As a young widow left badly off, and with three children to bring up, Fiona Nelson had come to know all the problems of trying to make ends meet. So despite the inevtably disapproving comments of her own mother, she advertised for a lodger to help pay for some of the bills. The result was Bill, somewhat rough around the edges perhaps, but nobody's...

It is the 1920s and Kate is happily married to Dr Rodney Prince - but spiteful rumours about Kate's past seem to follow her and her illegitimate daughter Annie. Annie faces a choice between two ways of life - the middle-class existence offered by Brian Stannard and the uncertain prospects of Terence McBane, a brilliant mathematician from the under-...

This collection of poems draws on many themes familiar to the listeners of Catherine Cookson's novels: love, work, class and the beauty of nature. She also shares more personal thoughts, reflections on her own writing, marriage to her beloved Tom and life in the north of England. From the earliest poem included here, written in 1925 aged nineteen,...

Bill Bailey, the rugged Liverpudlian, was now a fully-fledged Tyneside building contractor, as staunchly loyal to his squad of workmen as they were to him. He had also met and married Fiona, a young widow with her own loveable family, to which she and Bill shortly added with the adoption of the orphaned Mamie. Life was good, but the economic climat...

With a harsh childhood behind him, Riley left school with little in the way of knowledge but brimful of optimism, and secure in the understanding that one of his teachers, Fred Beardsley, had faith in his future. While on his honeymoon in Paris, Fred ran into Riley, who said he had been offered a 'position' at The Little Palace Theatre in Fellburn....

Catherine Cookson was the original and bestselling saga writer, selling over 100 million copies of her novels. Just before her fifteenth birthday Jinnie Howlett is offered a position as maid-of-all-work at a farm near the Cumbrian border. She hopes this will be a welcome relief from the workhouse she knows too well. But when she meets her brutish e...

As the daughter of a mining family, Katie Mulholland is forced to find work as a scullery maid in the house of the Rosiers. But the beautiful young girl soon captures the eye of her employer's evil son, who rapes her and leaves her pregnant. Quick to dismiss Katie, the family force her into a loveless marriage with the cruel manager of the Rosier m...

Catherine Cookson has compiled a selection of thoughts, recollections and observations on life - and death - together with another collection of the poems she prefers to describe as 'prose on short lines'.

Alison Read, orphaned when she was two years old, had for some years lived and worked with Paul Aylmer, her appointed guardian. Paul, an experienced antique dealer whose business thrived in the southcoast town of Sealock, had come to rely on Alison, who had quickly learned the trade. But when he asked her to value the contents of Beacon Ride, a cha...

In this, the third novel of a trilogy, the atmosphere in the Bailey household was alive with anticipation. It was not only beucase Christmas was approraching, or even that Bill Bailey was tackling the biggest project of his career. No, all the excitement was because in two weeks' time, Fiona bailey would give birth to a baby, the first arrival sinc...