The Girl from Leam Lane: The Life and Writing of Catherine Cookson - Softcover

Born to an impoverished young Tyneside woman in 1906, Catherine Cookson lived a life marked by cruelty and neglect. At the age of 27, she was able to buy a house of her owna hopeful sign thatthe escape from her past was complete. In fact, her struggle had barely begun. Following the loss of four babies, a nervous breakdown, and confinement in a psychiatric hospital, she was brought to the brink of suicide and forced to confront the tragedies of her life. The author has known Catherine Cookson for many years and was given full cooperation on this biography by the novelist and her husband Tom, who provided many of the photographs for the book. Originally published in 1997, it tells the story of her long and eventful life through the heroines in her books."

Piers Dudgeon is the author of more than thirty works of non-fiction. He worked for ten years as an editor in London before starting his own company, Pilot Productions, publishing books with authors as diverse as John Fowles, Catherine Cookson, Peter Ackroyd, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Conran and Ted Hughes. At the same time he wrote a number of books evocative of the spirit of place, including Dickens' London, Catherine Cookson Country, The English Vicarage Garden, The Spirit of Britain: A Guide to Literary Britain, along with Village Voices and The Country Child. Subsequently he left London for Yorkshire, where he wrote a series of oral industrial histories of Glasgow, Liverpool and London's East End, the annual Virgin Alternative Guide to British Universities, which still involves him in speaking to sixth forms across the country, and biographies of Catherine Cookson, the du Maurier family, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Maeve Binchy, the composer Sir John Tavener, the thinker Edward de Bono, and the novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie. Today he is publishing a growing list of novelists, including Angus Stewart, Giovanni Guareschi, and shortly Alessandra Lavagnino. In 2015 his biography, The Real Peter Pan: The Tragic Life of Michael Llewelyn Davies was published in the UK by The Robson Press; in 2016 in America by Thomas Dunne Books/St Martin's Press.