WATER GYPSIES

By Annie Murray

Synopsis

It is 1942, and after a childhood of suffering in Birmingham, Maryann Bartholomew has built a life of happiness and safety with her husband, Joel, and their children, working the canals on his narrowboat. But the tragic loss of her old friend, Nancy, leads her to a desperate act which nearly costs her her life.

Sample Player

Narrator	Penelope Freeman
Length	14hrs
Catalogue No.	11526
Publisher	Soundings Audio; 2016

Other audiobooks by Annie Murray

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August 1939. Genie Watkins, a Birmingham kid, would love to have a proper happy family like her Italian friend, Teresa. But Genie hasn't reckoned with the outbreak of war, her already rocky family being split up and the strangely liberating effect it all has on her mother....

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Emma Brown is a happy-go-lucky child, content to work hard at school, and to play hopscotch with her friends in the run-down Nechells area of Birmingham in the 1930s. But her life is turned upside down when her mother, Cynthia, has another baby, and doesn't seem able to cope.

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To escape her abusive stepfather, young Maryann Nelson befriends Joel Bartholomew, who works on the canal. Aboard his narrowboat, she finds herself falling in love with her new life. But old nightmares that she had thought were long buried resurface, and in panic she takes flight...

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The Second World War has finally come to a close. Birmingham is welcoming home its menfolk, and a new chapter is beginning in Rachel Booker's life. As the 1950s dawn, a whole new world of opportunity opens up. But family life settles into a routine and Rachel, unsatisfied, starts to yearn for more. Do her loyalties still lie with the family and friends she clung to throughout the war years or is it time to move on ....

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