Catherine Cookson

Some women are destined to arouse in men either fierce hatred or insatiable desire. Such a woman was Katie Mulholland....

Coming up 16, Tilly Trotter is different from the other girls in her village. Testing times lay ahead for Tilly, often hard to endure and even bringing her the undeserved taint of being suspected of witchcraft....

Thomas Mallen of High Banks Hall had many sons, most of them bastards. But to all of them he passed on his mark - a distinctive flash of white hair running to the left temple, known as the Mallen Streak....

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....

To outsiders, Dr Paul Higgins' life appeared to be happy and contented. Everyone had a good word for him and his home life appeared to be ideal. At 36, Bett Higgins could still pass for a much younger woman, not just in looks but in the way she loved the company of people half her age.

Ever since her mother died, Martha Mary had had to take over the running of her home, a sprawling mansion called The Habitation....

Rodney Prince, a doctor who chose to work amongst the poor of Newcastle to the shame of his beautiful wife, has never seen a girl look more out of place in the grime of the Fifteen Streets than Kate Hannigan....

Proud and canny, ignorant and intensely ambitious, Hannah Massey is a born ruler. Her kingdom may only be a working-class household in County Durham, but within its walls her iron will governs a predominantly male family, her word unchallengeable law....

Life on the Fifteen Streets was a continual struggle for survival. John O'Brien grew up in abject poverty, confined to the hardships of the Fifteen Streets. Then John O'Brien meets his sister's teacher....

The cinder path which led from the Northumberland farmhouse would always symbolise defeat for Charlie MacFell. People saw him as a born loser who always got the dirty end of the stick....

What then when a normal and beautiful young woman is forced to recognise, after two years as the wife of a country parson in the north of England, that her marriage will never bring her the fulfilment she desperately needs? Grace Rouse is faced with this situation....

Sep McGilby always said that Emily Kennedy had a happy face. And at 16, Emily had a lot to be glad about. She loved working as maid-of-all-work for the McGilbys, the only cloud on her horizon was her anxiety about her delicate younger sister, Lucy....

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....

Annabella LaGrange was the only child of a wealthy family, owners of a glassworks in the North-East of England....

At the end of the Second World War, Matthew Wallingham returns home, blinded and uncertain about his future...

When Connie buys a house on the moors, she has to negotiate with the abrupt Vincent O'Connor....

Mary Hetherington was a mother who dominated her family. And when David brought home Sarah from the "wrong end" of the 15 Streets, a girl who brought life and laughter into her dustless house, she soon took against her....

Set at the turn of the century, this is one of Catherine Cookson's most unusual novels, powerfully portraying a woman dangerously driven by desire and ambition....

Known for the wit of her writing, Catherine Cookson was the UK's most widely read novelist during her lifetime....

In the mid-1850s, life for an orphan was grim, as Kirsten MacGregor discovered when her parents died suddenly on a journey to Northumberland, leaving her penniless and alone in the hands of a cruel farmer....