The year of the virgins (29 page)

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(Continued from front flap)

There was something potentially explosive just below the surface of life at Wearcill House, but when that explosion came it was in a totally unforeseeable and devastating form, and even before the wedding festivities had ended. Its reverberations would plunge the Coulsons into an excoriating sequence of physical and emotional crises out of which would come both good and evil, as well as the revelation of the true significance of the year of the virgins.

This is one of Catherine Cookson's most moving and fascinating stories of family conflict, rich in drama and many-faceted characterisation, evocatively set in a landscape where her great company of readers throughout the world know her to be masterfully at home. It again confirms her unique standing as the best-loved of contemporary novelists.

Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, the illegitimate daughter of a poverty-stricken woman, Kate, whom she believed to be her elder sister. At the age of forty she began writing about the lives of working-class people with whom she had grown up, using the place of her birth as the background to many of her novels.

Although originally acclaimed as a regional writer - her novel The Round Tower won the Winifred Holtby award for the best regional writer of 1968 - her readership soon began to spread throughout the world. Now, some eighty books later, Catherine Cookson is firmly established as the most widely read novelist writing today.

Cover Design: Splash Studio