Böcker av John Wheatley

When 32 year old Derek Walker sees the lovely young Anita in a town bar, he decides there and then that she will be his wife. Anita, beautiful but without direction, is easily swayed. When he shows her the very attractive house on Lady Hall Lane, offering it as their marital home, she does not need to think twice. As the months and years pass by, the fault-lines in their relationship begin to open up, and Anita faces a stark dilemma. Rob and Frankie have been together since university, and the chaotic brilliance of uni life have moved into the the grown-up world of jobs, children and mortgages. When Rob leaves his job as a teacher to become a rep. for a software sales company, the apparent stability of their life begins to teeter. One day, Rob sees a very attractive young woman at the gym, and hears the attendant greeting her by her name. Her name is Anita. Rob`s life will never be the same again.

When she is displaced to Middleton, near Manchester, to stay with her strange Aunt Mary, an unhappy 13 year old, Joanna Logan, begins a diary. The diary reflects all her unanswered questions about what is happening with her parents. It also records her experience of Middleton, and the friendship which grows with Joss, the boy from down the street who, unknown to his family, is keeping a special dog, Riverside Lad. Twenty five years later, Joanna returns to Middleton, and discovers the secrets which lay beneath her aunt`s life, secrets which she never suspected at the time.

`Canky`s Trade` is set in the south Lancashire township of Middleton in 1811. Lord Byron, pursuing a legal entitlement which he had in nearby Rochdale, stayed at Hopwood Hall, close to Middleton in September of 1811, and the novel deals partly with Byron`s impact on the people he meets there. 1811 was also a year when the infamous Luddites were at large, and whose destructive resistance to new machinery prompted the Frame-breaking Bill, which Byron was to oppose in the House of Lords. And it was in the middle of the period when Oliver Canky, sexton of the parish churchyard, plied his `trade`. Throw in a young local weaver and poet, Sam Bamford, a murdered prostitute and some strange goings on in the cellar of the isolated house of Canky`s friend, `Owd Scrat`, and there you have the basic ingredients of the story....

The Exile`s DaughterMoving from Church Bay, on Anglesey, to the battles of the Somme and Flanders, The Exile`s Daughter follows the fortunes of Polish refugee Lauren Bucievski, and Jimmy Jilkes, circus runaway, door-to-door salesman, and soldier, through the earth shattering years of the early twentieth century. When Lauren and her father take flight from Poland during the 1905 revolution, the ten year old girl has little understanding of who her father`s enemies are. Seven years later, when she befriends the likeable and happy-go-lucky Jimmy, and when the charismatic Stefan turns up from Poland, her life is thrown into conflict, vulnerable as she is, in her isolation, to the dangers of her own dawning sexuality. The outbreak of war in 1914 becomes the defining factor in how each of their destinies will turn out

The Weeping Sands is a captivating historical saga interweaving four tales of love and loss spanning four centuries, with a ruined mansion providing the links between past and present, whilst the `weeping sands` of the title, the Lavan Sands provide a melancholy background to the novel`s events. Jenna Shaw, 32, children`s TV presenter, is invited to take par t in a TV show exploring her ancestry, a quest which will take her, ultimately, to the ruined mansion of Baron Hill, in Beaumaris, Anglesey. Four centuries earlier, Thomas Cheadle, despised for his affair with Lady Anne Bulkeley, and blamed for the death of her husband, prepares to play his part as the Civil War reaches Wales. Isobel Harcourt, recovering from a breakdown following a failed love affair with artist, James Pennington, and in the protection of her sister, is taken to Beaumaris, Anglesey, to convalesce. The year is 1831. How do Isobel`s strange delusions link the past and the present? What will be the outcome of Jenna`s quest?