To touch the lives of children, to witness their listening and reading silence, is reward enough in itself.

I love "the one that got away" trope, but I love when we get to see the whole evolution of the relationship, just not the ending snippet.Toure working on things with his daughter, Seline, was sweet and added an emotional layer that I wish could have been explored a little more, but in a novella it was done well. On 7 December 1946, she married Graham Hope Pilcher, a war hero and jute industry executive who died in March 2009. Almost from the beginning, I found myself saving this for things like the stationary bike, as it was encouraging me to bike more and stay on the bike longer.

I was obsessed with their connection and romance, Kennedy doesn’t disappoint and this short treat was just a delight! All in all a great listen if you want something quick with a dash of emotion, heat, and some laughs. I took the book, read the first fifty pages and was hooked on it from the beginning ~~ Pilcher is a classic storyteller. It’s second chance, the one that got away, reuniting years later after they both have lived their lives.But even so (like a dog worrying a bone, Judith’s thoughts turned back to her original grievance), the business of Saint Ursula’s still rankled. The last bit of the journey was the shortest possible walk, because the station stood exactly opposite the bottom gate of the Riverview House garden. In a season that changes all of them, the brilliance of family love overshadows even the valley of heartache as the Baxters draw closer to God and each other. At the star of this novel, I was rather fascinated by the relationship between Judith and her mother, who seems to be a push-over, but at the same time capable of some deep thoughts. It was like having all the world revealed, a huge and marvellously coloured map: farmland, patchworked like a quilt into small fields, green velvet for pasture and brown corduroy velvet for plough; distant hills, crowned with cairns of rock which dated back to a time, so long ago, that it was beyond comprehension; the estuary, its flood-waters blue with reflected sky, like a huge land-enclosed lake, but it wasn’t a lake at all, for it filled and emptied with the tides, flowing out to sea down the deep-water passage known as the Channel.

Judith did strike me as being very cold and I do think that she used Loveday for her family and beautiful house without actually liking her. Hardback, genuine cloth back and spine, printed in full colour throughout on 150gsm matt art paper, 136pp, 230mm x 165mm.You can also read about his life in War Child to War Horse, a collaborative biography with Maggie Fergusson.

He travels all over the UK and abroad talking to people of all ages at literary festivals, telling his stories and encouraging them to tell theirs.

During their sojourn in Penmarron, they had seen quite a lot of her, and she had never been anything but kind. The writing is not pretentious, the people feel real, everything that happens is described so clearly that I still feel I am in Judith Dunbar's Dower House listening to the rain on the roof. Two sisters, Edna and Hilda by name, who worked for her as cook and house parlourmaid, were equally elderly and unforthcoming, not a bit like darling Phyllis, who did everything for them all at Riverview House, but still found time to play racing demon at the kitchen table and read fortunes with tea-leaves.