The Tinker's Girl (Hardcover)

When young Jinnie Howlett's widowed father, a tinker man, died a pauper, she was indeed fortunate already to be an inmate of a northern workhouse, for with no other relatives, she might otherwise have ended up on the streets, a fate for children of her age that was, in the latter years of the nineteenth century, all too common. When, close to her fifteenth birthday and after years of toil and drudgery and an unfortunate experience at a previous workplace, she was at last offered a position as a maid-of-all-work, she was left in no doubt that this second chance was also her last.

Jinnie's employers were to be the Shalemans and her place of work Tollet's Ridge Farm, a bleakly isolated and run-down sheep farm way out beyond Allendale and towards the Cumbrian border. It was only a matter of weeks before she discovered that she had exchanged one kind of drudgery for another, for the Shaleman family - Rose, invalid wife of Pug and mother to Bruce and Hal - demanded so much of her that she almost became nostalgic about her years at the house, as she called it. Fortunately for Jinnie, however, Bruce soon recognised that there was more to this seemingly vulnerable girl than the other members of his family realised, and it was he who would defend her against the taunts and harassment of the brutish Pug and Hal.

It was when, by accident, she became acquainted with Richard Baxton-Powell, who owed his life to Bruce, that Jinnie realised how different and tempting life was beyond her place of work; although later, when the persistent attention Richard paid her became too obtrusive, she was to understand that her growing confidence and maturity owed more to her life with the Shalemans than to any outside influence. It was then that Jinnie Howlett was suddenly thrust into womanhood, and the path to her own destiny became clear.

Catherine Cookson's latest novel is a magnificent example of this most popular author's incomparable talent for characterisation, exploring as it does the life and fortunes of a spirited girl who lived in an age when it was customary for servant girls to do the bidding of their masters and remember their place. With its brilliant evocation of the period, it will be hugely enjoyed by her millions of readers all over the world.