Nadine Dorries

On Christmas morning, in the unforgiving harshness of a convent in Galway, Kitty Doherty gives birth to a baby, who is immediately taken away for adoption in America. But Kitty's life is hanging by a thread, her only hope a dangerous journey through the ice and snow to Ballymara and her Irish family.

The FitzDeanes are powerful. They have estates in England, a castle in Ireland and a growing shipping business in Liverpool. But in Ireland, during the famine, a great and terrible mistake was made, which has come to haunt the family for generations. Now young Ruby Flynn, rescued when the rest of her family died during the storms of 1947, reared and educated by nuns, arrives at Ballyford Castle, to work as a nursery maid. It is a fateful turning point...

This gripping follow on from 'The Four Streets' finds the community alive with rumours and gossip after the murder which rocked it to the core. No one knows - or is saying - who did it, least of all the police, but they are not giving up their search for the truth. Somewhere, in this tight-knit Irish Catholic community, someone must know something. Someone will surely talk one day. Meanwhile, 14-year-old Kitty Doherty, pregnant with the dead man's...

Summer is coming to the four streets - but so is trouble, especially for its redoubtable women, who've struggled through a bitter winter to put food on the table. The Dock Queen Carnival is only weeks away, but there's no money for the usual celebrations. No sign of a tramp ship with illicit cargo to be quietly siphoned off by the dockers. Peggy Nolan, with seven boys and a husband too lazy to work, has hit rock bottom and is hiding a terrible secret....

It is 1953 and five very different girls are arriving at the nurses' home in Lovely Lane, Liverpool, to start their training at St Angelus Hospital. Dana has escaped from her family farm on the west coast of Ireland. Victoria is running away from a debt-ridden aristocratic background. Beth is an army brat and throws her lot in with bitchy Celia Forsyth. And Pammy has come from quite the wrong side of the tracks in Liverpool. The world in which they...

Liverpool, 1963. Mary Kate Malone is seventeen and bitterly unhappy that her father has married again after the death of her mother. On her last day at school, she decides to leave home in Tarabeg on the west coast of Ireland and head for Liverpool to find her mother's sister. But absolutely nothing goes to plan. Within hours of disembarking, she finds herself penniless and alone, with no place to stay and no idea how she will survive. Meanwhile,...