National Network for Equitable Library Service

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?

For Mary Callaghan, marriage has brought heartaches and disappointment. What Mary wants most for her daughters is what she never had - a husband who will offer the security her own hard-drinking, free-spending, brash-talking Jack denied her.

Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather set up a catering business together in Dublin. A great story with the wonderful characters and Irish atmosphere that have made Maeve Binchy famous.