Pure As The Lily - Couverture souple

Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, the illegitimate daughter of a poverty-stricken woman, Kate, whom she believed to be her older sister. She began work in service but eventually moved south to Hastings, where she met and married Tom Cookson, a local grammar-school master. Although she was originally acclaimed as a regional writer - her novel The Round Tower won the Winifred Holtby Award for the best regional novel of 1968 - her readership quickly spread throughout the world, and her many bestselling novels established her as one of the most popular of contemporary women novelists. 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. For many years she lived near Newcastle upon Tyne. She died shortly before her ninety-second birthday, in June 1998.

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 a man who had held his head high with Geordie pride; now his only hope was that Mary would escape from the grinding poverty of the Tyneside slums that had held him prisoner for so many years.

But then something happened to Mary that shattered all his dreams of her future - an event that was to split the family and influence its members for generations to follow . . .