The Simple Soul And Other Stories

Sep 22, 2024 3:27 AM

Author:Catherine Cookson

This treasure trove of talent is set against the background of places already familiar to Catherine Cookson's countless readers - the North-East, the South Coast and London, with a time-scale stretching from the 1920's to the present day.

In the title story, a disillusioned husband decides to call on an office colleague he has always slightly despised, and finds himself having to re-evaluate his own family relationships in the light of what he discovers in the other's home. In the three stories that make up 'The Forbidden Word', the first set in the 1920s, the second in the 1950s and the third in the1980s, Catherine Cookson traces the changes in attitudes to marriage and pregnancy that have taken place in the last eighty years.

In other stories a shy bachelor begins to make friends for the first time in his life among the people who like himself have taken refuge from the Blitz in the London Underground, and a much put-upon young woman who makes up her own mind to escape from her family's domestic exploitation of her. The reader catches a glimpse behind the scenes in a large department store, and learns of the havoc that a husband's passion for cricket can cause.

Reviews

Read this huge, gloriously entertaining book instead of going to the gym...The Keating girls live in different countries, but they write seamlessly as one.

—— The Times

This is a tremendously accomplished, fullthroated saga delivering romance, betrayal, murder and mayhem...It's the kind of book you have to read by torchlight under the bedclothes after lights out

—— Daily Mail

Moving and utterly enthralling. You find yourself submerged in the traditions, the touch, the smell, the visible and the invisible world of a glorious yet divided world peppered with chilling, unexptected danger

—— Angela Fisher, author of Africa Adorned

One of England's foremost historical novelists

—— Birmingham Mail

A dazzling hall of mirrors... Ferociously ambitious... Illumined by a fizzing passion for the recondite

—— Daily Telegraph

An astonishingly assured début, funny and serious ... I was delighted

—— Salman Rushdie

She is . . . a George Eliot of multi-culturalism

—— Daily Telegraph

[Zadie Smith] is one of the prominent voices of her generation

—— Sunday Times

Britain's finest young author

—— The List

[Zadie Smith] packs more intelligence, humour and sheer energy into any given scene than anyone else of her generation

—— Sunday Telegraph

[White Teeth] established a model for how to make sense-and art-out of the complexity, diversity and pluck that have defined the beginning of this century

—— Time

The first publishing sensation of the millennium

—— Observer

White Teeth reflects a new generation

—— Guardian

[Zadie Smith] is one of the prominent voices of her generation

—— Sunday Times

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