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.

Everything seems to be fair set for the Prince family - but there is a serpent in every Eden, and spiteful rumours about Kate's earlier life seem to dog her steps, and those of Annie, an insidious threat that revives memories of the poverty and narrowness of life in the Fifteen Streets district that they have so recently left behind them.

Annie will be faced with some of the problems that earlier beset her mother: religious prejudice and a choice between two different ways of life - the comfortable middle-class existence offered by Brian Stannard and the uncertain prospects of Terence McBane, a brilliant mathematician but springing from the underprivileged world that Annie knew as a child.

As Kate Hannigan did, her daughter Annie must find the strength and eventual maturity to overcome the troubles that threaten to engulf her.