Pan Books War Babies Murray Annie

In Annie Murray's bestselling Chocolate Girls, three very different women work together at Cadbury's Bournville factory, where their lives become entwined by war and work - and a child called David • Edie marries young to escape her unhappy family home. Widowed at nineteen, and having lost her child from the marriage, she faces the war grieving and lonely. Then one night during the Blitz, an infant mysteriously abandoned during the bombing is handed into her care… • Ruby, meanwhile, doesn't want to be left behind in the wedding stakes, and settles for marriage with Frank • Finally there's Janet, kind-hearted and susceptible to male charm, who is hurt desperately by an affair with a married man • David, the child who steals Edie's heart as she brings him up through a time none of them will ever forget, is the love of all their lives

From Annie Murray, the bestselling author of The Bells of Bournville Green, comes Secrets of the Chocolate Girls, another gritty family saga about love, war and chocolate • September 1940, Birmingham • While her husband and daughter work at the Cadbury's Bournville factory, Ann Gilby has her hands full at home with her other daughter, Sheila, newly returned home with baby Elaine. With Sheila's husband away doing his bit in the RAF, Ann knows she should be grateful to have all her children safe under one roof. But she can't help but fear for their uncertain future as bombs fall ever closer to her Birmingham home. Part of her yearns for the carefree days of her youth when she also worked the line at Cadburys, filling trays of chocolate shells

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

A tale of hardship and survival, The Doorstep Child is a heart-rending story from bestselling author Annie Murray • From a tender age little Evie struggled • Evie spent her early years left outside on the step. With a drunk for a father and a neglectful mother, all little Evie has ever craved is a safe home and a normal existence • Her young eyes had seen so much but this never tainted her spirit. If it wasn't for her best friend Gary, and friendly dog called Whisky - Evie might never have made it to the sixteenth birthday • At sixteen she meets Ken, a sweet brown-eyed boy, not much older than she is. Perhaps her fortunes have changed? But no sooner does she give over her heart, she is betrayed, not for the first time in her young life

The Allotment Girls is an inspiring and heartwarming novel of wartime hardship, friendship and fortitude from Kate Thompson, author of the Secrets of the Sewing Bee • During the Second World War, life in the iconic Bryant & May match factory is grimy and tough. Annie, Rose, Pearl and Millie carry on making matches for the British Army, with bombs raining down around them • Inspired by the Dig for Victory campaign, Annie persuades the owners to start Bryant & May allotment in the factory grounds. With plenty of sweat and toil, the girls eventually carve out a corner of the yard into a green plot full of life and colour • In the darkest of times, the girls find their allotment a tranquil, happy escape. Using pierced dustbin lids to sieve through the shrapnel and debris, they bring about a powerful change, not just in the factory, but their own lives

Sometimes the end is only the beginning • Annie is single, unemployed and just a bit stuck when her beloved father dies unexpectedly. Furious at his partner's plans to scatter his ashes somewhere of no emotional significance, Annie seizes the urn and, on a whim, decides to take it on a tour of the thirty-one sea areas that make up the shipping forecast, which her father loved listening to, despite living in landlocked St Albans. Travelling around the coastline of Britain searching for the perfect place to say goodbye, she starts to wonder if it might be time to rethink some of the relationships in her life - but is it too late for second chances? • A novel about love, loss and the importance of living life to the full, Annie Stanley, All at Sea by Sue Teddern is proof that it's often the most difficult moments in life that show us what really matters

One of the greatest military feats during the Second World War was the transformation of the German force's activities in the weeks following the battles in Holland and on the German border, where the Allies had finally inflicted the greatest catastrophes of modern war on them • Somehow the Germans found the strength to halt the Allied advance in its tracks and to prolong the war to 1945. Armageddon, by military historian Sir Max Hastings, is the epic story of those last eight months of the war in northern Europe

Bomber Command is journalist and military historian Sir Max Hastings' compelling account of one of the most controversial struggles of the Second World War • RAF Bomber Command’s offensive against the cities of Germany was one of the epic campaigns of the Second World War. More than 56,000 British and Commonwealth aircrew and 600,000 Germans died in the course of the RAF’s attempt to win the war by bombing. The struggle began in 1939 with a few primitive Whitleys, Hampdens and Wellingtons, and ended six years later with 1,600 Lancasters, Halifaxes and Mosquitoes razing whole cities in a single night • Max Hastings traced the developments of area bombing using a wealth of documents, letters, diaries and interviews with key surviving witnesses. Bomber Command is, in turn, a fascinating, meticulously-researched, and vivid assessment of the RAF's integral role in the Second World War

Family and friendship mean everything under the darkening skies of wartime Britain. The Spitfire Sisters is the third book in Margaret Dickinson's moving Maitland trilogy • It is the 1930s and the Maitland family have spent the years following the Great War struggling to come to terms with its catastrophic aftermath, and their hopes now lie with the next generation. Their Lincolnshire village of Doddington suffered terrible loss and it has taken great courage for the bereaved families to rebuild their lives without their loved ones • When war is declared again, it is Daisy Maitland and her peers who must now take up the fight for freedom. Feisty and a daredevil like her beloved Aunt Pips, who spent World War One on the front line serving with a flying ambulance corps, Daisy had persuaded a family friend to teach her to fly as a young woman

Will Ella ever find what she's looking for? • Voluntary nurse Ella is haunted by the soldiers' cries she hears on the battlefields of Dieppe. But that's not the only thing that haunts her. When her dear friend Jim breaks her trust, Ella is left bruised and heartbroken. Over the years, her friendships have been pulled apart at the seams by the effects of war. Now, more than ever, she feels so alone • At a military hospital in France, Ella befriends Connie and Paddy. Slowly she begins to heal, and finds comfort in the arms of a French officer called Paulo - could he be her salvation? • With the end of the war on the horizon, surely things have to get better? Ella grew up not knowing her real family but a clue leads her in their direction. What did happen to Ella's parents, and why is she so desperate to find out? • The Abandoned Daughter by Mary Wood is the second book in The Girls Who Went To War series

The first in Ken Follett's breathtaking Century Trilogy, Fall of Giants is a captivating novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women • A World in Chaos • 1911, a thirteen-year-old boy, Billy Williams, begins working down the mines as George V is crowned king. The escalating arms race between the empire nations will put not only the king but this young boy in grave danger • A Terrible War • Billy’s family is inextricably linked with the Fitzherberts, the aristocratic owners of the coal mine where he works. And when Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German embassy in London, their destiny also becomes entangled with that of Gus Dewar, an ambitious young aide to Woodrow Wilson, and two orphaned Russian brothers whose plan to emigrate to America falls foul of conscription, revolution and imminent war