Author Information
Catherine Cookson's Latest Book

Newest Release

  • Bibliography:
    113 Books (5 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1950
  • Latest Book:
    February 2023
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About the Author

Catherine Ann McMullen was born on 27 June 1906 in Tyne Dock, England, UK. She grew up as daugther of Rose and John McMullen, but was the illegitimate daughter of Kate Fawcett, whom she believed to be her older sister, and Alexander Davies, a bigamist. She left school at 13 and, and she began work in service but eventually moved south to Hastings, where she met and Tom Cookson, a local grammar-school master, whom she married on June 1940. She suffered some miscarriages and couldn't have children.

She took up writing as a form of therapy to tackle her depression, and joined Hastings Writers' Group. Her first novel was published in 1950. She wrote almost 100 books, which sold more than 123 million copies, her novels being translated into at least 20 languages. She also wrote books under her childhood name, Katie McMullen, and under the pseudonym Catherine Marchant. After receiving an OBE in 1985, Catherine Cookson was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1993. She was appointed an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1997. She passed away on 11 June 1998 in North East. She remained the most borrowed author from public libraries in the UK for 17 years, losing the title only in 2002, four years after her death.

Full Series List in Order

Bill Bailey

1 - Bill Bailey (1986)
2 - Bill Bailey's Lot (1987)
3 - Bill Bailey's Daughter (1988)
4 - The Bondage of Love (Jan-1997)

The Hamiltons

1 - Hamilton (1983)
2 - Goodbye Hamilton (1984)
3 - Harold (Jan-1985)

Mallen

1 - The Mallen Streak (Jan-1973)
2 - The Mallen Girl (1973)
3 - The Mallen Lot // The Mallen Litter (1974)

Mary Ann

1 - A Grand Man (1954)
2 - The Lord and Mary Ann (1956)
3 - The Devil and Mary Ann (1958)
4 - Love and Mary Ann (1961)
5 - Life and Mary Ann (1962)
6 - Marriage and Mary Ann (1964)
7 - Mary Ann's Angels (1965)
8 - Mary Ann and Bill (1967)

Tilly

1 - Tilly (1980)
2 - Tilly Wed (1981)
3 - Tilly Alone (1982)

Book List in Order: 113 titles



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Kate Hannigan was different. Although fate had cast her into the grim promiscuous life of the slums, she determined to rise above her destitute surroundings. Perhaps it was the legacy of her father--a brilliant young artist--that made her carry herse...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Life in the Fifteen Streets... was a continual struggle for survival. Some families gave up hope and descended into a state of perpetual despair. Others, like the O'Briens, maintained a fierce determination to transcend the bitter poverty into which...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    THE COLORS OF LOVE Ever since Rose could remember, she knew she was different. Her relatives, her teachers, her schoolmates, even her own mother, all made her aware of that. For Rose's father was of an alien race, and her perfect beauty bore u...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    'Me da's a grand man!' Mary Ann Shaughnessy has spoken; question her who dare. For although Mary Ann may look quite an ordinary small girl from a dockland tenement, always hot in defense of a ne'er-do-well father, she is in fact a one-man army, armou...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    There were plenty around Fellburn who said she was as plain as a pikestaff, but Maggie Rowan more than made up for it by her dogged determination to succeed. They reckoned that once a miner's daughter like Maggie had tasted power, she'd be like a beg...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    She lies like an angel and fights like the devil himself. Her loyalty is as fierce as her determination to hold her family together. Charming and manipulating the men in her life, Mary Ann concentrates on what she does best -- running other people...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    "You're a lucky man, Rooney," his friends kept telling him. As he watched them struggle to feed a large family or forgive an unfaithful wife, the comfortable bachelor was forced to agree. And yet there was an emptiness in Rooney -- an ...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    When Mary Ann is sent from her native Tyneside to become a pupil at a high-class convent boarding school on the South Coast, the idea in her benefactor's mind was that she should be turned into a little lady. In this, the third story in the Mary ...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Other Women Were Pretty But none of them attracted men the way she did. Their quiet, sensual beauty proved no match for her boyish slimness and unblushing eagerness for love. Other Women Were Satisfied They accepted whatever life offered. Pam Tu...






    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Fanny McBride was a large, cheerful. indomitable Tyneside widow with a large cheerful family. When she reached her fifties, she began to feel, for the first time in her life, a little lonely. All but one of her sons and daughters had married and left...



    • / Historical Romance
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    FEARFUL PASSION From the moment strikingly lovely Leonine Carter first laid eyes on Peter, she felt a tremor of fear. It was not the obviously dazzled look of instant adoration from this handsome young man that filled her with misgiving. Leonine w...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    CHRISTINE England was in the grip of the depression. For beautiful Christine Winter these years of suffering were heightened by personal tragedy. Three men loved her: Ronnie, her strange older brother; Don, cruel and tormented, who would stop a...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Her expensive convent education hadn't changed Mary Ann Shaughnessy one little bit. Sure, she could come over all refined when she had to, but who'd want to talk ever so nice on a farm? But in other respects she was growing up fast. As Mar...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    NEVER WOULD HER HUSBAND FORGIVE HER FOR REBELLING AGAINST THE CRUEL DECEPTION OF THEIR MARRIAGE Grace Rouse knew that her husband Donald would never willingly let her go free, so she tried to make herself invulnerable to his vengeful bitterness --...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    It is impossible to imagine Mary Ann Shaughnessy as anything but an enchanting, aggravating and utterly natural child, possessed of an outsized love for her father and with an inherent inclination to put right the lives of those near to her. Yet c...



  • Deep in the wild fen country, Rosamund Morley lived a cloistered, poverty-stricken existence with her sister Jennifer and her alcoholic father. She was the prop and stay of the family â€" and it was she who ran for help the night her father set his b...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    HOW COULD SHE TELL HER HUSBAND? HOW COULD SHE LIVE WITH HERSELF? Sarah knew that it would break her husband David's heart and destroy his pride if he learned that she had surrendered herself to his brother John, who had dominated David his whole li...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    MOTHER HANNAH MASSEY, fiercely ambitious, willing to do anything and sacrifice anyone--husband, sons, her illegitimate grandchild, even herself--to win the social position she lusted for and to enthrone there the one daughter she loved. & DAUGH...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    It hardly seems possible, but Mary Ann Shaughnessy, the irrepressible child of Tyneside whose tempestuous journey through life thousands of readers have followed in the five books previous to this, is engaged to be married. The wedding is set to be i...






    • / Romantic Suspense
    • Buy Buy

    Prudence Dudley was a woman who appeared to have everything: an undeniably attractive woman who had already achieved considerable success as a novelist. Yet she remained at odds with life. It all stemmed from the past: her sad rejected childhood and ...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    SHE WAS DESPERATELY, HELPLESSLY IN LOVE... Ever since girlhood, Jenny Chilmaid had lived in the shadow of her stunningly beautiful cousin Bett. Bett made Jenny her best friend -- only to use her to witness her triumphs in love, and to listen to he...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Mary Ann’s ‘Angels’ are both six years old. Eight years have passed since she married Corny Boyle, and they are now the proud parents of twins, Rose Mary and David, who are inseparable and the apple of their mother’s eye. But are they really ...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    KATIE MULHOLLAND -- She was young, innocent -- and doomed by her very loveliness to cruel devastation by her master's brutality. BERNARD ROSIER -- The notorious heir to the Rosier Mines, slave of his passions and obsessed by Katie. THERESA ...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Mary Ann never wanted to take on Bill in the first place. She had all too shrewd an idea of what it might involve, but both her husband, Corny, and the twins David and Mary Rose, were so keen to have the little bull-terrier puppy that in the end she ...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Vanessa Ratcliffe is just sixteen, daughter of one of the town's richest men. And in spite of her social standing and convent education Vanessa's provocative manner often draws envious eyes in her direction. Angus Cotton is a rough diamond, living in...



  • Harry Blenheim wasn’t what you might call a good-looking fellow, but his face was full of character, with the kindest eyes God ever made. That’s what his wife Esther had said, back in the days when they’d loved and laughed together. Now, it w...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Annabella Lagrange had the kind of childhood that most can only dream about. The only child of an aristocratic couple, raised on their magnificent estate in the English countryside, she was loved by her parents and coddled by servants who acquiesced ...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    THE WOUNDS OF A BROKEN MARRIAGE, THE PAIN OF A DIVIDED HEART The love between beautiful young Gail Blenheim and Harry, her father, was of a rare and intimate kind. Gail was still and adolescent girl when her parents’ marriage was destroyed by he...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    His shameful secret. From the moment they met Rod's virile good looks and vitality totally enthralled Maggie, while his dynamic business success introduced her to a world of wealth and luxury beyond her wildest dreams. But now Maggie had discovered t...






    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Cissie Brodie was an impoverished orphan, the daughter of a farmer, and a proud, beautiful young woman. Clive Fischel was Lord Fischel's arrogant son, a man raised to despise his inferiors in Victorian England's class-conscious society. One afternoon...



  • Catherine Cookson novels are set in and around the northeast of England, past and present. This, her autobiography, makes plain how it is she knows her background and her characters so well. The Kate of the title is not Catherine Cookson, but her mot...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Angus McBain, the brutal master of Cock Shield Farm who was too easily tempted to sin, too sinful to escape a hideous retribution... Jane, his gentle daughter who devoted her life to caring for her deformed young brother... Amos, the legless child wh...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Mary Walton was the apple of her da's eye. For long now he had been out of work, and Mary was his only comfort during those dark years of the Depression, when unemployment and a nagging, ambitious wife gnawed away at his self-respect. Once he was...



  • MALLEN The name was a law unto itself. Drinking, gambling and womanizing, their reckless breed ravaged the countryside. All their sons, legitimate and bastard alike, bore the Mallen streak--a white shock coursing through dark hair. It was said ...



  • The year was 1851 and Rory McAlister was learning the wheelwright's trade in a small town in the north of England. At fifteen, Rory could think of no finer way of life than the one he led as Mr. Cornwall's apprentice. Mr. and Mrs. Cornwall tr...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Desire Gone Wild Barbara -- the fierce Mallen blood coursing through her veins, she would stop at nothing to win the man she loved. Michael Radlet -- gentle but compelling, he aroused her ardor as no man ever had. Sarah Waite -- Barbara...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Doomed Happiness That was the inevitable outcome when Barbara Mullen married Dan Bensham. She bore him two sons, blond twin boys like her husband. But the third son, Ben, was dark. A moody, violent boy given to flashes of temperament. And in his h...



  • She was proud and lovely and aloof, living alone in her family manor. Respectfully the villagers addressed her as Miss Peamarsh to her face, but had far uglier names for her among themselves. Miss Peamarsh knew of their malicious tongues--but wou...



  • A magnificent storyteller's unforgettable novel of a young widow torn between the love of a distinguished lawyer and his rebellious, irresistible grown son. TWO KINDS OF SIN Beautiful young widow Cissie Thorpe sensed it was wrong to accept ...






    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    It was a white wedding, but it was not a love match. Annie Cooper married Georgie McCabe for one reason only: she was expecting his child. Georgie might not be all that bright, but he was a hard worker; and as time went by, the family prospered. Four...



  • The turbulent story of a fascinating, ruthless man with gambling in his blood, courage in his heart and laughter in his soul. Rory Connor, the pride of Jarrow Road, whose furious ambition led to violence and danger for himself and those around him...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    The Price of Love. She gave up everything for him. Her reputation. Her chance for the kind of future every woman wants. She followed him-- not when was a man of means--but when he had nothing. She gave willingly, gladly, never knowing if his feelin...



  • "I WANT TO BE A VET!" In his daydreams, fifteen-year-old Matty would stand up to his dad and tell him he didn't want to be a dockworker, no matter how good the pay. But life isn't made of daydreams, and Matty knew that even if he got around his f...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Her name was Hannah Boyle, but to the people of the village she would always be "The Girl"--Matthew Thornton's bastard. -- Savagely treated by Matthew's wife Anne, she fled for protection to the devil-may-care horse-dealer, Ned Ridley, who had earl...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    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 ...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    There are men who can at times be stirred by the power and conflict of their own emotions to the point of shedding tears. Such a man was Abel Mason. Unhappily married to the shrewish Lena, he sought release in a love affair that soon ended in brutal ...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    "ONE DAY YOU'LL COME INTO YOUR OWN, TILLY, YES YOU WILL." It was those words from a wise old friend that kept Tilly Trotter going. A beautiful, solitary innocent in the rural England of 1840, wrongly accused of witchcraft by superstitious village...



  • While staying with his grandparents on the eastern coast of England in 1890, 16-year-old Eddie finds himself allied with his rather prickly and reputedly deaf grandmother in the struggle to free his sister and the household maid from a band of white ...



  • ‘The child was bright, the voice on the phone had said; and quite normal…’ Why had they said that? They were holding something back. He had felt it from the very first. Was she a cripple, he had asked? No, the voice had said, she wasn’t a cri...






    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Beautiful and bewitching Tilly Trotter has served Mark Sopwith devotedly for twelve years -- his wife in all but name. But now his is dead and Tilly's whole future at Highfield Manor looks uncertain. -- Four months pregnant with Mark's child, Till...



  • Daniel Jones wanted no more trouble -- he already had plenty. Living alone with his father was far from easy, and the weekend visits with his now-attentive mother and her new husband were almost more than the fifteen-year-old could bear. But then,...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    'How many times can we love?' The question haunted beautiful Tilly Trotter, bereft after the murder of her beloved husband Matthew by warring Comanches. Summoning her courage, she fled America for the familiar English countryside. Tilly was Lady of t...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Maisie could never be quite sure when she met up with Hamilton; most likely, it was when she started talking to herself as an often lonely seven-year-old. Hamilton, an imaginary horse, had to remain a secret for many years, for what would people thin...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Emma had only one legacy from her father -- the art of wielding the whips... A gift that would bring her torment, honor and tragedy. Beautiful and fiercely independent, Emma cast her spell on all -- the frail painter who opened her heart to beaut...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    There would be times when Riah Millican came to regret that her miner husband had learned to read and write, and then shared that knowledge with her and their children. For this was Durham in the 1830s, when employers tended to regard the spread of e...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    It seemed the clouds that had darkened so much of Maisie's early life had really cleared away. Freed at last from a disastrous marriage, she had also become a best-selling author with her very first book: all about Hamilton, the remarkable horse who ...



  • The imaginary horse has vanished from Maisie's life, and in the days after the death of her second husband she takes comfort from the company of a cheerful, bright-eyed little Cockney boy named Harold. Although Maisie is grieving for her belo...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Roddy Greenback -- handsome, ambitious, a talented artist, he fled his heritage for the wider world, while a terrible secret haunted all his dreams... Mary Ellen Lee -- she desired Roddy with a young girl's first recklass passion -- but sens...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    A legacy of hatred can be a terrible force in life, over which not even an enduring love and all the fruits of material success may prevail. Catherine Cookson explores this theme in a major novel that will absorb and enthrall her readers as irresisti...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Bill Bailey came into the life of a young widow Fiona Nelson and her three children as a lodger. He appeared to be ordinary enough but behind his rough charm lay some remarkable qualities, which were to have a great and lasting effect on the futur...



  • As World War I approaches, Foreshaw Park, the rundown estate of the once-wealthy Thorman family, becomes the setting for the burgeoning romance between the Thorman's elder daughter, Agnes, and Robert Bradley, a hired hand...



  • IN THE BROODING NORTH COUNTRY HILLS, A MAN AND A WOMAN FOUGHT FOR THE PASSION THAT THE WORLD BRANDED A DISGRACE... Agnes Thorman- the proud, forlorn mistress of a once-grand estate, society forbade her the man who was her equal in all but name... ...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    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 an...



  • IN THE RAW NORTHUMBERLAND COUNTRYSIDE, A PROUD WOMAN STRUGGLED WITH THE FATEFUL CHOICE BETWEEN LOVE, LOYALTY AND DESIRE... Nancy Ann Hazel -- free-spirited child bride, she abandoned the shelter of the vicarage to embrace a life of vibrant challen...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    In this, the third novel of a trilogy, the atmosphere in the Bailey household was alive with anticipation. It was not only because Christmas was approaching, or even that Bill Bailey was tackling the biggest project of his career. No, all the excitem...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    At twenty-one, Jinny Brownlow was, to all intents and purposes, alone in the world, a typist at a large engineering firm in the Tyneside town of Fellbum, with her only outside interest the local theatre group, where the only role she seemed to play w...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Young Frederick Musgrave was never more agile than when navigating his sculler across the waters of the Tyne between the busy seaports of North and South Shields in 1843. Already his services were in demand as a carrier of messages and certain small ...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    This modern-day tale features an irresistible hero, Bill Bailey, who, from the moment he arrives to take up residence in Fiona Nelson's home, makes his presence felt in no uncertain terms. As a young widow left badly off, and with three children t...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Bridget Dean Mordaunt was a woman of consequence in her own part of the world. Inheriting her father's businesses at the age of nineteen, by the time she was twenty-three in 1880, she was running them as confidently as any man. Yet the path desti...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    A century or so ago there lived at Heap Hollow Cottage, situated near Fellburn in County Durham, a man and a woman and their six children. By all appearances they were a close and loving family. Yet across the happy facade lay a shadow that had lengt...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Even the approach of Christmas, 1913, fails to excite the restless Agnes Conway, the twenty-two-year-old manager of her feckless father's adjoining sweet and tobacconist shops. There are dark secrets in Arthur Conway's past, and these come tragically...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Orphaned at a tender age, Millie Forester is adopted by "Raggie Aggie" Winkowski, and she suffers misfortune and misplaced love as she grows to adulthood side by side with Aggie's son, Ben, whose love for Millie increases over the years. ...



  • Unable to obtain a divorce from his alcoholic wife, Nathaniel Martell and his mistress defy convention and live together openly. They manage not only to feed, clothe, and educate their six children but to create a warm family life. As Anna Martel...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Emma Funnell is the matriarch of Bramble House, built for her as a wedding gift. Now, in 1968, she is in her seventies, with the avowed intent of living to be a hundred. And, as she has always done, she continues to rule the roost, for apart from h...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Ward Gibson knew what was expected of him by the village folk, and especially by the Mason family, whose daughter Daisy he had known all his life. But then, in a single week, his whole world had been turned upside down by a dancer, Stephanie McQueen,...



  • Ellen Jebeau married a man who did little but dream, and who then died with debt his only legacy. Whatever else her marriage had lacked, however, she had her son Joseph. She resolved he should have all in life she had missed and to achieve that end, ...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    The Golden Straw, as it would be named, was a large, broad-brimmed hat presented to Emily Pearson by her long-time friend and employer Mabel Arkwright, milliner and modiste. And before long it was to her employer that Emily owed the gift of the busin...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    It had never been the best of marriages and over recent years it had become effectively a marriage in name and outward appearance only. Yet, in the autumn of 1960, Winifred and Daniel Coulson presented an acceptable facade to the outside world, for ...



  • The day Joe Remington brought his new bride to Fell Rise, he had already sensed she might not settle easily into his home just outside the Tyneside town of Fellburn. Making plain her disapproval of Joe's familiarity with the servants, questioning...



    • / Historical Romance
    • Buy Buy

    Close to her fifteenth birthday, Jinnie Howlett, a reluctant inmate of a northern workhouse, was offered a position as a maid-of-all-work by the Shalemans at Toilet's Ridge Farm, a bleakly isolated farm near the Cumbrian border. Before long, howe...



  • The Nipper’s been sold for a pit pony!’ Losing both his job and his home when the small farm he lives on is sold, fifteen-year-old Sandy is horrified when his much-loved young pony, the Nipper, is sold as a pit pony, destined to spend the rest...



  • ‘You’ll hold my life in your hands. Whatever happens, nobody must know what you are carrying…’ Life changes overnight for fifteen-year-old Rory McAlister, an apprentice wheelwright, when his master, John Cornwallis, who had been kind to Ro...



  • Even in the heat of battle, Geoff Fulton would always carry with him the memory of the night he was on leave, when his timely intervention rescued fourteen-year-old Lizzie Gillespie from the oldest of perils for a young girl. The year was 1937 and t...



  • Following the success of Let Me Make Myself Plain, Catherine Cookson offers a further selection of thoughts, recollections, and observations on life, together with more of the poems she prefers to describe as prose on short lines. She ...



  • For seventeen-year-old Brid Stevens, the day began with such promise. At four o'clock on a summer morning, her alarm clock roused her from a dream-filled sleep, for she had an appointment to keep with Joe Lloyd, whom she had met at the weekly dan...



  • In Her Way Dame Catherine Cookson sings and reflects,on the songs that evoke her most poignant and vivid memories. At the age of thirteen Catherine Cookson was told that she couldn't sing. From then on she suppressed a talent that only came to li...



  • Years ago Bill Bailey had met and married Fiona, a young widow with her own family. The Baileys made their home in the Tyneside town of Fellburn, where Bill's business prospered. When one of Fiona's children, Willie, acquired a new friend, th...



  • Money is tight in the farming communities around Fellburn in the 1880s, so when Hector Stewart announces that he is to marry wealthy Moira Conelly, it is his son Daniel who guesses the real reason for the union. However, Moira has not been entirel...



  • Pine Hurst has been home to the wealthy Steel family for generations. And since her mother's death, eldest daughter Beatrice has controlled the estate -- ruling her father, Simon, and her three younger sisters with an iron fist. For Beatrice, control...



  • Fourteen-year-old Marie Anne Lawson, youngest daughter of a prosperous Northumbrian family, fleeing from something she couldn't bear to see, fell and broke her ankle. She was discovered by a local man who, because of a disfigurement, was known th...



    • / General Fiction
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    Bridget Gether's parents were killed in the wartime Blitz so she had lived with the Overmeers at Balderstone, their sprawling property in the Northumbrian countryside, since she was a child, Unaware that she had been manipulated into agreeing to marr...



  • As soon as she saw Shekinah Hall on the wild moorlands near Hexham, Constance Stapleton was attracted to it. With her marriage to Jim on the brink of collapse, Connie sensed that the move would initiate the separation from Jim she knew was inevitable...



  • Suddenly risen to power and influence, Samuel Fairbrother, manufacturer and retailer of boots, shoes and clogs, decided that his new station in life deserved a more imposing residence. Accordingly he bought himself a thirty-four-roomed mansion situat...



  • 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...



  • 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 south-coast town of Sealock, had come to rely on Alison,...



  • On the face of it, Hannah and Humphrey Drayton were happily married. But after years of tyranny and loneliness, Hannah could no longer bear the stuffy City broker. The only relief she had was every Thursday evening, when Humphrey played bridge, and...



    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Blinded by the Second World War, Matthew Wallingham, a decorated war hero, feels he is faced with a grim future. Lying in his hospital bed, he imagines his life as an invalid and falls into a depression that neither his friends nor his family can co...



  • Set in the English countryside in the early twentieth century, Kate Hannigan's Girl is the story of Kate's eldest daughter, the lovely, free-spirited Annie Hannigan. Blessed with silver-blond braids and a lighthearted disposition, Annie enjoy...



  • When Fred Carpenter suggests to his wife, Sally, they should take a boating holiday on the Norfolk Broads, she is filled with trepidation. Nevertheless she summons her courage and they and their bull terrier Bill set off, with Fred at the helm of Dog...




  • The woman who presented herself at the offices of the respectable firm of London solicitors was, the receptionist decided, clearly a vagrant who had been sleeping on the streets. The clothes that hung on her frail body were filthy, and she seemed una...



  • Born into grinding poverty, young Freddie Musgrave relies on his wits to survive and help feed his family. He earns a few shillings by navigating his little boat across the swift-flowing waters of the Tyne, running messages and smuggling goods betwee...



  • "_______________________
    ""Humour, toughness, resolution and generosity are Cookson virtues . . . In the specialised world of women''s popular fiction, Cookson has created her own territory."" (Helen Dunmore, The Times)

    County Durham, 1860s...





  • ''Humour, toughness, resolution and generosity are Cookson virtues . . . In the specialised world of women''s popular fiction, Cookson has created her own territory.'' - Helen Dunmore, The Times

    Everyone, including her family, thought Ward Gibson w...














    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Catherine Cookson has assembled in this work a collection of her essays, poetry and personal reflections which are seen as a distillation of her own philosophy and inspiration. The book is illustrated with a selection of her own paintings and drawing...


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Catherine Cookson has published 113 books.

Catherine Cookson does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, A Marriage of Scandal, was published in February 2023.

The first book by Catherine Cookson, Kate Hannigan, was published in January 1950.

Yes. Catherine Cookson has 5 series.