Showing results by author "Catherine Cookson" in All Categories

Coming up 16, Tilly Trotter is different from the other girls. Tall for her age and coltish, she is not afraid of taking on 'man’s work' to help out the grandparents who raised her in a cottage at the edge of the Sopwith Estate. Testing times lay ahead for Tilly, often hard to endure and even bringing her the undeserved taint of being suspected of witchcraft. She only loves one man, farmer Simon Bentwood, and is heartbroken to discover he is betrothed to another. A spurned suitor takes a terrible revenge, and a betrayal forces her into the cruel drudgery of the local mine.

Roddy Greenbank was brought by his father to the remote Northumberland community of Langley in the autumn of 1807. Within hours of their arrival, however, the father meets a violent death and the boy is left with all memory of his past life gone. Adopted and raised by old Kate Makepeace, Roddy found his closest companions in Hal Roystan and Mary Ellen Lee. These three stand at the heart of a richly eventful narrative that spans the first half of the 19th century, their lives lastingly intertwined by the inexorable demands of a strange and somewhat cruel destiny.

It was a wartime white wedding but it was not a love match. Annie Cooper married George McCabe for one reason only: she was expecting his child. But Annie was a girl of spirit and determined to make the marriage work. Annie applied herself to that task as she matured into a woman of character and resource. The family prospered even as it grew. She bore George four children, but it was the first who always held her heart in the hollow of his hand. From early childhood, Rance was a problem.

Cock Shield Farm, 1881. After Molly Geary finds herself pregnant with landowner Angus McBain's child, she is left distraught and ruined. Dishonoured by being the secret mistress of McBain, she must find an alternative suitor to save her reputation, or else the threat of being discarded looms. McBain devises a plan to claim his employee, Davie Armstrong, as the father to Molly's child. Leaving the pair forced to marry, the issue appears resolved. But with secrecy comes consequences, and young Molly realises she is tied in a web of lies beyond what she could imagine.

Annabella LaGrange was the only child of a wealthy family, owners of a glassworks in the North-East of England. When Annabella was seven, she thought the world a delightful place to live in, and only occasionally wondered why her parents never took her beyond the gates of their magnificent country estate. When she was ten she decided that the seclusion didn't really matter because when she grew up she would marry her handsome cousin Stephen and never be lonely again.

Some women are destined to arouse in men either fierce hatred or insatiable desire. Such a woman was Katie Mulholland. At 15, a scullery maid in the house of the Rosires, she had been raped by the master. Now, many years later, she had enough money to maintain three carriages if she wanted to and she was on her way to see Bernard Rosier under very different circumstances.

When Kate Mitchell was offered the job of part-time secretary at Tor-Fret, a lonely old house on the Northumberland fells, she had no idea that the household was composed only of men. Her employer, Maurice Rossiter, an embittered victim of polio, was subject to alternate fits of temper and depression. Even so, Kate found it difficult to understand his peculiar hatred of his elder brother Logan, on whose charity Maurice was obliged to depend. But when she accidentally stumbled upon Maurice with Logan's fiancée, she became aware of some of the secrets of Tor-Fret.

Maisie doesn't understand why her mother can’t love her, but she knows that her life is hard and deeply unhappy. When her stepfather George, the only person she trusts, leaves, Maisie has no protector until she begins to escape. She could never be quite sure when she first met up with Hamilton; most likely it was when she started talking to herself. But she didn’t call him that then; that came much later when she was 14 and Doctor Kane had to pay her a professional visit....

Den vackra, föräldralösa Millie får en enkel och kärleksfull uppfostran av den barska men godhjärtade lumphandlerskan Agnes "Tras-Aggie" Winkowski. Möjligheten att jobba som barnflicka på en herrgård gör att Millie kan bidra till uppehället, tills en dramatisk och skrämmande händelse förändrar allt. Catherine Cookson föddes 1906 i South Shields och dog 1998 i Newcastle-upon-Tyne. "Kate Hannigan", hennes första roman, utkom 1949.

This collection of stories is set against the background of places already familiar to Catherine Cookson's countless readers. Included in this collection are "The Simple Soul", "The Forbidden Word", "The Creak", "Lingerie", "Nasty! Don't Touch!", "For Fear Of...", "Silly Mid-on", and "Blitz".

There were plenty around Fellburn who said Maggie Rowan was as plain as a pikestaff, a woman consumed with jealousy at her sister's good fortune in marrying well. But Maggie Rowan, with her dogged determination to succeed, had two raging ambitions beneath a cold and forbidding exterior: to become the mother of a child whom she could love and to escape from the life of the miner's cottage to one of the big houses on Brampton Hill. When she marries the easy-going Chris Taggart, her marriage is planned shrewdly and without sentiment.

Ever since her mother died, Martha Mary had had to take over the running of her home, a sprawling mansion called The Habitation. She did everything she could to make ends meet, but could not understand why they were in such financial straits - especially as when her mother was alive, they had several profitable businesses. She hoped that her father's frequent visits to Great-Uncle James would finally come good when he died, and they could sell his house to alleviate their great need of money.

Two older brothers had taught Nancy Ann how to look after herself well enough, and she could hold her own with the roughest of the village children. But soon she had to muster her courage and fortitude to the full when the far greater challenges of a controversial marriage thrust her into womanhood and into a whole new world of conflict and tragedy which had to be faced and overcome. 

Tilly was first a rich man's mistress, then a frontier wife, and now a widow. With her two children, half-blind Willy and her adopted daughter, Josefina, Tilly returns to Highfield Manor, where she'd started her life working as a nursemaid all those years ago. But Tilly is now a rich woman with Highfield, the estate and mine all hers. At 35, she is white-haired, but as spirited and as magnetic to men as ever. Her reputation as a witch continues to grow among the villagers, ever hostile and suspicious, but she is supported by faithful friends and warm memories.

Only after returning from his well-attended funeral did Fiona Bailey realise just how much she would miss Davey Love. Despite her initial doubts and prejudices about this rough-hewn Irishman, towards the end of his life she had discovered qualities about him she had previously overlooked. Above all, it was his inherent kindness that she had failed to discern when she and her husband had first met Davey and his wayward son, Sammy. 

The Batleys and the Caldwells owned neighbouring farms on the beautiful, wild Northumbrian coast. But there all similarity ended, and enmity began. For between the two families raged a violent and bitter feud. Into this stormy atmosphere came Linda Metcalfe, an agricultural student, who became involved in the tensions between the two households on her arrival. Employed by Ralph Batley, Linda soon found herself unwittingly a part of the feud, and began to feel a strange admiration for Ralph, who made it painfully clear that he didn't need her on the farm or in his life.

Someone had once told Emma Molinero, the daughter of an itinerant carnival performer, that she was made for trouble. Her earliest memories were of life with a travelling show - 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, must now leave the warm and friendly community to live with an unknown English grandmother far to the north in County Durham. With her she took the whips and knives used with such dexterity by her father for his act.

Invalided out of the army at the end of the Second World War, Matthew Wallingham wonders what place there is in a new social order for a blind man, even if he is a decorated war hero. He has the sympathy of family and friends, but it seems the only person who can help him is his nurse, Liz. When he arrives home, however, he realises that his family have their problems too.

Tilly Trotter has devotedly served Mark Sopwith at Highfield Manor for twelve years. She is his wife in all but name. Theirs is a scandalous yet happy arrangement. But when Mark dies, Tilly is left pregnant with his illegitimate child. Cast out of the manor house by Mark's spiteful grown-up daughter, Tilly is forced to face the prejudices of the local village. No stranger to hardship, she makes do as best she can, but when a villager's vicious attack leaves her baby son, Willy, half blinded, she knows that it is time to leave her native Tyneside.

Catherine Cookson’s well-loved novels Hamilton and Goodbye Hamilton tell the story of Maisie, who invented an imaginary horse to keep her company through the long years of an unhappy marriage, and before she became a best-selling author. In this engaging sequel, Hamilton has vanished from Maisie’s life and two human companions take his place.