The Cinder Path

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.

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 a local grammar-school master. At the age of forty she began writing about the lives of the 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 novel of 1968 - her readership soon began to spread throughout the world. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages and more than 5o,ooo,ooo copies* of her books have been sold in Corgi alone. Thirteen of her novels have been made into successful television dramas, and more are planned.

Catherine Cookson's many bestselling novels have 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 and her husband Tom now live near Newcastle-upon-Tyne.