Maureen Lee

Until that fateful day in Brighton, Maggie had thought she would never be happy again... Maggie's once-happy marriage has turned sour, leaving her tied to a husband who no longer seems to love her. So she continues to work, keeps in touch with her friends and tries not to think about the lack of love in her life. But all that changes when Maggie meets someone who transforms how she feels about herself and turns her entire world upside down.

A Dream Come True

Dancing In The Dark

September Girls

It's 1925 and Patricia, Tara and Aideen couldn't be more excited about leaving Dublin with their father and heading for a new life in Liverpool. Yet it soon becomes clear that all is not as it seems, for the day after they arrive in England, Bernie hastily sweeps the girls onto a huge ocean liner heading to New York, leaving no forwarding address. When their father vanishes mid-way across the Atlantic, the grieving sisters prepare themselves for a new life in the big city, far from home, friends and family. For whatever their father was running from has every chance of catching up with the girls, unless they can do their best to build new lives in New York ...

The Kelly sisters

From 1930s Liverpool to London, then California and finally back to Liverpool, the powerful and compelling saga of one woman's turbulent life. Kitty O'Brien's husband is a drunken thug, and in order to feed her starving children, she sells her body on the Liverpool docks. Her daughter Lizzie is pregnant by her father and, still weak after her abortion, she kills him. Her mother takes the blame, but Lizzie cannot blot out the painful memories of her childhood. Eventually, with a failed marriage behind her, she finds fame, fortune and friendship in Hollywood - but happiness still escapes her. And so she returns to her roots, and it is her final marriage and its disastrous consequences that, at last, force her to face her past and find the happiness and peace of mind that have always eluded her.

Stepping Stones

On 3rd September 1939, Amy Browning decided to start writing a diary. It was a momentous day for so many reasons: it was Amy's 18th birthday; her sister had just given birth to a baby boy; and on the radio it was announced that Great Britain was now at war with Germany. For a while, life didn't change very much for Amy. Living with her family in Opal Street, Liverpool, Amy and her friend both got jobs at a factory, and spent their free time looking round the shops, or watching the ships being loaded at the docks. But as the months went by, things began to change. The bombing started, and Amy's fears grew for her brother, fighting in France, and her boyfriend Ian, in the RAF.

Amy's Diary

Put Out the Fires

Number One bestseller Maureen Lee's first novel of the hugely popular Pearl Street series. As Britain stands alone against a monstrous enemy, the inhabitants of Pearl Street, in Liverpool, face hardship and heartbreak with courage and humour. The war touches each of them in a different way: for Annie Poulson, a widow, it means never-ending worry when her twin boys are called up and sent to France; Sheila Reilly's husband, Cal, faces the terror of U-Boat attacks; Eileen Costello is liberated from a bitter, loveless marriage when her husband is sent to Egypt and she goes to work in a munitions factory - and falls in love. And Jessica Fleming, down on her luck, is forced to return to the street she'd hoped never to see again.

(Pearl Street 1)

Lights Out Liverpool

A tragedy tears a family apart - a superb novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of THE LEAVING OF LIVERPOOL. Pretty Amy Curran was just eighteen years old when she met Barney Patterson, the love of her life, on Southport Pier in 1939. Their romantic, passionate marriage was made in heaven - but with the outbreak of war, Barney volunteered to fight, and the couple were separated for five long years. When he returned to Liverpool after VE Day, he wasn't the same person - and neither was Amy. How could things have become so twisted that one day Amy would kill the husband she once so adored? And what happened to their little girl, Pearl, just five years old at the time? In 1971 Amy is released from prison - although her freedom will change the lives of others, not least that of her daughter. But Pearl has her own demons to exorcise in her quest for happiness. And the greatest question she must ask herself is this: can she ever love her mother after what she did?

A heart-wrenching Liverpool saga about families and their secrets

Mother Of Pearl

When Lila is exiled to Australia on a false charge of theft, she is helped by a buccaneer to return to London and have her revenge

Lila

A heartwarming family saga set just after World War II from SUNDAY TIMES Top 10 bestseller Maureen Lee. It's 1944 and Flora Knox is enjoying a beautiful spring morning in the Swiss mountains, waiting on a railway station platform for a train. Having been educated in Switzerland, Flora has been unable to return home to the UK since the outbreak of war, much to her delight. She is far happier there than she had been with her elderly aunt. As Flora watches, a cattle train draws closer to the station, pulling a fleet of slatted trucks behind. But the trucks don't contain animals. From within come the sounds of humans, groaning, pleading, on a desperate journey across the Swiss countryside. Horrified, Flora runs to the train as it slowly clatters through the station, and as she does so, a filthy bundle of rags is pushed out into her arms. Through the slats of the train, she hears a desperate plea: 'Take him. His name is Simon.' As the train disappears, Flora is left holding a tiny baby boy. Everything looks just the same as it did moments before - the sun, the sky, the station - but nothing will ever be the same again. SUNDAY TIMES bestseller Maureen Lee has written a powerful, moving story of war, motherhood and love.

Flora And Grace

It is Liverpool, 1939. The Second World War is about to start when pretty Laura Oliver meets Queenie Todd. Laura is twenty-one and happily married to dashing Roddy. Plain, inadequate Queenie is only fourteen and has been deserted by her goodtime mother. The two become friends, along with big-hearted Vera Monoghan across the street. When the air raids begin the older women trust Queenie sufficiently to put their small daughters, Hester and Mary, into her care and the three young people are evacuated to Caerdovey, a small town on the coast of Wales. At first it is a haven of peace and quiet. The girls have a wonderful time and then something happens, so terrifying that it will haunt them for the rest of their lives. This unputdownable story tells of great friendships and terrible betrayals. Maureen Lee has written a novel full of the warmth and perception we have come to expect from her.

Queen of the Mersey

An exclusive ebook suspense novel from Sunday Times bestselling author, Maureen Lee. Culloden: an elite boarding school for girls in New Hampshire, surrounded by fields of yellow corn which roll down to the sea, is now a headline in the national newspapers due to a mysterious disappearance. On their very last day of school, three young women say goodbye to each other for a final time: Julie, Cornelia and Sam. But as they do so, they make a promise: never to contact each other again, never to speak of what happened that term. Among the privileged families who mingle on the grass lawns at graduation, there are those who carry secrets of their own. And Culloden is a school with more than one dark secret at its heart...

An Eye For An Eye

The war touches each of the inhabitants of Pearl Street in a different way, but they all face their hardship and heartbreak with courage and humour. Lights Out Liverpool is a poignant story of families torn apart and neighbours united by war.

Set during the Second World War in Liverpool, this is a wonderful Maureen Lee tale - written specially for the World Book Day Quick Reads promotion. On 3 September 1939, Amy Browning decided to start writing a diary. It was a momentous day for so many reasons: it was Amy's eighteenth birthday; her sister had just given birth to a baby boy; and on the radio it was announced that Great Britain was now at war with Germany. For a while, life didn't change very much for Amy. Living with her family in Opal Street, Liverpool, Amy and her friend both got jobs at a factory and spent their free time looking round the shops, or watching the ships being loaded at the docks. But as the months went by, things began to change. The bombing started, and Amy's fears grew for her brother, fighting in France, and her boyfriend Ian, in the RAF...

Alice Lacey couldn't be more different from her sister-in-law, Cora. Alice is married to John, Cora to his hapless younger brother Billie. Both women give birth to sons on one chaotic night in 1940. It is Cora's jealousy and resentment that prompts her to swap her puny baby for Alice's beautiful son. With Alice's marriage in tatters, she borrows money from Cora in order to purchase the lease of the tiny hairdresser where she works. Alice is talented; the business thrives and a chain of salons becomes Laceys of Liverpool. The relationships between the cousins Cormac and Maurice, their parents, Alice's three girls and their eventual husbands and children, combine to give a unique picture of Liverpool in the last sixty years of the twentieth century.

Laceys of Liverpool

Two families - and their secrets . . . A superb Liverpool saga from bestselling author Maureen Lee 'The queen of saga writing' MY WEEKLY 'Maureen Lee is one of those hugely talented authors who writes great women for women readers. Her books don't just have one heroine, they have several. But even by her popular standards, The September Girls is exceptional. ... a thumping multi-generational saga' DAILY RECORD In Liverpool, on a stormy September night in 1920, two women from very different backgrounds give birth to daughters in the same house. Enemies at first, they later become friends when separate troubles unite them. But friendship between their daughters, Cara and Sybil, is a different matter. Nineteen years later, at the beginning of the Second World War, Cara and Sybil find themselves thrown together when they enlist and are both stationed in Malta. It is a time of live-changing repercussions for them both while, back home in Liverpool, the bombs rain down on a defiant city.

The September Girls

A moving contemporary novel set in Liverpool about the new residents of Victoria Square Victoria Macara lives in the old house on the corner. When the land is sold, she finds herself surrounded by new properties called Victoria Square. The newcomers include mismatched lovers, Kathleen and Steve; Rachel, who is attempting to forget a terrible tragedy; Sarah who is running away from an abusive husband, while Anna and Ernie are just after a quiet life. For Marie, Victoria Square is a refuge from the men who murdered her husband; for Judy, it means a fresh start after forty years of marriage to a man she'd thought she'd love for ever. But it is to Gareth - trapped in a hopeless marriage - that Victoria is particularly drawn . . .

The Old House on the Corner

The Girl from Barefoot House

Another wonderful Liverpool saga from bestselling author, Maureen Lee. At the age of nineteen, Kitty McCarthy has decided she is going to live a life less ordinary - although she doesn't know quite how to go about it. What she does know is that she doesn't want to get married and raise children in Liverpool like her elder sisters: Claire, who is a mother-hen; easy-going Norah and elegant Aileen. But Kitty's resolve is tested by the unexpected direction her life takes. The combination of an impetuous youthful decision and a chance meeting twenty years later are to have momentous repercussions that will stay with her for ever, and it is her sisters who are the constant thread when other relationships come and go. They know her best, they say, and in the end they know what's best for her - although Kitty would almost certainly disagree...

Maureen Lee

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