The Rag Nymph - Hardcover

'Catherine Cookson's novels are about hardship, the intractability of life and of individuals, the struggle first to survive and next to make sense of one's survival. Humour, toughness, resolution and generosity are Cookson virtues, in a world which she often depicts as cold and violent. Her novels are weighted and driven by her own early experiences of illegitimacy and poverty. This is what gives them power. In the specialised world of women's popular fiction, Cookson has created her own territory' - Helen Dunmore, The Times

In the heat of a late June afternoon in 1854, abandoned by her panic-stricken mother in an all-too-obvious flight from the law, Millie Forester burst into Aggie Winkowski's life like a bolt from the blue. Aggie who was known hereabouts as 'Raggie Aggie', for trading in rags and old clothes was her long-established business, knew only too well the dangers waiting for such a strikingly pretty girl left alone in this rough and vice-ridden quarter, and knew she must take her in.

But what began as compassionate expediency led to the establishment of a new relationship that would grow and deepen, moulding Millie's destiny and giving new meaning to the life of Aggie Winkowski.

Millie Forester's advance through the coming years to the threshold of womanhood is the core of -THE RAG NYMPH- is gripping and socially concerned an historical novel as Catherine Cookson has ever written. Her superb skills of narrative and characterisation provide a spectrum of the good and evil of the Victorian era, frankly confronting the terrible menace of child corruption, which remains a constant issue in our own time.