The Beauty Chorus


Book Description

'A WONDERFUL, ESCAPIST, NOSTALGIC READ'- RED MAGAZINE: An enthralling debut novel of romance, wartime glamour, and adventure in the skies. Inspired by the brave young women who flew fighter planes across Britain in World War Two, New Year's Eve, 1940: Evie Chase, the beautiful debutante daughter of an adoring RAF Commander, gazes out at the sky as swing music drifts in from the ballroom. With bombs falling nightly in London, she resolves that the coming year will bring more than just dances and tennis matches and is determined to do her bit for the war effort. 2nd January, 1941: Evie curses her fashionable heels as they skid on the frozen ground of her local airfield. She is here to volunteer for 'The Beauty Chorus,' the female pilots who fly much-needed planes to bases across the country. Soon, she is billeted in a tiny country cottage, sharing with an anxious young mother and a naive teenager. Thrown together by war, these three very different women soon become friends, confidantes, and fellow adventuresses. But as they take to the skies, they will also face hardship, prejudice, and tragedy. Can their new-found bond survive their darkest hours?




Coming Home Galop


Book Description




The Independent


Book Description







Jolly Della Pringle


Book Description

The story of American repertory theatre actress Jolly Della Pringle (1870-1952) is an odyssey of travel, adventure, drama, romance and many changes in fortune. Pringle was a major star to the people in the gold fields, cow towns, logging camps, military forts and rural communities of the West and Midwest during the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century. She knew most of the famous performers of her day, including Buffalo Bill Cody, Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Douglas Fairbanks and Gloria Swanson. Before serial marriage was common in show business, the seldom single Della Pringle married and divorced five times. Here for the first time is Pringle's saga, covering her rise from a teenage hotel maid to the magnificently gowned star of her own theatrical company, her amassing of a fortune, her coast to coast fame and her appearances in Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops comedies.




The Sketch


Book Description




The London


Book Description




The Forbidden Zone 1940


Book Description

This is a continuation of the story of Anne Angelo, as published in the companion book: A Sprig of White Heather and a Scottish Lass. It is a heart-warming story that completely justifies the researching and writing. It demonstrates how inexorably lives can be shaped and directed by the circumstances of birth and the environment in which the formative years are spent. Born in Invergordon, Ross-shire, in the Highlands of Scotland, to parents utter opposites in cultural and social backgrounds, education, heredity, and race—and further, tragically, in conflict since the very day of their wedding—her world until the age of twenty was one of hatred and heartbreak, fear, and disillusionment and despair. Released at that age, by entirely fortuitous circumstances over which she had no control, she enjoyed a period of blissful living in France. The coming of the War brought an end to that. The actions of the German Forces of Occupation against her drove her into her activities with the French Resistance. It was inevitable she would be betrayed. She was forced to flee to the only place where she could be sure enemy agents could not reach her—her father’s house in the Scottish Highlands, where the security for the old naval base was still effective, but where she had no protection from her father’s wiles and hostile intentions. In many ways, her story outdoes that of Hatter’s Castle. Clinging to the slender thread of the love she found in France, she endures. Until the sun shines and, in a surprising revelation, shows that motives and intents are not always what they are thought to be.




Punch


Book Description