Brought up in Jarrow in the harsh years of the 1870s, Rose dreams of the world beyond the grime of the town. Capturing the heart of handsome steelworker William Fawcett, a respectable and happy future seem possible. But tragedy strikes and Rose must find the will to survive and save her young family from destitution

To escape the malign interest of her possessive and drunken step-father, Kate Fawcett is sent away from teeming Tyneside and finds work at Ravensworth Castle. She soon attracts the attention of charming, headstrong Alexander Pringle Davies, a distant cousin of the Earl, who risks incurring the wrath of his family by courting lowly Kate. Kate finally succumbs and allows herself to be seduced, but Alexander is forced abroad by his father and into an unwanted betrothal. Discovering she is carrying Alexander's child, Kate goes home to face the wrath of her step-father and the censure of their neighbours and resigns herself to a lonely life of drudgery. But it is her daughter Catherine who gives her life meaning and keeps Kate from giving up - that and the thought that Alexander might one day return to claim her and their angel child.

Catherine (Kitty) McMullen, is seventeen, restless and rebellious. Resentful of her mother Kate's new husband, she yearns for stories of the father she never knew and when her gossipy aunt divulges that he was a wealthy gentleman, Catherine's discontent with grimy, impoverished Jarrow grows. Taking a job at the workhouse laundry, her young eyes are further confronted with the horrors and indignities of poverty, and she becomes even more determined to rise above her wretched surroundings by educating herself. Braving the ridicule of fellow staff, Catherine embarks on a quest for knowledge. Soon the ill-educated and streetwise Kitty McMullen is a ghost of the past, and the well-spoken, well-read Catherine leaves the north-east to follow her dreams. But hardship and heartbreak are not far behind, and there are battles to be fought and won for this plucky and romantic heroine. RETURN TO JARROW concludes the bestselling trilogy that began with THE JARROW LASS and continued with A CHILD OF JARROW.

When Carol Shannon, the unruly daughter of Brassbank's pit manager, falls for young miner, Mick Todd, their defiant relationship causes a storm in the close-knit mining village. For the bitterness between their families runs as deep as the coal seams that are Brassbank's lifeblood. But the hardest battles are still to come for rebellious Carol. With 1984 dawns the year long Miner's Strike that divides the nation and sets communities at war. Hardship not only threatens Brassbank's survival, but pushes Carol and Mick's passionate union to breaking point, leaving tragedy in its wake. Set against the fascinatingly vivid backdrop of a momentous time, Never Stand Alone is an impassioned novel of a woman's fight for her community, her family and the man she loves.

Women have long been recognized as the backbone of coalmining communities, supporting their men. Less well known is the role which they played as the industry developed, working underground alongside their husband or father, moving the coal which he had cut. The year 2012 is significant as it is the 170th anniversary of the publication of the Report of the Commission into the Employment of Children and Young People in Coal Mines (May 1842). The report findings included the revelation that in some mines half-dressed women worked alongside naked men. The resulting outrage led to the banning of females working underground three months later. The Report of the Commission has been neglected as a source for many decades with the same few quotations regularly being used to illustrate the same headline points. And yet about 500 women and girls gave statements about what mining was like in 1841 and in earlier years in different parts of the country. In conjunction with the 1841 census it paints a comprehensive, though previously unexplored picture of the work of a female miner, how she lived when not at work, how she was regarded by the wider community and what she could achieve. Although banned from working underground, women were still allowed to work above ground after 1842. In the second half of the nineteenth century around 3,000 women continued to be employed at the pit head though this was increasingly confined to the pit brow lasses of Lancashire. This book examines the life of the female miner in the nineteenth century through to the outbreak of the Great War, both at work and away from it, drawing out the largely untapped evidence within contemporary sources - and challenging received wisdoms.

1976: friends, Marcus and Ruth, go missing in Afghanistan during an overland bus trip to Kathmandu. A generation later, Ruth's niece Amber, haunted by the disintegration of her family, determines to get at the truth of her disappearance. Was it murder, as her father suspected, or a suicide pact as the police believed? Tracking down the trip's bus driver, Amber starts to piece together a lost world - the mystical, vibrant hippy trail to India.

A look at the dark side of life in Jarrow in the North East of England in the 19th and early 20th centuries.