World War One
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Mabel Crowley: Book One by E.H. Nolan
Mabel Crowley, the only child of a wealthy English banker, wants nothing more than to be rid of her last name and wed her first love, stable-boy Charlie Archer, whose own hopes reside in becoming a partner in his father’s livery yard. Her parents forbid the union and whisk the impulsive child away to Bath so that she might forget her troubles. Distraught and vowing that she will never love again, Mabel impulsively accepts a teaching position while on vacation in Bath, certain that this will ensure her spinsterhood and prove her undying love for Charlie. Irene Hartley, a five-year-old student desperately in love with her new teacher, persuades her parents to offer Mabel a position as governess to their growing brood. Her father is Theodore Hartley, the obscenely wealthy and renowned railroad tycoon. Theodore sees how his daughter has grown attached to Mabel, and after his wife dies in childbirth, he makes Mabel an offer of a permanent nature to make his eldest daughter happy. Still madly in love with Charlie, Mabel returns home to find out whether he has carried the same love in his heart in the years they’ve been apart. She finds him boarding a train, in uniform, ready to serve his country in World War I. Will she act once again on impulse, or will she make her decision based on hope for her future? A sweeping romance of love, longing, and the nature of hope, E.H. Nolan’s debut is a moving family saga that probes the deepest recesses of the human heart with subtlety, profound empathy, and prose filled with the emotion of open spaces and words left unsaid. Delving into the nature of sacrifice, family secrets, and the important of keeping promises and honouring commitments, Mabel Crowley captures the essence of the human condition as it delivers a passionate portrait of a life consumed by the power of love.
Britt by Alan Hardy
DEGENERATE FLOOSIES…DASTARDLY GERMAN SPIES…DIRTY OLD MEN…SOPWITH CAMELS…AND A VIRGINAL HERO AND HEROINE WHO ARE ENGLAND’S ONLY HOPE….
1918. England faces defeat. Germany looks set to triumph. Only one man and one woman can save England.
Wriggles is the Royal Flying Corps’ greatest ace. Can he prevent a dastardly German spy ring from getting top-secret information out of France? Is he completely out of his depth in a world of devilish scoundrels, and flouncing, unashamed, near-naked scarlet women?
Britt, his childhood sweetheart, is working as a nurse at a hospital near Paris. Forever pining for the lost innocence of her childhood, she too has problems. Adrift in a world of dirty old men and dissolute hussies, she is fast approaching mental breakdown. She finds purpose in life as a slayer of German spies. Convinced as she is that German male spies have snakes growing out from between their legs, they are quite easy to identify. Another obsession of hers is to discover what Wriggles has between his legs…
As well as twists and turns of plot, exciting aerial combats, and a host of characters, from the suave, bollocks-obsessed Major Mullen to sexy, black-haired, pouting Marianne casting amorous eyes over our virginal hero, there unfolds (in the story of Britt and Wriggles) one of the greatest love-stories ever told. Will it end happily, or will Wriggles end up with a bullet through his head, and Britt strait-jacketed in a mental institution?
This is a novel of sexual and martial comedy, with no-holds-barred excitement and thrills, and more. It explores two flawed individuals who, heartbreakingly unable to come to terms with an adult world, begin to draw closer and closer together and discover feelings hitherto unknown to them. It is a sympathetic portrayal of two children trapped in adult bodies, and how one of them, Britt, tries to dig her way out of her schizophrenic nightmare with a courage and determination which deserves to succeed…
Will Britt manage to save herself..? And will Britt and Wriggles save England..? Will they find true love? Or does death and madness await them in a world dominated by Germany and its depraved supporters?
