Böcker av Madeleine Brent

Born in a Mission in China, Lucy Waring finds herself with fifteen small children to feed and care for when she is thrown into the grim prison of Chengfu and meets Nicholas Sabine - a man condemned to death. He asks her the same cryptic riddle that Robert Falcon, another 'foreign devil', has asked her only the day before, and the mystery of this riddle echoes through Lucy's when she is brought to England by the Gresham family. Unused to English ways, she is constantly in disgrace and is soon involved in the long and bitter feud between the Greshams and the family who live across the valley in the house called Moonrakers. In England Lucy discovers danger, romance and heartache, and mystery as strange events lead her to doubt her own senses. How could she see a man, long dead, walking in the misty darkness of the valley? Who carried her unconscious into the labyrinth of the Chislehurst Caves and left her to die? It is only when Lucy returns to China, a country now at war, that she finds the answers to the mysteries of her past. It is in China, at the moment when all seems lost, that she at last finds where her heart belongs.

Set in Cornwall at the turn of the twentieth-century, Madeleine Brent's first novel follows the fortunes of Cadi Tregaron, a sixteen year-old fisherman's daughter.

In 1897, deep in the wilderness of the Hindu Kush, a seventeen year-old English girl is sold as a slave. Lalla endures two years before she can try to escape across Afghanistan back to her life as the heiress to the estates of Witchwood.

When eighteen year-old Chantal first encounters the half-starved tramp who calls himself Martin, she is touring Hungary with a circus company as one of the 'Flying Gallettis', and prefers to forget every detail of her unhappy early years in faraway England. But a train of events is started which will bring her inevitably back to her destiny and to the unravelling of many mysteries that surround her life. Who is this Martin, who speaks like an English gentleman and looks like a tinker? Why is he in Hungary at all? Whose powerful malice has pursued her since childhood, and why? Who indeed is she?In Chantal Madeleine Brent has created one of her most appealing characters. Red-haired and spirited, her wilfulness and courage win hearts and bring trouble upon her wherever she goes, but although she has driven herself unsparingly to attain a rare skill as a circus artist, her true ambition is to become a doctor (no mean aspiration at the beginning of this century).The story moves from the warm, bustling atmosphere of a travelling circus to the cold correctness of English country house society, and back again to Eastern Europe, before all the complex strands are finally unravelled. Packed with incident and excitement, Kirkby's Changeling represents Madeleine Brent at her very best.

Jani, the strange and lovely heroine, has been brought up in a remote region of the Himalayas in Tibet by a runaway English soldier. Both Jani's past and that of her soldier protector are shrouded in a mystery that grows ever deeper for Jani when the foreign demon on a black horse comes from the south to take her away to a new and frightening world--a London orphanage. Later, when she moves on and finds the Woman in Red, Jani becomes one of the family in a Hampshire household. And it is here that her past is gradually uncovered. She becomes locked in a macabre struggle, long prophesied by the High Lama of her Tibetan youth, against the strange and terrifying powers of the Silver Man.

It is 1890 and Hannah McLeod, an 18 year-old English girl, is living in Paris, where she works at a small restaurant. Only her neighbour, Toby Kent, a struggling artist, knows the strange and horrifying secret that makes her afraid to return to England.Then one night, rescuing a stranger, Andrew Doyle, from attach by Montmarte apaches, Hannah unwittingly becomes entangled in circumstances that force her to flee from France to England and take up the mysterious offer she had received to become French tutor in the household of a Mr. Sebastian Ryder. But why should Mr. Ryder want to employ her? Does he know something about her of which she is unaware? Are there still more secrets in her past?A Heritage of Shadows is the haunting story of a girl, ignorant of her true identity and convinced that she is forever denied love on account of her shameful past, who is plunged into a world of nightmarish intrigue. As the tale unfolds, carrying her from England to Mexico and back again to Paris, Hannah finds herself caught up in a vicious struggle between two men of great wealth and power - a struggle which threatens her life - before the final discovery of where her happiness lies.Madeleine Brent, the bestselling author, has once again written a story packed with drama and suspense. It vividly recreates the atmosphere of the 1890s, exposing the darker and more sinister elements that lurked below that outwardly respectable era.