The Upstart - Softcover

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Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, the illegitimate daughter of a poverty-stricken woman, Kate, whom she believed to be her older sister. She began work in service but eventually moved south to Hastings, where she met and married Tom Cookson, a local grammar-school master. Although she was originally acclaimed as a regional writer - her novel The Round Tower won the Winifred Holtby Award for the best regional novel of 1968 - her readership quickly spread throughout the world, and her many bestselling novels established her as one of the most popular of contemporary women novelists. After receiving an OBE in 1985, Catherine Cookson was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1993. She was appointed an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1997. For many years she lived near Newcastle upon Tyne. She died shortly before her ninety-second birthday, in June 1998.

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Suddenly risen from shoemaker to a position of power and influence, Samuel Fairbrother decides that his new station in life deserves a more imposing residence. And so he moves his family into a mansion. With the house comes Maitland, a hostile butler who views Samuel as nothing more than an upstart.

As the century turns, Samuel's children grow up and move away - all except his eldest daughter, Janet. And when the scattered family seems increasingly irreconcilable, it is Janet who holds the key to her father's ultimate happiness.

The Upstart is an absorbing, beautifully told story of wealth, family ties and class conflict at the end of the nineteenth century.