Slinky Jane

In Battenbun, Northumberland, there live four Puddleton men - Grandpop, Old Pop, Pop and Peter. Three of them have two things in common: a cast in one eye and in the other, a glint for the opposite sex. Peter, his mother's only joy, has no cast and no eye for women either - until one day a customer calls at his garage on the edge of the village.

The village hadn't seen anything like her before, and wasn't certain it wanted to, and from the moment of her arrival, things began to happen. An eel is found in a pond where never an eel has been known to visit. Men creep through the woods to find Slinky Jane - but which one, the eel or the strange girl?

Slinky Jane, an early work by Catherine Cookson, is a story that allows full play to all her special gifts. It is full of sharp northern humour and gives the reader at least one memorable character in the indomitable nonagenarian person of Grandpop Puddleton.

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. Although she was originally acclaimed as a regional writer - in 1968 her novel The Round Tower won the Winifred Holtby Award - her readership quickly spread throughout the world and her many bestselling novels have established her as the best-loved of contemporary writers. 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 and her husband Tom lived near Newcastle upon Tyne. She died shortly before her ninetysecond birthday, in June 1998.