THE WINGLESS BIRD

Cookson's in her old-timey stride again after the surprisingly slow guttering of The Black Candle (1990). Once more, here's the Tyne-wide Newcastle gender gap--men strong and nasty, flawed but good; women of various degrees of fortitude and marked for victimhood. And there are those iron class-barriers--over which the Good Male pursuing the Honest-as-lye-soap Heroine will leap in a single bound. The Conway household in Newcastle is simmering in discontent. Mother Alice is verbally assaulted by husband Arthur, day after day. Arthur is owner of a tobacco-and-sweet shop, where toils underpaid daughter Agnes. Meanwhile, daughter Jessie, the one groomed by Arthur for gentility, pines after suitor Robbie Felton--from ""the roughest family on the quay""--and Agnes continues to dream of faraway places. But there's soon to be excitement enough at home. Jessie, of course, is pregnant; Arthur is wild with rage and rampages--at first with a shovel (Robbie is sent to a hospital) and then with a revolver, waved into a crowd of Feltons. Mediator Agnes catches a bullet--but then it's ta-ta to Pa! Agnes now has a fat legacy and learns some stunning family secrets, though she's still staring out a shop window. Coming around and admiring, however, is wealthy, old family Charles Farrier--who's sure love can level ranks. With Alice and Jessie and Robbie all settled and happy, thanks to Agnes, love finds a way. By the time WW I and a scourge of TB have done their worst, Agnes will have loved, married, lost and loved again, the last time to a man crippled by war and with a pride to match Agnes' own. Love and passion--from shop to stately mansion.