Kate Hannigan's Girl

Kate Hannigan, Catherine Cookson's first published novel, has been in print since it first appeared in 1950. Now, over fifty years later, here is its sequel, Kate Hannigan's Girl.

It is the early 1920s and Kate is happily married to Dr Rodney Prince, who has willingly accepted her illegitimate daughter Annie as the eldest child of their household. But there is a serpent in every Eden, and spiteful rumours about Kate and Annie's past abound — reviving memories of the poverty and indignities they have suffered in the Fifteen Streets district they have so recently left behind them.

Annie is torn between the comfortable middle-class existence offered by Brian Stannard and the uncertain prospects of Terence Macbane, a brilliant mathematician, who comes from the underprivileged world that Annie knew as a child.

Like Kate Hannigan, Annie must find the strength and maturity that will enable her to overcome the troubles that threaten to engulf her…

Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, the illegitimate daughter of a poverty-stricken woman, Kate, whom she believed to be her older sister. 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. 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 died shortly before her ninety-second birthday in June 1998.