Kirjahaku

This is England in the late 50's, and Penny is in her last year at school. She works hard, her teachers like her, and they have hopes she will go to Cambridge. However, no one in her family has been to university before and her father thinks it will only give her unrealistic fantasies. He needn't have worried: Penny is not destined to go to Cambridge. She makes the mistake of falling in love. At first she thinks she and Richard can go together. That won't happen either. Every step of her way Penny is fighting to stay on course, and at every step her gentle nature suffers shattering blows. Love almost costs her her sanity. Throughout this book which opens up the world of the late fifties and early sixties, we see how society is changing, how the old certainties are giving way, and we see the sacrifices Penny makes to achieve her dream. 'Penny Black' is the second part of 'The Brighton Trilogy'.

At 23 Elaine has achieved much more than a woman of her age in 1939 might have expected - or predicted. She is single minded, ambitious and highly intelligent and can handle the heavy responsibility that has fallen on her as war threatens. It seems that anything is possible. She is wooed by a neighbour, one of 'nature's gentleman', modest, unselfish, but limited. Frank desperately wants to marry her. Then she meets Robert Leonard, owner of the largest department store in Brighton, the most eligible man in the town and falls deeply in love with a man who seems to correspond to all her instincts and ambitions. The story takes Elaine and her family through the war and into the fifties and as she watches her bright daughter grow up she is determined that she shall not fall into the trap that ensnared Elaine. This is Part One of The Brighton Trilogy.

The Prince Orsini has a lineage 800 years old. Unfortunately he no longer has the ancestral acres to support his dignity. They are all in the hands of a local farmer Don Luigi Spada, a self-made upstart who has gradually acquired all the princely mortgages. The Prince and his daughter occupy a dilapidated palace in the foothills of the Alps and she does what little she can to make up to him for all that he has lost. It seems only Ginevra can save the her father's crumbling fortune but will the price be too high? Meanwhile Italy in 1858 is in a ferment; the talk is all of driving out the Austrians and uniting the country. The name of Garibaldi is on everyone's lips, and nowhere more so than on the handsome lips of Renzo, the illegitimate son of Don Luigi and Ginevra's childhood friend. History intervenes, Garibaldi intervenes, and Ginevra will go through the two most tempestuous years of Italy's history - and her life - before the country can be united and Ginevra's and her father's destiny secured.

It is England in the 1840's, and 'Railway mania' is raging. Fortunes are being made - and lost. Unfortunately for Harriet Pearson, the intelligent 23 year old daughter of a retired schoolmaster, her father was one of the unlucky ones. He lost his savings in a failed railway scheme, suffered a stroke, and was confined to his bed for eight years. After his funeral Harriet travels to Yorkshire to stay with an old school friend, Lady Blanche Waldegrave. Here she meets one of the 'Moving Spirits of the Age,' Jack Dashwood, the railway millionaire who is seeking the hand of Blanche. She also meets Dan Brady, the Irish labourer who has left Ireland with his little girl to seek a living 'on the diggings'. This is their story.