Search results for ""Author Laurie Graham""

'They like it if you're marvellous for your age. If you can't be that, they want you down Plaistow Crematorium, not hanging about here, taking up bus seats.' So says Bernie Gibbs, living on her memories on the seventh floor of an East End high-rise. Her diet is mainly chocolate bars and she yearns for action, or at least for the re-opening of the old Imperial Dance Hall, where she used to have good times. One of her ex-husbands, Jimmy Dwyer, turns up from nowhere with a greyhound that needs a temporary home, then disappears again. Seeing Jimmy revives memories of the War, when Birdie and her friends did their bit. She still does her bit today, though the world around her doesn't make much sense. When the Fruit Bowl Estate boils over in the scorching summer of '95, Birdie gets all the action she can handle.

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It shouldn't have been like this. Being on television was meant to lead to fame and a glamorous social life. But for Lizzie Partridge, forty-something, divorced and TV cook on Midlands This Morning, it meant dinners for one, coping alone with an air-head adolescent daughter and following middle-aged men into corner shops pretending she needed a bottle of Lea & Perrins. Her good friend Louie - if only he wasn't gay - thought he knew what the trouble was: Lizzie was always on the wrong side of the glass, looking in at other people's lives. True or not, things for Lizzie were going to get a lot worse before they got better...

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'Entirely original, this makes us laugh a lot and take a long look at our lives. I absolutely adored it!' KATIE FFORDEThe laugh-out-loud sequel to Perfect Meringues - can former queen of the TV cooks Lizzie Partridge claw her way back into the nation's hearts?Life has been going downhill for ex-TV chef Lizzie Partridge ever since she spectacularly ended her television career by throwing a chocolate mousse at the host of Midlands This Morning. Her partner Tom has left her, Nigella and Jamie have got the cookery world sewn up, and now her cookery column - her last bit of work - has been axed. Surely the only way is up from here?In a desperate bid for sympathy and attention she runs away, from the gas bill and the mouse under the sink, and in wet and wintry Aberystwyth she experiences a brush with her past and a glimmer of new prospects. And when her nephew's girlfriend - a TV producer - has the bright idea to reunite her with her former nemesis and target of the mousse attack in a new show, it seems like things could be going Lizzie's way again after all!

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Pittsburgh was too small for Beryl Wexler. Barely out of high school, she changed her name to Buzz and set off for the bright lights of London. She never looked back. Now she's at the top of her game in the music PR business, looking after the coolest groups on the planet. And for a woman who was forty-two last birthday she certainly keeps up the pace. But her life is about to change. Some twenty-year-old has been given the new Japanese girl band predicted to go stellar, and Buzz is being sidelined. Instead, Buzz gets to tour with the Gorni Grannies, Bulgarian singers of a certain age. These ladies may not be the tantrum-throwing celebs Buzz is used to, but they present other challenges. How to stop Lubka straining yogurt through her knee highs? How to dissuade Kichka from stealing everything not nailed to the floor? Fuelled by copious shots of home-brewed plum rakia, Buzz and Lubka address life's ups and down, until the world tilts and a different future beckons.

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Nan's mother loves to tell her daughter stories, though the details vary according to how much she has drunk. The tale she tells most often claims that Admiral Lord Nelson is Nan's father: he was her lover and she saw him die at Trafalgar. Or so she claims. From poor beginnings, resourceful Nan makes her own determined way through life, but always haunted by the wish to know the truth about her father. From Portsmouth in the early 1800s to the battlefields of the Crimea, Nan discovers the world is full of people with a story about Nelson. There are some questions we can never hope to answer...

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'Why is Laurie Graham not carried on people's shoulders through cheering crowds? Her books are brilliant!' MARIAN KEYESThe Early Birds is the feel-good and funny follow-up to The Future Homemakers of America that proves that no matter what life throws at you, great friends and regular cocktails will always see you through.Peggy, the southern belle. Kath, the pragmatist with the only Norfolk accent in New York state. Gayle, the preacher with healing hands. Mrs Colonel Audrey Rudman, forever keeping up the standards of the Officers' Wives Club. Lois, who's never had a thought she didn't voice. Loudly.Their menfolk may be long retired, but once a US Air Force wife, always an Air Force wife, and the bonds of friendship forged in base after military base are still going strong fifty years later. Time is rendering its Accounts Payable for all of them now: hip replacements, eye problems, forgetfulness and departures. In this hymn to lifelong female friendship, Peggy soldiers on through new upheavals, including her ex-husband Vern's Alzheimer's diagnosis, the death of one of her nearest and dearest, a life-changing house move and the world-shattering events of 9/11 with the help of her sharp-tongued, often eccentric, but always loyal group of friends.

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There is one great love in everyone's life. For Ducky, Princess Victoria Melita, hers was a Romanov cousin, a member of the doomed Russian royal family. Her father is Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria's second son. Her mother is Grand Duchess Marie, the daughter of Tsar Alexander II. Ducky seems doomed to be a pawn on her grandmother's dynastic chessboard.But Ducky is not so easily controlled. In an era when death is considered preferable to divorce she fights for the freedom to be with the true love of her life. From disgraced exile in Paris to the glitter of St Petersburg and the mud and carnage of the Eastern Front, she forges her own path.As Russia descends into the chaos of 1917 and the Romanov dynasty falters, Ducky is right at the heart of events.Exiled once more, she tells us her story.

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Bobs and Ba live in happy prosperity. They began with nothing, but now they have a successful chain of car repair yards. Bobs has even bought a racehorse! But on a Caribbean holiday to celebrate Bobs' fiftieth birthday, it becomes clear he is a man with things on his mind. Has he found a younger woman? The receipt in his pocket from Sasha Lingerie is pretty damning. And what's the terrible secret in the cupboard behind his pool table? As the gossip starts at the golf club and the kids stop calling, Ba's life is turned upside down. What's more, her daughter Melody is getting married and everyone's nerves are in shreds. It takes events beyond their control to show Bobs and Ba just what their marriage is made of.

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The Early Birds is the touching and funny follow-up to The Future Homemakers of America. 'Funny, heartwarming and a real treat. I would recommend it to anyone!' Katie Fforde'Wit and insight to match Nick Hornby, and the entertainment value of Helen Fielding' Independent on The Future Homemakers of America'Why is Laurie Graham not carried on people's shoulders through cheering crowds? Her books are brilliant!' Marian KeyesPeggy, the southern belle. Kath, the pragmatist with the only Norfolk accent in New York state. Gayle, the preacher with healing hands. Mrs Colonel Audrey Rudman, forever keeping up the standards of the Officers' Wives Club. Lois, who's never had a thought she didn't voice. Loudly. Their menfolk may be long retired, but once a US Air Force wife, always an Air Force wife, and the bonds of friendship forged in base after military base are still going strong fifty years later. Time is rendering its Accounts Payable for all of them now: hip replacements, eye problems, forgetfulness and departures. In this hymn to lifelong female friendship, Peggy soldiers on through new upheavals, including her ex-husband Vern's Alzheimer's diagnosis, the death of one of her nearest and dearest, a life-changing house move and the world-shattering events of 9/11 with the help of her sharp-tongued, often eccentric, but always loyal group of friends.

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When Lady Enid - a woman in need of a project and a husband - throws in her lot with dashing Bernard Finch, she thinks she's found her perfect life's companion. Handsome and clever, Bernard has come a long way from his small-town American roots. Now he is a man transformed, more English than the English, a celebrated lecturer on Aegean cruises. Which is where his past comes back to bite him, in the shape of his old college chum, Frankie Gleeson. Frankie has made his fortune in corn snacks and to celebrate his success he brings his wife, Nola, to cruise the Greek islands. Frankie is a simple man but he has the gift of total recall, of every detail of Bernard's early years. Yet while Bernard shuns his cruise companions, Enid finds herself strangely drawn to them. It's amazing how much can happen between Istanbul and Venice.

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It is 1962. The first avocado pears are appearing at the greengrocers, people are thinking about carpeting their lavatories and boxing in their banisters, and Ronnie Glover, housepainter, husband and father, is feeling the first vague stirrings of discontent with his life. Then, out of the blue, the fabulous, sophisticated (and married) Jacqueline bursts into his life and teaches him to tango. She seems to offer everything he ever dreamt of. But is it all too good to be true? What can a woman who has traveled the world want with a man who carries a stub of pencil behind his ear? And are the Ten O'Clock horses of Ronnie's painful childhood awake and sniffing the wind?

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London, the 1880s, and Jack the Ripper is at large. Two childhood friends meet again having found very different fortunes in the fog-bound, Ripper-stalked streets of Victorian London. Plain but witty Dot is a music hall star; pretty Kate (Eddowes, a true-life Ripper victim) has fallen on hard times.'Poignant and unsentimental, Dot's whipllash humour had me cheering' DAILY MAILWhen star of London's Victorian music hall, Dot Allbones, bumps into her childhood friend Kate Eddowes outside the Griffin theatre in Shoreditch, it's a blast from the past. The two grew up together in the Midlands, but life has treated them very differently since then.Told through the eyes of the irreverent Dot, this is the story of a London populated by chancers, some rich, some destitute. During one hot summer in the 1880s Whitechapel famously became the scene of unspeakable horror, and Kate Eddowes found a grisly fame that would far outshine Dot's.Because out there, in the stews of East London, Saucy Jack is sharpening his knife . . .

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