Sequel to 'Kate Hannigan'.
It is the early 1920s and Kate is happily married to Dr Rodney Prince, who has willingly accepted her illegitimate daughter Annie as the eldest child of their household. Everything seems to be fair set for the Prince family - but there is a serpent in every Eden, and spiteful rumours about Kate's earlier life seem to dog her steps, and those of Annie, an insidious threat that revives memories of the poverty and narrowness of life in the Fifteen Streets district they have so recently left behind.
Annie will be faced with some of the problems that earlier beset her mother: religious prejudice and a choice between two different ways of life - the comfortable middle-class existence offered by Brian Stannard and the uncertain prospects of Terence McBane, a brilliant mathematician, a man who springs from the underprivileged world that Annie knew as a child.
As Kate Hannigan did, her daughter Annie must find the strength and eventual maturity that will enable her to overcome the troubles that threaten to engulf her.
In this, Catherine Cookson's one hundredth published novel, set in her beloved north-east, she reveals all her talents as a
storyteller to capture the conflicts of class and religion and of growing up in a rapidly changing society.
