http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/287974901

Seeking Catherine Cookson's "da"

Catherine Cookson said that the shame of her illegitimacy was the driving force behind her compulsion to write. She claimed not to know who her father was but allowed people to believe that he was an aristocrat. Kathleen Jones has at last discovered the truth about the elusive "Alexander Davies" named on Cookson's birth certificate, revealing a story as surprising and compelling as one of Cookson's own novels. This is a story of terrible poverty and of the long years of damage visited on three families by the lies and evasions of one charming man. But it is also a story of reconciliation. Cookson's greatest biographer brings the story of her subject's life, and of the pain that made her, to a final and deeply moving conclusion.

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