Val Wood: 25 books

For ten years, Delia has had to fend for herself and her son Jack, and as a young unmarried mother, life has never been easy. Every new coat and pair of shoes was bought with what little money she could scrape together as a singer on the stage. But when the theatre work dries up, Delia faces...

When Lucy’s parents are killed in a train crash, her kindly uncle steps in to look after the little girl – to the initial apprehension of his wife and her son. However, Lucy’s sweet, spirited charm slowly wins over her new family, and as she overcomes the trauma of her childhood, she grows up...

Ellen thought she’d always live in the remote, pretty coastal village where she grew up. After all, her husband, Harry, works on a farm where he’s guaranteed a job and home for life. But when the old landowner dies and the couple and their young children are forced from their cottage, the...

Harriet and Fletcher Tuke have worked hard to raise their children well. Daniel, the eldest son, has always accepted that his birth father died soon after he was born, and Fletcher has raised Daniel as his own. But as Daniel comes of age and begins to fall in love with childhood friend Beatrice...

Margriet grew up as a lonely child in the old town of Hull. Her adored father often travelled by sea to the Netherlands, leaving her with an unaffectionate mother and only her imagination of a little Dutch girl, Annelise, to keep her company. When devastation ravages her tiny family. Annelise becomes...

____________________ Winter, 1860. Rosalie has been granted a life of comfort and wealth but neither of these protects her when her mother suddenly dies. Polly has lead a life of grinding poverty; after losing her own mother, she finds herself alone on the bitterly cold streets...

Rosa grew up an orphan in a remote, watery island fastness on the wild East coast of Yorkshire. Taken in as a small child by the motherly Mrs Drew, she realised as she grew up that this large and seemingly close farming family contained many troubled souls. Mr Drew, whose religious fervour held a...

1860 Harriet Miles is trying to take care of her seriously ill mother, and just when she thinks things couldn't get any worse she is fired from her job at the hostelry. The last thing she expects after her mother dies is a marriage proposal from a man she barely knows, but her only alternative...

Holderness, 1846. For reliable, thirteen-year-old Bella, life isn't turning out quite as she'd hoped. She lives at the Woodman Inn - an ancient hostelry run by her family in the Yorkshire countryside - surrounded by two older brothers who never pull their weight and a flighty younger sister....

In the slums of Hull, at the turn of the eighteenth century, lived Will and Maria Foster, constantly fighting a war against poverty, disease and crime. Will was a whaler, wedded to the sea, and when tragedy struck, crippling him for life, it was John Rayner, nephew of the owner of the whaling fleet,...

It is the late 1850s and a tired woman holding a baby walks from Hull to one of the big houses in Anlaby, the home of the wealthy Rayners. She knocks at the door, and shoves the baby at young James Rayner. It is a Rayner child, the father was 'young Mr Rayner', and the mother is dead. Then she vanishes....

Scarborough, 1880 Jeannie spends her days watching the harbour girls - mending nets, gutting herring - and waiting for Ethan Wharton to come in on his father's fishing smack. Jeannie had always expected to marry the loyal and dependable Ethan. But then she meets Harry - a stranger who has come...

Ruby and Grace had grown up in the slums of Middle Court, the poorest place in Hull. Friends since early childhood, they had supported each other in bad times and good. Ruby's ma, Bess, addicted to the opium which dulled the pain of her miserable existence, tried hard to be a good mother, but without...

Annie Swinburn had killed a man -- the killing was timely and well-deserved, for Francis Morton had been evil in every possible way. But Annie knew that however justified her crime, only the rope and the gibbet awaited her if she remained in the slums of Hull. And so she ran -- up river, along the...