The Cinder Path — Catherine Cookson

The cinder path which led from the Northumberland farmhouse would always symbolise defeat for Charlie MacFell. People saw him as a born loser, a nice chap who always got the dirty end of the stick. At the root of the matter were boyhood humiliations by his brutal father -- but was that all there was to Charlie MacFell? Then an opportunity emerged for Charlie to display his inner strengths and integrity, and to give the fie to those who had thought him to be of no account...

THE CINDER PATH portrays a man in search of himself, and tells a story of exceptional dramatic force which carries the reader from the rural Northumberland of Edwardian times into the holocaust of the Western Front in the First World War.