Bøger af Yvonne Oram

Norfolk 1549From childhood red-haired Frances Dyball has had a particular heroine: Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII, whose changing fortunes require her to tread carefully through life. Frances, too, faces uncertainty and her life is influenced and altered by five men. Thomas Vaughan is the son of the god-parents who take in Frances and her sister Jane when their mother dies. The Vaughans are landed gentry who raise sheep for the profitable Norfolk wool trade. Frances idolises Tom but a brief romance between them turns ugly and opens her eyes to his failings and her own lack of experience with men.Nicholas Conyers, a London merchant, is the suitor for Frances invited to Norfolk by her god-parents when they become suspicious about her feelings for Tom. However, Nicholas has an affair with Tom's married sister, Arabella, and Frances finds herself helping the lovers run away together.Frans Pietersen is steward to Arabella's brutal husband, Sir William Young. Pietersen becomes obsessed with Frances and, while involved in the search for the runaways he stalks the young woman.Abandoned by her god-parents and trying to avoid the attentions of Pietersen Frances takes work as housekeeper to a Norwich widow who runs her late husband's wool trading business. Matthew Wolf, one time travelling player, is the widow's secretary and he and Frances fall in love. Wiser now, Frances recognises his faults and her own difficult position but when he asks her to marry him she realises he's in earnest. Confident they can share a good future together she happily plans for her wedding. But in the Summer of that year a fifth man enters her life. Norfolk land workers and small farmers rise up in protest against the enclosure of public grazing by sheep farming gentry. Robert Kett leads a small army of these protesters to Norwich and they besiege the city, refusing to disband until their grievances are dealt with. Frances, Matthew, Pietersen, Nicholas and Tom all become involved in Kett's Rebellion - their lives increasingly entangled as the King's forces are sent to Norwich to crush the uprising, sparking public violence and personal revenge.

A lion decides to give up living in the wild and find a comfortable home where he'll be treated as a much loved family pet. Each chapter takes the Lion to a different kind of house and he has quite a variety of exciting adventures before settling down at last. The Lion Who Wanted to be a Cat was produced by asking each member of the writing group to write a chapter. The result is a delight.

This book contains ideas for organising yourself and your writing along with a range of exercises to get you going - whether you're just beginning to develop your writing skills or have hit a block in your work and want to try out some different activities to get yourself back on track. The exercises include fiction and non-fiction writing so you can use them to check out where your writing talents lie. There are 30 exercises in all so if you use this workbook on a daily basis you'll have writing 'prompts' for around a month which should be enough to get you up and running. By then you'll know your writing strengths and be able to assess these against the concluding checklist. And there's information about how to progress further. This version is printed in black and white for the sake of costs and price. See Amazon for the full colour version.

The Nightmare Weight Ferrel has extraordinary powers: she can see into the future and into the minds of others. But she's an ordinary young women, worried that she's making a complete mess of her relationships and wishing she didn't have blue-for-danger eyes. And although she doesn't foresee being arrested in a bar and charged with fortune telling she knows her future is at risk. She has to answer for her actions at a hearing and the result is a period of community service on an exploratory space mission. Only days into the trip, though, the craft is flung off course and Ferrel finds she has a lot more to worry about than her love life, and the colour of her eyes...

Deceivers is the second of three novels set in Norfolk, following the lives of the Vaughan family. The time is just after the Civil War when England, ruled by a Lord Protector, struggled to find a measure of peace and stability. The fortunes of the Vaughans have shifted too - descendants of those who lived at Swanton Hall are now farming a smaller estate and trying to rebuild their lives after the recent conflict. But their hard-won peace is disrupted by deception.Other publications include Old Bold and Won't Be Told: Shakespeare's Amazing Ageing Ladies (Thames River Press). Also Rebels' Summer, The Nightmare Weight and Rose in the Mud: A Creative Writing Coures (All from Robano Resources).

A lively exploration of ageing women in Shakespeare's day ? onstage and off.