Catherine Cookson Livres

Etrange fille que cette Kirsten au double profil, l'un pur et séduisant comme celui d'une madone, l'autre maudit, défiguré par ce "mauvail oeil" qui fait craindre à tout le village que la "loucheuse" ne lui porte malheur... Quel sort pèse donc sur elle pour qu'elle soit toujours écartelée entre deux sentiments? Entre l'amour et le dégoût pour son enfant, fruit d'un viol. Entre deux hommes aussi. Konrad, le "taureau suédois", maître du Prieuré où elle est employée comme nourrice (étrange nourrice), et le doux et beau Colum, cordier à la demeure et ennemi juré de Konrad. Un jour viendra où l'amour triomphera de la malédiction - où Kirsten n'aura plus peur. Mais à l'amour il faudra payer le plus tendre, le plus déchirant des tributs...

The year was 1851 and Rory McAlister was learning the wheelwright's trade in a small town in the north of England. At fifteen, Rory could think of no finer way of life than the one he led as Mr. Cornwall's apprentice. Mr. and Mrs. Cornwall treated him almost as a son. His own family lived nearby and he was able to visit them occasionaly and help them out with his wages. Everyone in the village had a friendly word for him. And -- especially -- there was Lily. But the simple pattern of Rory's life was suddenly shattered. Mr. Cornwallis was injured on the eve of his yearly journey to the West Country, where it was vblieved he went to visit his mother, and Rory was asked to make the journey in his place. But what was the mysterious Blue Baccy the Cornwallises had been discussing? "You'll remember this night for as long as you live, boy," said Mr. Cornwallis. And Rory would remember -- the Isle of Jersey, long night hours at sea, the sound of shots, the sight of death, the taste of fear. He would never forget the new truths revealed through his strange journey -- some of them difficult to accept -- about those he admired and trusted most. But above all he would learn what Blue Baccy was; what it meant to those who risked their lives for it -- and to his master and himself.

John Emmerson was a lonely man. He had a wife, a son, friends, but he was isolated from all the people and events about him by the tragedy of his past. Then, he met Cissie, and for the first time his loneliness eased a little. Cissie was everything his wife Ann was not. And, she was quick to sense the needs of a desolate, unhappy man.

'Me da's a grand man!' Mary Ann Shaughnessy has spoken; question her who dare. For although Mary Ann may look quite an ordinary small girl from a dockland tenement, always hot in defense of a ne'er-do-well father, she is in fact a one-man army, armoured with faith and possessed of formidable qualities. Set on Tyneside, the part of the world which Catherine Cookson knew and understood so well, this heartwarming and humorously observed book skillfully weds an authentic and unsentimentalized background to the kind of fairytale story that we all like to believe could come true and which the Mary Ann Shaughnessys of this world know to be true. The moral of A Grand Man is simply that faith can move mountains, but the delight of the book lies in the telling and in the character of its heroine as she battles, connives, and bargains to get a better way of life for those she loves and especially for the 'grand man' himself. A Grand Man is the first of the Mary Ann stories and was made into a film, Jacqueline, in 1954.