the shadows of Olive’s
family there are haunting secrets of which no one will speak….And
Jess’s security is threatened when she meets a friend of the family
and falls passionately in love. For handsome Ned Green is not only already
married, nut about to become a father any day…
Poppy Day takes us into the warm heart of a Birmingham family as we follow
its struggle to come through the Great War intact. Anne Murray’s uplifting
saga is a moving love story of loyalty, remembrance and ultimately healing.
"A moving novel, beautifully crafted with a sharply observed historical
background" Coventry Evening Telegraph
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|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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Almost from the day she is abandoned, half frozen, on the steps of Birmingham’s
Home For Poor Girls, little Mercy Hanley shows a fierce determination few
others can match. An inner fire shines brightly, even in the cruel conditions
of the home.
Here, in the opening years of a new century in the British Empire’s
prime industrial city, survival is hard. Those who start with nothing are
granted least of all. When her best friend Amy is put into service far away,
and Mercy is dispatched to live in the slums of Angel Street with the slovenly
Mrs Gaskin, she feels that the orphan in her has been abandoned once again.
But behind Mercy’s pale haunting face there is a mind of steel as
Mrs Gaskin and her neighbours soon discover. Beatings, threats and poverty
cannot halt Mercy’s efforts to improve herself, or create a new life
for Susan, Mrs Gaskin’s crippled daughter. Even in the worst times,
it is as if someone is watching over Mercy, willing her to succeed. Through
the dark shadow of world war and with the first awakening of passion, Mercy
continues her fight for survival on her own terms. She will earn her freedom
and security. Then at long last she can give her love.
“Full of nostalgia and emotion" Beverley Guardian
“A tale of passion and empathy that will keep you hooked” Woman’s
Own
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|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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Genie Watkins is a Birmingham kid with a sharp tongue, an unflinching sense
of loyalty and an uncanny habit of being at the centre of the action. She
longs for a proper family like her friend Teresa's, and works hard to try
and keep everyone happy. But it's August 1939. As war breaks out Genie has
to fight even harder for her family's survival. Her father and brother gone,
she takes on responsibility for her mother, who at first finds the war strangely
liberating ... Add to this the problems of her uncle Len - 'not quite the
full shilling' - and her glamorous songbird auntie Lil, and Genie has her
work cut out to hold together the family's already rocky existence.
As the bombing begins over Birmingham, even the happy moments of singing
with her Nan or sharing secrets with Teresa are threatened. So is the precious,
loving relationship she has begun with Joe, a young pilot. The Blitz seems
about to destroy not just the face of the city but all that is familiar.
But from amidst the rubble come extraordinary surprises, glimpses of hope
- and, above all, powerful resilience.
“A tale of passion and domestic details which inspires the reader.
Annie Murray brings her characters and their neighbourhood to vitality to
life” Denise Robertson
| Territory | Publisher/Agent |
|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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A REMARKABLE, STIRRING NOVEL
Anne Craven has grown up captivated by stories of her mother's childhood
in Birmingham and of Kate's friend, Olivia. Theirs was a magical friendship
and Anna has always regretted that with Olivia's tragic death during the
War, she will never meet the woman her mother loved so deeply.
But when Kate dies after a long illness, she leaves her daughter a final
story, one that this time tells the whole truth of her life with Olivia
Kemp. And as Anna reads on, she learns that this particular story is far
from finished and is shocked to discover how little she really knows about
the mother she felt so close to. Why has Kate kept so much hidden from the
people who loved her? Why did she feel that at the last, Anna should hear
the truth? With Kate's words of caution ringing in her head, she goes in
search of the one woman, very much alive, who can answer the urgent questions
she now has about Kate's childhood, and even her own...
The journey takes Anna into the darkest moments of the past before laying
her mother's ghosts to rest. It also helps her discover a future that she
has only dreamed of and a love she has lost the hope of finding.
"A meaty family saga with just the right mix of mystery and nostalgia"
Parents Magazine
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|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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"An exceptional first novel" The Chronicle
For Rose Lucas, a spirited, intelligent girl, born into a large family in
the slums of pre-war Birmingham, life is limited and hard. But through her
friendship with Diana, daughter of a vicar from middle-class Moseley, she
learns to aspire to a different and better existence and vows never to become
a child-bearing drudge like her mother.
Life, however, seldom follows the way of dreams. After a childhood marked
by tragedy, she eventually finds and loses the love for which she has striven
so hard. From Italy, where she has travelled during the Second World War,
she is forced to return to Birmingham and an unhappy marriage, her hopes
and illusions shattered.
Finally after further struggle, she leaves the beloved city of her childhood,
as it rises from the ashes of its bombed devastation, for the powerful spirit
of Rose will not be defeated...
A vivid and lyrical first novel by an author whose passion shines through
her moving and heart-warming saga.
| Territory | Publisher/Agent |
|---|---|
| World | Darley Anderson Agency |
| UK & Commonwealth | Pan Macmillan |
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