Book Description
Three magnificent novels in one volume.
From the Publisher
THREE MAGNIFICENT NOVELS IN ONE VOLUME
The Mallen Streak - The Mallen Girl - The Mallen Litter
From the Back Cover
The Mallen Streak The Mallen Girl The Mallen Litter
Thomas Mallen of High Banks Hall had many sons, most of them bastards. But to all of them he passed on his mark - a distinctive flash of white hair running to the left temple, and known as the Mallen Streak. It was said in the Northumberland countryside that those who bore the streak seldom reached old age or died in bed, and that nothing good ever came of a Mallen.
Starting in 1851, this compulsively readable sequence of novels follows the stormy lives of the Mallens through succeeding generations, linking the England of Victoria with the dark days of the First World War.
Collected together in one volume for the first time, Catherine Cookson's Mallen novels are richly entertaining tales of family life and relationships which touch the heart and offer much shrewd observation of the human condition.
About the Author
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 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 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.
