VGC.BCA edition by arrangement with Constable & Co,1999.Black hardback(gilt lettering to the spine) with Dj(small crease and nick on the Dj cover),both in VGC.Illustrated with b/w photos.Nice and clean pages with a small nick on the edges,inscription written inside the back cover.Nice and clean book.353pp including List of illustrations,notes and sources,bibliography,index.BCA edition. This is another paragraph Review: With a life as inherently dramatic as that of any of her heroines, novelist Catherine Cookson is the perfect subject for a biography. The facts are astonishing, giving substance to the accepted wisdom that life is often stranger than fiction. Born and brought up in domestic service in Tyneside, the young Cookson was shocked to discover that the woman she had accepted as her sister was in fact her mother, the disgrace of illegitimacy necessitating duplicity. Growing up in abject poverty, surrounded by relatives who either drank or simply sunk into despondency, Cookson was starved of any creative outlet but determined to break free of the dismal destiny that seemed to await her. By her early 20s, by dint of sheer industry, she had gained financial independence and within two decades was well on the way to becoming a successful writer. Jones is a sympathetic, eminently fair biographer, and has written a compulsively readable study of a remarkable, contradictory woman; indeed the book carries the same sort of narrative momentum to be found in the best of Cookson's fiction.