Catherine Cookson

The story opens the day before Anabella's 7th birthday, against a setting of the north-east of England during the Industrial Revolution, and continues through early womanhood, her first love and her discovery of the contrast between the wealth she enjoys and the poverty all around beyond the gates of her family's estate.

From the moment Bill Bailey arrived to take up residence at Fiona Nelson’s home in the Tyneside town of Fellburn, he made his presence felt in no uncertain terms. As a young widow left badly off, and with three children to bring up, Fiona had come to know all the problems of trying to make ends meet. So despite the inevitably disapproving comments of her own mother, reckoned locally to be an interfering woman, she advertised for a lodger to help...

A young woman decides that she must change her life and herself after hearing her fiance describe her as a "cultured handmaiden" slavishly eager to please.

A coming-of-age novel featuring a farmer's son in 19th century Fellburn, England. Daniel Stewart wants to be a doctor, but his father won't pay for studies, spending his money on drink and on making babies with his second wife. When the father dies, Daniel must care for the family, which ends his prospects of studies as well as marriage to his love. By the author of The Lady on My Left.

When a thirty-four-room mansion becomes available, the newly wealthy manufacturer and retailer Samuel Fairbrother snatches it up along with the staff of servants headed by the butler Maitland, who makes no effort to hide his disdain for his new boss. After Maitland and Fairbrother come to an uneasy truce and years go by Fairbrother's children leave the house, except his daughter Janet who is able to bring about a reconciliation he thought was impossible....

Despite the expectations that he will marry well even after being blinded in the war, Michael Wallingham alienates members of his wealthy family by turning to his nurse, Elizabeth Ducksworth, for solace.

Someone had once told Emma Molinero, the daughter of an itinerant carnival performer, that she was made for trouble, and certainly it had dogged her steps from childhood onwards. earliest memories were of life with one of the many travelling shows – part fair and part circus – that toured the shires at the dawn of the Victorian era. But at the age of seven she found herself an orphan who, in accordance with her Spanish father’s dying wishes,...