Кэтрин Куксон - все книги по циклам и сериям | Книги по порядку

Всех мужчин клана Молленов можно узнать по седой пряди у виска. Обладатель роковой метки редко доживал до старости, и жизнь его всегда обрывалась трагически. Из поколения в поколение передается эта печать проклятия, а вместе с ней - властолюбие,

Проклятие рода Молленов преследует юную красавицу Барбару с самого рождения. Ее мать умерла при родах, сама она с детства обречена на глухоту. Героине суждено испытать немало унижений и жестокости, пережить горькие разочарования и крушение надежд,

Подрастает третье поколение Молленов. И хотя у сына Барбары роковая метка - седая прядь у виска, кажется, что спокойствие и счастье в семье непоколебимы. Но неожиданно Барбара встречается со своей первой любовью…

Дочь бедняков Тилли Троттер настолько красива, умна и загадочна, что соседи прозвали ее «колдуньей». Но, похоже, она так и не смогла наколдовать себе счастье. Удары судьбы, один тяжелее другого, обрушиваются на девушку. И только любовь аристократа Марка Сопвита дает ей силы выжить…

Казалось бы, ничто не может омрачить спокойную семейную жизнь Тилли. Но умирает Марк, и ей суждено заново испытать все тяготы жизни. Каким мучительно долгим будет путь к Большой Любви, каким хрупким окажется счастье. И какую страшную клятву даст Тилли во имя этой Любви.

Англия, XIX век… На родину из Америки возвращается Тилли Сопвит. Она потеряла и мужа, и любовника. Неужели все теперь в прошлом — любовь, надежды, счастье, и ей остается жить только ради детей? Но неожиданно в ее судьбе вновь появляется Стив — человек, который всю жизнь любил Тилли…

Судьбой предназначено Абелю Мейсону любить четырех женщин. И каждая оставляет неизгладимый след в его жизни. Но мучительный поиск любви и счастья оборачивается для героя новыми разочарованиями и потрясениями. И когда, отчаявшись, он уже готов переступить роковую черту, неожиданно приходит спасение...

Измученная постоянными изменами мужа, Констанс ищет утешения в объятиях Вина - молодого человека с пылким и открытым сердцем, но... темным прошлым. Муж Констанс, не желая даже слышать о разводе, жестоко избивает жену и вскоре бесследно исчезает. Подозрение в преступлении падает на Вина, однажды уже убившего своего соперника...

It had never been the best of marriages and over recent years it had become effectively a marriage in name and outward appearance only. Yet, in the autumn of 1960, Winifred and Daniel Coulson presented an acceptable facade to the outside world, for Daniel had prospered sufficiently to allow them to live at Wearcill House, a mansion situated in the most favoured outskirt of the Tyneside town of Fellburn.

Of their children, it was Donald on whom Winifred doted to the point of obsession, and now he was to be married, Winifred's prime concern was whether Donald was entering wedlock with an unbesmirched purity of body and spirit, for amidst the strange workings of her mind much earlier conceptions of morality and the teachings of the Church held sway.

There was something potentially explosive just below the surface of life at Wearcill House, but when that explosion came it was in a totally unforeseeable and devastating form, plunging the Coulsons into an excoriating series of crises out of which would come both good and evil, as well as the true significance of The Year of the Virgins . . .

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Emma Funnell is the matriarch of Bramble House, built for her as a wedding gift. Now, in 1968, she is in her seventies, with the avowed intent of living to be a hundred. And, as she has always done, she continues to rule the roost, for apart from herself three generations of the Funnell family live in the house - all of them women.

There is widowed daughter Victoria, increasingly a hypochondriac; granddaughter Lizzie, who bears the brunt of running the house, as well as enduring a loveless marriage to Len Hammond; and Peggy, her sixteen-year-old daughter, now trying to find the courage to drop the bomb-shell of her pregnancy into their midst.

This explosive situation provides the springboard for a powerful and absorbing novel that explores, over a period of fifteen years, all that fate holds in store for the dwellers in the house of women, reaching its climax with a frank confrontation of a major social issue of today.

Bridget Dean Mordaunt was a woman of consequence in her own part of the world. Inheriting her father's businesses at the age of nineteen, by the time she was twenty-three in 1880, she was running them as confidently as any man. Yet the path destiny required her to follow was not an easy one. Her feckless cousin Victoria became infatuated with Lionel Filmore, the fortune-hunting elder son of an old but impoverished family living in the decayed grandeur of Grove House. Bridget had no illusions about Lionel, but Victoria's happiness was paramount to her.

So a pattern began to form that would shape the lives of generations to come, a pattern of some good and some great evil, but all of it inexorably linking Bridget ever more closely with the Filmores and their house.

The Black Candle displays all of Catherine Cookson's narrative skills and shrewd perception of human strengths and frailties which have established her as our most widely-read and best-loved novelist.

A century or so ago there lived at Heap Hollow Cottage, situated near Fellburn in County Durham, a man and a woman and their six children. By all appearances they were a close and loving family. Yet across the happy facade lay a shadow that had lengthened and darkened with the passing years. For the father and mother were not husband and wife, which meant that, to the narrow and bigoted minds of the Victorian rural community, the offspring of Nathaniel Martell and Maria Dagshaw were base-born gillyvors - in country parlance, bastards.

Anna, the elder daughter, was entering womanhood resolved to face the legacy of her birth and the challenges it must continue to bring her. Her journey through life would not be an easy one and only her inborn courage and zest for life would sustain her quest for fulfilment and happiness.

The day Joe Remington brought his new bride to Fell Rise, he had already sensed she might not settle easily into his home just outside the Tyneside town of Fellburn. Making plain her disapproval of Joe's familiarity with the servants, questioning the donation of food to striking miners' families - these objections and more soon rubbed Joe and the local people up the wrong way, a problem he could easily have done without. For this was 1926, the year of the General Strike, the effects of which would nowhere be felt more acutely than in this heartland of the North-East.

Then when Elaine became pregnant, she saw it as a disaster and only the willingness of her unmarried sister Betty to come an see her through her confinement made it bearable. But in the long run, would Betty's presence only serve to widen the rift between husband and wife, or would she help to bring about a reconciliation?

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Ward Gibson knew what was expected of him by the village folk, and especially by the Mason family, whose daughter Daisy he had known all his life. But then, ina single week, his whole world had been turned upside down by a dancer, Stephanie McQueen, who seemed to float across the stage of the Empire Music Hall where she was appearing as The Maltese Angel. To his amazement, the attraction was mutual, and after a whirlwind courtship she agreed to marry him.

But a scorpion had already begun to emerge from beneath the stone of the local community, who considered that Ward had betrayed their expectations, and had led on and cruelly deserted Daisy. There followed a series of reprisals on his family, one of them serious enough to cause him to exact a terrible revenge; and these events would twist and turn the course of many lives through Ward's own and succeeding generations.

It all began with a straw hat. A large, broad-brimmed hat, dyed in an elusive mixture of colours to produce a distinctive shade of pale gold, it was presented to Emily Pearson by her long-time friend and employer Mabel Arkwright, milliner and modiste, whose establishment under the name of The Bandbox was situated in a discreet corner of the West End of London. And it was to her employer - known to her clientele as Madam Arkwright - that Emily owed not only the gift of The Golden Straw, as it had been named, but eventually the business itself, for her friend had more and more come to rely upon her as time went by.

After Mabel Arkwright's death, Emily, exhausted by the extra work that had fallen upon her shoulders and exasperated by Dr Steve Montane, her late employer's young and plain-spoken physician, took herself off to the South of France to stay at an hotel previously and warmly recommended by Mrs Arkwright. It was now 1880, and many fashionable guests were staying at the hotel in Nice, among them Paul Anderson Steerman. It was from the balcony of his room that he first noticed The Golden Straw, worn by Emily as she arrived from England. But although it was the hat that first held his attention, his admiring gaze quickly turned to Emily herself, and throughout the time of his stay he paid her unceasing attention.

But Paul Anderson Steerman was not all he seemed to be, and he was to bring nothing but disgrace and tragedy to Emily, for the traumatic months following her return to England were but a prelude to a series of events that would influence the destiny not only of her children but her grandchildren too, as the new century dawned, the First World War came and went and still she was alive to reflect on all that had resulted from the gift of the hat.