Heritage of Shame - Hardcover

Hodder's highly successful saga author knows how to pile on the misery and melodrama, this time extending beyond England with a heroine dragged across Africa and Europe by her misguided father, raped in Russia and given an unrelenting set of obstacles when she returns home. What might shock fans is a couple of pages of explicitly described homosexual activity between the evil aunt's depraved son and an army officer in World War I. Ultimately, evil gets its comeuppance, disaster after disaster are overcome, and unrequited love is finally returned. But if 'saga' once equated with 'bodice ripper' - and escaping a harem in Turkey also gets a mention here - Hutchinson's barrier-breaking venture into the testicular is daring, to say the least.

Russia proves to be a cruel landfor Anne Corby. Her mother is dead in the steppes and Anne herself is pregnant with an illegitimate child, the result of a brutal rape. She flees to Darlaston, but that soon holds no sanctuary either."