Hettie of Hope Street - Tapa dura

A breathtaking tale set of one girl’s determination to triumph against the odds. From the bestselling author of Child of the Mersey and Home For Christmas.

Hettie is an orphan, taken in by Ellie Pride and her husband to their Preston home and treated as one of the family. But she has always harboured a lust for adventure and excitement, plus the desire to trace her roots.

On the cusp of womanhood, and in love with John who she is not considered good enough for, her mind is finally made up: she will run away to the bright lights of Liverpool to find her fortune.

There, she gets a rude awakening and must take on a job working in the kitchens tof a restaurant o make ends meet. Until, by chance, she is heard singing by the owner and propelled into a life she could only have dreamed of...
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Hettie is spotted by a sort of talent scout and goes to work in London, where she is feted for her beauty and extraordinary voice by rich young men but where she also sees the dark side of life – a fellow dancer dies after an abortion, the rich young men and many of the other singers/dancers drink hard liqour and take cocaine. It is a mad, dizzy, dangerous world and Hettie increasingly feels ills at ease. She still loves John and misses Ellie but knows she cannot return to the fold after all she has done.
Then tragedy strikes, and Hettie must decide between her heart and her head, her duty and her desire...

Annie Groves was born and lived in the north-west of England all of her life. She was the author of the Pride family series, Ellie Pride, Connie’s Courage and Hettie of Hope Street, for which she drew upon her own family’s history, picked up from listening to her grandmother’s stories when she was a child. Her next set of novels was the World War II series Goodnight Sweetheart, Some Sunny Day, The Grafton Girls and As Time Goes By. These were followed by the Campion series, Across the Mersey, Daughters of Liverpool, The Heart of the Family, Where the Heart Is and When the Lights Go on Again, which are also based on recollections from members of her family, who come from the city of Liverpool. My Sweet Valentine follows on from Home for Christmas and London Belles and is the third in this series, which introduces a set of glorious characters living in Article Row in Holborn.
Annie Groves, whose real name was Penny Halsall, also wrote under the name of Penny Jordan and was an international bestselling author of over 170 novels with sales of over 84 million copies.
Sadly, Penny Halsall died in 2011. She left a wonderful legacy of heart-warming novels for many more fans to discover and she will be greatly missed by all who knew her.
The final books in the Article Row series, Only a Mother Knows and A Christmas Promise, will be published posthumously in 2013.