Elizabeth McGregor - The Ice child

I enjoyed this book, the mix of fact with fiction on the doomed Franklin expedition to the Arctic in 1847.  An Expedition, which disappeared while searching for the Northwest Passage.
The book opens with the mother polar bear and her cub.  This drew me in straight away, I could visualise the bears on their journey of survival.
It then shifts to the UK.  Jo Harper is a reporter for a local paper.  She is asked by her editor to follow up a story on a missing archaeologist Douglas Masters, a minor celeb, who has gone missing while on a mission to find any artifacts of the Franklin Expedition.
Jo's interest picks up after she speaks to his estranged wife and watches video footage of Marshalls last attempt to the Artic.  It then becomes a girl meets boy kind of scenario, they fall in love and have a child named Sam. 
Her stepson is very cold towards her and harbours an anger towards his father, the estranged wife is very vindictive and obsessively domineering.  But things go drastically wrong and a family tragedy occurs.
Alongside the present we keep returning to the past and that ill fated Arctic voyage presented as a running account narrated by a 16-year-old sailor named Gus.  The plight and struggles of the crew, the struggle of the polar bear to feed her cub in the ever shrinking polar ice and Jo's family tragedies are parallels of endurance and bravery under great odds.
I've never read one of this authors books before and I was worried it was going to be a M&B type romance but my worries were unfounded.  Although the ending was very predictable the story was enjoyable.

Elizabeth McGregor - Learning to Love

review live on show by Babs Simpson 16th August 2012
Somebody recently recommended LEARING by Heart by ELIZABETH McGREGOR to me, but I can't remember who it was.
You know who you are and thank you very much indeed!

This is a great read by an author who I didn't know but will certainly read again - a thoroughly satisfying story about a mother and daughter. Zeph, the daughter discovers that her adored husband has had an affair and, devastated, she takes their young son and goes to he mother' home in Somerset to seek comfort.

But Cora has many secrets in her own life and as they are revealed during the course of the book, Zeph realises that her own childhood was not all that she had believed it to be.

This is very satisfying with strong, believable characters. Th action switches between London, Somerset and Sicily and it all makes for an extremely enjoyable read. So, thanks again whoever you are, I'm delighted you recomended it to me!