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The author’s mother, Julia, lived on Bread Street, Leeds up to the age of eleven when she was orphaned. This novel, written for Julia, is no longer available because some of the material is included in SOMEWHERE BEHIND THE MORNING.
Winner of the HarperCollins Elizabeth Elgin Award for the Most Regionally Evocative Debut Saga of the Millennium. An outstanding and powerful novel set in Leeds before and during World War I. In working-class Leeds of 1914, sisters Julia and Margaret Wood are striving to rise above devastating poverty. War seems inevitable and angry feelings about foreigners have reached boiling point; their German-Jewish father’s search for work proves hopeless. Self-educated, entrepreneurial Julia keeps the family afloat by hawking homemade pies on the streets of Leeds. Her beautiful elder sister Margaret, an apprentice milliner and new member of the suffragette set, seeks a faster way out of destitution, pinning her hopes to a rich suffragette, Mrs Turner, and her journalist son, Thomas. But as the Great War rages, Julia discovers for herself the meaning of courage, and looks forward to that new day, that fresh, magical start, somewhere behind the morning.
A captivating follow up to Somewhere Behind the Morning, set in Leeds and Morecambe Bay in the 1920s and 1930s. When Jessica Price was a little girl, her father, a shoemender, gave her a beautiful new pair of shoes with a sixpence hidden in the toe of one. ‘From the fairies,’ he explained: ‘For luck and to show you have far to go in life.’ But Jess makes her own luck. Growing up in working-class Leeds in the aftermath of the Great War, Jess is torn between her mild-mannered father and her cantankerous, ambitious mother. Although she submits to her mother’s strict Catholic upbringing she finds an escape in creating fairy-tales – with her childhood soultmate, Wilf, providing the illustrations. As Jess and Wilf grow up their love grows with them and life seems settled. While Wilf pursues his dream of becoming a successful sculptor, Jess fights to save her godchild from the orphanage – a battle that will transform their lives.
An engrossing story of two families set in 1930s Yorkshire. Sophie and Rosa Moran are born into a working-class family struggling to rise above poverty. Their father is a lowly employee at Thackreys’ Bank, a powerful family-run concern. Sophie and her sister first come into contact with the Thackrey family – especially young Lydia – as children, through their father’s job. They form an improbable yet ultimately enduring friendship. Years later, their paths cross again when Barney Moran is sacked from the bank, and the girls beg Mr Thackrey for help. Swept up in a dramatic chain of events involving murder, robbery and injustice, the lives of the two families are changed for ever.. |
Sisters
on Bread Street 
