A House Divided

At the end of the Second World War, Matthew Wallingham returns home, blinded and uncertain about his future. Worse yet, his father is ill, and his mother is obviously unhappy, while his younger brother, who has made a success of running the farm on the family’s estate in the war years, is resentful of Matthew’s desire to help him. The only person Matthew feels he can talk to is his grandmother, but the rest of the family regards her as a holy terror.

Matthew soon realizes that his future plans are not going to work, and he starts to look for a new career. He finds himself depending more and more on Liz, his nurse who becomes the focus of all his thoughts and his hopes for a future. But Liz has a shadow hanging over her, a shadow that will bring a terrifying violence into the Wallingham family’s life.


From the Paperback edition.

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 best-selling 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.


From the Paperback edition.