author Fiona McAndrew

Fantasies From The Kitchen Sink

After a wildly successful and scandalous career as a stripper, Fifi Lemott pens her memoirs and makes a fortune. She then buys the house of her dreams in the quintessential town of Dorking, and embarks upon on a journey of adventure and mischief in the hope of finding love.  

In her search for a new life of romance and respectability, Fifi finds her path crossing with sexually frustrated pensioners, and finds herself baking cakes for the Women’s institute laced with Marijuana.  She also teaches them how to Pole dance, and fights a battle of wills with the town’s controversial book reviewer, Ted Pembleton.  

On a visit to LA to stay with an old friend, Fifi is seduced by the gardener, which ends disastrously.  A surprise phone call from her flamboyant gay agent Luka brings Fifi back to England for the Queen’s garden party, where all hell breaks loose when she discovers that some of the Dorking residents are also attending.  

Fifi, not beaten, but lonely and bored, sells up and returns home to her mother’s house in Gateshead.  The death of a friend and a brief encounter with a long lost love brings Fifi’s world crashing down.  

With the help of a transsexual drag artist called Elspeth, Fifi re-evaluates her life, returns to LA, and starts once again to write her next adventures.  

Darkly humorous tales filled with poignant reality and the ridiculously funny.  

author Elizabeth Collins

Live Assertively Love Your Life

This book targets adults who need more skills to be assertive or who have the skills but feel guilty or uncomfortable being assertive.
It contains a range of strategies and exercises to help people be assertive.
A number of scenarios about situations where people are aggressive or passive rather than assertive are given to illustrate these behaviors.
Examples are then given to illustrate assertive responses instead.

author Therese A. Kraemer

Love Bachelor Style

Reed Stone, born Reed Stonebrook, the thirteenth Duke of Chischester left his home to sail to America.
He becomes a prosperous rancher and by the age of thirty-five and is content with his bachelor life.
But his existence is turned-upside down when his brother and sister-in-law are killed and a young nanny,
Allison McBride comes to his ranch with a ready-made family.
No way in hell is Reed going to return to England and take over his ducal duties for anyone, especially four
 children.
But when the green eyed beauty enters his life, insisting he take responsibility for his nephew and nieces,
he finds being an adamant bachelor is no longer part of his life. This conclusion comes too late when he
discovers Allison Mc Bride returned to London. Reed travels to London to his late brother’s estate and his serene life

author Therese A. Kraemer

Love From Another Time

Tia, a futuristic woman hides from the police in a space capsule, which lifts off with her and a resident android. The android believes Tia is another Cyborg, and they travel back to the eighteenth century to collect DNA to repopulate the future after most life on Earth had perished from a rare disease. The capsule crashes on the estate of Earl, Haden Winslow Morley. He, believing they’re poor peasants hires them as servants. Modern times clash with ancient traditions and make for a very explosive attraction between the two strangers but that doesn’t prevent the two from falling in love, regardless of what obstacles they must face. (And they face many). Fiction and non-fiction are intertwined when Tia is abducted by Haden’s mistress and left unconscious, dress as a prostitute, to be killed by Jack the Ripper. When the attempt on her life fails, Tia returns to her time changing the future for the better. But, Tia’s life is empty without her Earl.

author Eliza Sherlock

Rapture

In these twelve stories, a brain injured young man rebels against his diminished life, a doorman at one of London’s exclusive hotels impersonates a deceased client, a retired banker tries to renew his importance by sculpting and erecting an enormous spire in his front yard, a young wife discovers the betrayal going on under her own roof, and in the concluding story railing against her daughter’s self-destructive life and wasted potential, the grieving mother longs to recapture the past.  The characters in this short story collection are possessed by varying degrees of obsession and madness.  The loneliness, longing and emptiness that lead to the search for meaning and connection in the midst of tumultuous personal change are achieved in unusual ways.  From diverse walks of life and settings, young and old, the characters’ every love relationship, every betrayal tests their assumptions and reshapes the future. 

author Eliza Sherlock

Rapture

( this is only a part of the first story )

Top Man

The windows in their flat were so fogged by condensation Emma and Jonathan couldn’t see out - the hot August day and boiling vegetables competed with weak central air for ascendancy. Jonathan had suggested salad for Sunday lunch but she couldn’t bring herself to serve Martin such an insubstantial meal. She checked her watch; he was due in half an hour, just enough time to mash the potatoes, set the table and change.

When the doorbell rang at noon, Emma buzzed him in. She listened to the familiar voices in the entryway, Jonathan’s low and calm, Martin’s voluble. As they entered the kitchen, Martin brusquely kissed her cheek and handed over the weekly bunch of flowers, a mix of white carnations and daisies, dyed strangely blue, which she felt compelled to admire extravagantly while arranging them in a vase. Last week’s bunch, wilted and tilting at different angles, splayed in a pickle jar on the kitchen counter.

Jonathan offered Martin a glass of sherry, and Emma, hurt by her brother’s coldness, began to dress the salad. Martin leaned against the kitchen counter and ignoring her, recounted his week. Jonathan murmured encouraging replies. Listening, she knew that though he resented Jonathan, he hoped to impress him, and she forgave Martin’s attempt to exile her for finding a new man. Conversation with Martin never an easy proposition, guiltily, she smiled at Jonathan, receiving in return a look she couldn’t interpret.

They moved from the kitchen through the dining area and into the living room, all three spaces interconnecting without walls. Cramped, they sat in a row on the sofa, Emma in the middle. She picked her cuticles, trying to think of something Martin would like to talk about. An avid moviegoer, he loved to discuss plots, and often gave them a blow by blow account, which drove Jonathan mad.

“Seen any movies this week?” she said.

He turned to her, his mood now improved.

“I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” He looked at Jonathan to gauge his reaction.

“Part two hundred and seventy one,” Jonathan said rolling his eyes.

Martin laughed.

“You have to admit, there’s been no more successful story,” Emma said.

“Do you mind if I put on some music?” Martin asked, kneeling before the CD player.

“Whatever you’d like,” Emma said.

Jonathan offered refills and Emma joined him in the kitchen to serve. She dug him in the ribs with her elbow at the stove, feeling conspicuous with only the dining area and the music to shield them. She wanted Jonathan to embrace Martin, too, to know and love him as she did, though without the perspective of the good years, she knew how hard he found it.

“Please,” she whispered, “be gentle with him.”

 “I am trying. If only it wasn’t every Sunday.” 

“He looks up to you.”

“Little does he know.”

She smiled. “You didn’t know him then. He could have been just like you, a professor of English. He was so smart. And,” she gulped, “it breaks my heart that he thinks Harry Potter is something you’d like to talk about.”

“I’m sorry,” Jonathan said. “The man is impossible to pin down. There are so many versions I have to take into account.”

“Sshh. We all have versions; don’t make it sound like he alone has changed.” 

Jonathan gave her a hug. “I promise I’ll do better.”

She served the salad followed by dinner. Emma forced herself to eat the hot food and Jonathan, perspiring, ate with little appetite. But Martin relished his meal, attacking each item individually - first his peas followed by carrots, potatoes, and finally chicken. She knew from childhood he ate in order of least preferred.

After lunch they sat in the living room with bowls of ice cream on their laps.

Jonathan, ashamed now of his callous attitude, rose gamely to the responsibility of getting to know Martin better.

“What do you like to read?” he said, as Martin shuffled through the CDs, scattered on the floor.

“Oh, I like most anything. You may find this strange,” he said, taking in Jonathan’s receptive smile, “but what I like most is reading maps.”

“Old maps?”

“I like new maps best.”

“Martin has mastered the whole of London while it’s all I can do to get to work and back,” Emma said, grateful for Jonathan’s about-face. She squeezed his hand.

“Not so,” Martin said. “But I can surely try.”

“It’s a noble aim. London, though I’ve lived here for a long while, is not easy to navigate,” Jonathan said.

Martin looked up and smiled. “Well, the important thing is I know how to get here.”

Emma and Jonathan exchanged glances.

“Martin, you know that nothing stays the same,” Emma said.

“Of course I do.”

In the face of his optimism, she found herself unable to go on.

“How would you feel if we were related, old chap?” Jonathan said, coming to the rescue.

Martin’s face suffused with the creep of a blush at the shock of this. For a long moment, he didn’t reply. “Well, that’d be fine,” he said at last. He scrambled to his feet, stuffing a couple of CDs into the rucksack he’d brought the flowers in. “You don’t mind if I borrow these, do you? I’ll bring them back next time.”

“Of course I don’t,” Emma said with a sigh.

She was proud of Martin’s independence, the way he worked a full-time job and lived in a flat from which he walked to work every day, living at the height of his capability - beyond her parents’ wildest dreams. Substituted by the Sunday ritual, the relationship she craved with her younger brother, though unfair, even foolish in its impossibility, didn’t stop her wishful thinking, the lunches not only filling Martin’s emptiness but attempting to fill hers. The past remained too close, reminding her not only of their loss but of their fleeting happiness. Martin once her closest friend, their love in some way unassailable, had vanished. Now that boy was gone and Martin had taken his place.

She walked him to the Sloane Square tube station.

“Is it true,” he said outside the entrance, “that you’re going to marry Jonathan?”

“Yes,” she said. “But it won’t change things between us. I’ll be married, that’s all.”

“When?” he said.

“We’re going to put the flat on the market first. We plan to list within the month. And once it’s sold and we’ve bought a house we’ll get married.”

He looked at her, trying to retain his composure. “He’s a good bloke.”

“He is, isn’t he?”

“He finds me a chore, I think, even though I try my hardest.”

“That’s just not true,” she said firmly. “You don’t know each other yet, that’s all.”

“If you say so.”

Martin, she thought, despite his limitations, could not be taken in that easily.

Though he made the trip weekly, he consulted the map, placing his finger on the first connection. Looking up he smiled wryly, as though making fun of himself.

“Bye, Emma.” His smile enigmatic, not that of a man who had suffered a traumatic brain injury, his normal appearance a trick life played on her. She hugged him with too much feeling and he pulled away impatiently. In an attempt to recover, she stooped to examine her hemline and smoothed her cotton dress.

“Well, bye then, Martin,” she said. “Same time next week?”

“Right-o,” he said briskly. He glanced at his watch, kissed her and then began his descent into the station, lifting his arm to wave without looking back.

author Therese A. Kraemer

Western Sunset

After the Civil War, Southern Bell, Vanetta Adair, is forced to leave her home.
She travels out west to live with her uncle and her westward journey is more than she bargained for.
As she and a handsome wrangler, Chandler Mc Dermott travel via the Oregon Trail, she refuses to give up her fancy gowns and shoes.
The two clash over everything. Chandler evades falling  in love with any woman. Vanetta loves and hates him at the same time.
It is going to be a long journey for both.

author Therese A. Kraemer

Innocence

Madison Adair

travels to Kansas to fill a school teacher’s position. The first person she encounters is a small child fleeing from a store owner for stealing penny candy.
 She discovers that the dirty faced ruffian is a seven year old girl who offers Madison a handful of pennies to be her mother.
When the girl’s father shows up, she scolds the handsome blond, blue eyed man for letting his daughter run dirty in the streets.
Although the woman is beautiful with green eyes and black hair, Blair Cody, a widower takes an instant dislike to the lecturing stranger.
He vows never again to wed but his daughter has different ideas and is determined to change his mind about her new teacher.

author Therese A. Kraemer

Keeper Of My Heart

Book Six in the Time Travellers Series


Drew Bryant born in the year 1870 is a photographer for the daily newspaper and on his way home one night,
loses consciousness. He wakes up in a hospital in the year 2014, to find he has been shot and that his brother
has taken him into the future with an antique watch to save his life. After weeks of recovery, he returns home
to discover a female friend, Timmie Blyth has been abducted. Their lives continue to get involved with the mob,
 which endangers them with low-life characters, more time traveling and killings.
Editors Note:
Many characters in this book have accents and or different speech patterns. The author has attempted to illustrate this phonically. These are not spelling errors.