A Hopscotch Summer

Literature & Fiction

MURRAY, ANNIE

Genre Fiction

Macmillan, UK

The Women of Lilac Street

Macmillan

Meet Me Under the Clock

Family of Women / Miss Purdy's Class by Murray, Annie

It is 1946: the war is over and three young women face a new kind of life. But peacetime brings its own pressures...
Katie O'Neill's childhood has been dominated by her temperamental mother and by frightening secrets that she barely understands. Innocent, yet hungry for love, she is easily taken in by male charm and is left outcast and alone with her young son.
Emma Brown has spent the war at home in Birmingham, longing for her husband Norm to return and meet the son he has never seen. But she soon finds that the joy of homecoming only brings a whole new set of problems.
And Molly Fox, after a sad and brutal childhood, found a place to belong during the war, in the women's army, the ATS. Now, the women are no longer wanted and Molly finds peacetime a bleak, difficult challenge. Finding work in guesthouses and holiday camps, she keeps running from herself, in search of a place she can call home.
All the Days of Our Lives is the story of three girls who first met in a Birmingham classroom in the 1930s, each facing life with all its joys, sorrows and surprises.

All the Days of Our Lives

Pan Publishing

Pretty seventeen-year-old Greta has never known a stable family life. With no father, and loathing her mother Ruby's latest boyfriend, Greta finds life hard at home and is happiest at work with her friends at the Cadbury factory in Birmingham where she is popular with the boys. Life takes a turn for the worse when her missing vixen of a sister Marleen turns up during the freezing winter of 1962. Greta soon decides that her only way out is marriage, but all too soon she discovers that life with her old class mate Trevor is not a ticket to freedom and happiness. She finds herself on the streets, pregnant and homeless...She is taken in by her mother's old friends, Edie and Anatoli Gruschov. In Anatoli, Greta finds the father she has never had. Kindly Edie loves to mother people and is desperately missing her son David and his family who have settled in Israel. But the love and security of this haven is soon shattered by appalling tragedy, which affects all the chocolate girls and their children and changes life forever...Continuing the saga begun in Chocolate Girls, and set in 1960s Birmingham, this is a story of families whose lives are entwined, of belonging and loss...and of a young woman's search for transforming love.

The Bells of Bournville Green

Picador

Where Earth Meets Sky

Pan/Macmillan

Miss Purdy

Pan.

Product DescriptionTwo daughters. Two mothers. The secrets of two lifetimes.Book DescriptionIn 1984 two young mothers meet at a toddler group in Birmingham. As their friendship grows, they share with each other the difficulties and secrets in their lives: Joanne, a sweet, shy girl, is increasingly afraid of her husband. The lively, promising man she married has become hostile and violent and she is too ashamed to tell anyone. When her mother, Margaret is suddenly rushed into hospital, the bewildered family find that there are things about their mother of which they had no idea. Margaret was evacuated from Birmingham as a child and has spent years avoiding the pain of her childhood - but finds that you can't run from the past forever. Sooky, kind and good-natured, has already been through one disastrous marriage and is back at home living with her parents. But being 'disgraced' is not easy. Her mother, Meena, refuses to speak to Sooky. At first her silence seems like a punishment, but Sooky gradually realizes it contains emotions which are far more complicated and that her mother may need her help. Meena has spent 20 years trying to fit in with life in Birmingham, and to deal with the conflicts within her between east and west, old ways and new. This is the story of two young women discovering the heartbreak of their mothers' lives, and of how mothers create daughters - and learn from them.About the AuthorAnnie Murray was born in Berkshire and read English at St John's College, Oxford. Her first 'Birmingham' novel, Birmingham Rose, hit The Times bestseller list when it was published in 1995. She has subsequently written many other successful novels, including A Hopscotch Summer, Soldier Girl and the bestselling Chocolate Girls. Annie has four children and lives near Reading.

My Daughter, My Mother

Birmingham Rose & Where Earth Meets Sky

GARDNERS VI BOOKS AMS006

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Books by MURRAY, ANNIE