The Lord and Mary Ann — Catherine Cookson

She lies like an angel and fights like the devil himself. Her loyalty is as fierce as her determination to hold her family together. Charming and manipulating the men in her life, Mary Ann concentrates on what she does best -- running other people's lives.

As has been said before, Mary Ann Shaughnessy is no ordinary child. She first won a place in the hearts of thousands of readers in A Grand Man, described by Alan Melville in a broadcast as 'a quite enchanting novel, written by someone who obviously knows the mind of a child as well as she knows the mean back streets of Tyneside.'

Mary Ann firmly believed that when her father took on the farm job she had largely contrived to find for him, he would be set for life. Away from the temptations of the town, doing the kind of work he was meant for, he must slowly but surely turn into the angelic being Mary Ann knew him to be. But Mary Ann did not count on the frailties of human nature nor the sheer contrariness of others, which destroyed all her well-laid plans.

In this second novel of the Shaughnessy saga, Mary Ann returns in this delightful, warm-hearted and humorously observed story of life set in northern England.